"Yes," said Valentine somberly. "After they've regained control of Majipoor and driven us all from their world. So Ermanar once told me. All right: maybe inviting them to Velalisier was a mistake. But they've ignored all my other overtures, too. I write to their queen the Danipiur in Ilirivoyne, and if she replies at all, it's in letters of three sentences, cold, formal, empty—" He drew in his breath deeply. "Enough of all this misery, Carabella! There'll be no war. I'll find a way to break through the hatred the Shapeshifters feel for us, and win them to my side. And as for the lords of the Mount who've been snubbing you, if indeed they have—I beg you, ignore them. Snub them back! What is a Divvis to you, or a Duke of Halanx? Fools, is all they are." Valentine smiled. "I'll soon give them worse things to worry about, love, than my consort's pedigree!"

"What do you mean?"

"If they object to having a commoner for the Coronal's consort," said Valentine, "how will they feel when they have a commoner for their Coronal?"

Carabella looked at him in bewilderment. "I understand none of this, Valentine."

"You will. In time, you'll understand all. I mean to work such changes in the world—oh, love, when they write the history of my reign, if Majipoor survives long enough for that history to be written, they'll need more than one volume for it, I promise you! I will do such things—such earthshaking things—" He laughed.

"What do you think, Carabella? Listen to me ranting! The good Lord Valentine of the gentle soul turns the world upside down! Can he do it? Can he actually bring it off?"

"My lord, you mystify me. You speak in riddles."

"Perhaps so."

"You give me no clue to the answer."

He said, after a moment's pause, "The answer to the riddle, Carabella, is Hissune."

"Hissune? Your little Labyrinth urchin?"

"An urchin no longer. A weapon, now, which I have hurled toward the Castle."

She sighed. "Riddles and still more riddles!"

"It's a royal privilege to speak in mysteries." Valentine winked and pulled her toward him, and brushed his lips lightly against hers. "Allow me this little indulgence. And—"

The floater came suddenly to a halt.

"Hoy, look! We've arrived!" he cried. "There's Nascimonte! And—by the Lady, I think he's got half his province out here to greet us!"

The caravan had pulled up in a broad meadow of short dense grass so dazzlingly green it seemed some other color altogether, some unworldly hue from the far end of the spectrum. Under the brilliant midday sun a great celebration was already in progress that might have stretched for miles, tens of thousands of people holding carnival as far as the eye could see. To the booming sound of cannons and the shrill jangling melodies of sistirons and double-chorded galistanes, volley after volley of day-fireworks rose overhead, sketching stunning hard-edged patterns in black and violet against the clear bright sky. Stilt walkers twenty feet tall, wearing huge clown-masks with swollen red foreheads and gigantic noses, frolicked through the crowd. Great posts had been erected from which starburst banners rippled joyously in the light summer breeze; half a dozen orchestras at once, on half a dozen different bandstands, burst loose with anthems and marches and chorales; and a veritable army of jugglers had been assembled, probably anyone in six hundred leagues who had the slightest skill, so that the air was thick with clubs and knives and hatchets and blazing torches and gaily colored balls and a hundred other sorts of objects, flying back and forth in tribute to Lord Valentine's beloved pastime. After the gloom and murk of the Labyrinth, this was the most splendid imaginable recommencement of the grand processional: frantic, overwhelming, a trifle ridiculous, altogether delightful.