"By what definition?" Stasilaine asked.

"Look about you in this room," Prince Manganot said. "Here you see the definition of manhood. You, Stasilaine: anyone can see the strength of you. Walk as a stranger through the streets of any city, Stee, Normork, Bibiroon, simply walk through the streets, and people will automatically defer to you, having no notion of your rank or name. Elidath the same. Divvis. Mirigant. My royal brother of Dundilmir. We are men. He is not."

"We are princes," said Stasilaine, "and have been for many years. A certain bearing comes to us in time, from long awareness of our station. But were we like this twenty years ago?"

"I think so," Manganot said.

Mirigant laughed. "I remember some of you when you were at Hissune's age. Loud and braggartly, yes, and if that makes one a man, then you surely were men. But otherwise— ah, I think it is all a circular thing, that princely bearing comes of feeling princely, and we put it on ourselves as a cloak. Look at us in our finery, and then cover us in farmer's clothes and set us down in some seaport of Zimroel, and who will bow to us then? Who will give deference?"

"He is not princely now and never will be," said Divvis sullenly, "He is a ragged boy out of the Labyrinth, and nothing more than that."

"I still maintain that we can't elevate a stripling like that to our rank," said Prince Manganot of Banglecode.

"They say that Prestimion was short of stature," the Duke of Chorg remarked. "I think his reign is generally deemed to have been successful, nevertheless."

The venerable Cantalis, nephew of Tyeveras, looked up suddenly out of an hour's silence and said in amazement, "You compare him with Prestimion, Elzandir? What precisely is it that we are doing, then? Are we creating a prince or choosing a Coronal?"

"Any prince is a potential Coronal," Divvis said. "Let us not forget that."

"And the choosing of the next Coronal must soon occur, no doubt of that," the Duke of Halanx said. "It's utterly scandalous that Valentine has kept the old Pontifex alive this long, but sooner or later—"

"This is altogether out of order," Elidath said sharply.

"I think not," said Manganot. "If we make him a prince, there's nothing stopping Valentine from putting him eventually on the Confalume Throne itself."

"These speculations are absurd," Mirigant said.

"Are they, Mirigant? What absurdities have we not already seen from Valentine? To take a juggler-girl as his wife, and a Vroon wizard as one of his chief ministers, and the rest of his raggle-taggle band of wanderers surrounding him as a court within the court, while we are pushed to the outer rim—"

"Be cautious, Manganot," Stasilaine said. "There are those in this room that love Lord Valentine."

"There is no one here who does not," Manganot retorted. "You may be aware, and Mirigant can surely confirm it, that upon the death of Voriax I was one of the strongest advocates of letting the crown pass to Valentine. I yield to no one in my love of him. But we need not love him uncritically. He is capable of folly, as are we all. And I say it is folly to take a twenty-year-old boy from the back alleys of the Labyrinth and make him a prince of the realm."