“Are you quite well?” Abdullah asked him.
“Perfectly,” said the soldier. Even his voice sounded odd.
Princess Beatrice pushed her way through to him. “Oh, there you are!” she said. “Whatever is the matter with you? Afraid I’m
going to go back on my promise now we’re getting back to normal? Is that it?”
“No,” said the soldier. “Or rather, yes. It’ll bother you.”
“It will bother me not at all!” snapped Princess Beatrice. “When I make a promise, I keep it. Prince Justin can just go to… whistle.”
“But I am Prince Justin,” said the soldier.
“What?” said Princess Beatrice.
Very slowly and sheepishly the soldier put away his veils and looked up. It was still the same face, with the same blue eyes that were either utterly innocent or deeply dishonest, or both, but it was a smoother and more educated face. A different sort of soldierliness looked out of it. “That damned djinn enchanted me, too,” he said. “I remember it now. I was waiting in a wood for the search parties to report back.” He looked rather apologetic. “We were hunting for Princess Beatrice—er, you, you know—without much luck, and suddenly my tent blew away and there was the djinn, squeezing himself in among the trees. ‘I’m taking the Princess,’ he said. ‘And since you defeated her country by unfair use of magic, you can be one of the defeated soldiers and see how you like it.’ And next thing I knew, I was wandering about on the battlefield, thinking I was a Strangian soldier.”
“And did you hate it?” asked Princess Beatrice.
“Well,” said the Prince, “it was hard. But I sort of got on with it and picked up everything useful I could and made a few plans. I see I shall have to do something for all those defeated soldiers. But”— a grin that was purely that of the old soldier spread across his face— “to tell the truth, I enjoyed myself rather a lot, wandering through Ingary. I had fun being wicked. I’m like that djinn, really. It’s getting back to ruling again that’s depressing me.”
“Well, I can help you there,” said Princess Beatrice. “I know the ropes, after all.”
“Really?” said the Prince, and he looked up at her in the same way that as the soldier he had looked at the kitten in his hat.
Flower-in-the-Night nudged Abdullah, softly and delightedly. “The Prince of Ochinstan!” she whispered. “No need to fear him!”
Shortly after that the castle came to earth as lightly as a feather. Calcifer, floating against the low beams of the ceiling, announced that he had set it down in the fields outside Kingsbury. “And I sent a message to one of Suliman’s mirrors,” he said smugly.
This seemed to exasperate Howl. “So did I,” he said angrily. “Take a lot on yourself, don’t you?”
“Then he got two messages,” said Sophie. “What of it?”
“How stupid!” said Howl, and began to laugh. At that Calcifer sizzled with laughter, too, and they seemed to be friends again. Thinking about it, Abdullah could see how Howl felt. He had been bursting with anger all the time he was a genie, and he was still bursting with anger now, with no one except Calcifer to take it out on. Probably Calcifer felt the same. Both of them had magic that was too powerful to risk being angry with ordinary people.
Clearly both messages had arrived. Someone beside the window shouted, “Look!” and everyone crowded to it to watch the gates of Kingsbury opening to let the King’s coach hasten out behind a squad of soldiers. In fact, it was a procession. The coaches of numerous ambassadors followed the King’s, emblazoned with the arms of most of the countries where Hasruel had collected princesses.
Howl turned toward Abdullah. “I feel I got to know you rather well,” he said. They looked at each other awkwardly. “Do you know me?” Howl asked.
Abdullah bowed. “At least as well as you know me.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Howl said ruefully. “Well, then, I know I can rely on you to do some good fast talking when it’s needed. When all those coaches get here, it may be necessary.”
It was. It was a most confusing time, during the course of which Abdullah grew rather hoarse. But the most confusing part, as far as Abdullah was concerned, was that every single princess, not to speak of Sophie, Howl, and Prince Justin, insisted on telling the King how brave and intelligent Abdullah had been. Abdullah kept wanting to put them right. He had not been brave—just walking on air because Flower-in-the-Night loved him.
Prince Justin took Abdullah aside, into one of the many antechambers of the palace. “Accept it,” he said. “Nobody ever gets praised for the right reasons. Look at me. The Strangians here are all over me because I’m giving money to their old soldiers, and my royal brother is delighted because I’ve stopped making difficulties about marrying Princess Beatrice. Everyone thinks I’m a model prince.”
“Did you object to marrying her?” asked Abdullah.
“Oh, yes,” said the Prince. “I hadn’t met her then, of course. The King and I had one of our quarrels about it, and I threatened to throw him over the palace roof. When I disappeared, he thought I’d just gone off in a huff for a while. He hadn’t even started to worry.”
The King was so pleased with his brother, and with Abdullah for bringing Valeria and his other Royal Wizard back, that he ordered a magnificent double wedding for the next day. This added a great deal of urgency to the confusion. Howl hurriedly made a strange simulacrum—constructed mostly of parchment—of a King’s Messenger, which was sent by magic to the Sultan of Zanzib, to offer him transport to his daughter’s wedding. This simulacrum came back half an hour later, looking decidedly tattered, with the news that the Sultan had a fifty-foot stake ready for Abdullah if he ever showed his face in Zanzib again. This being so, Sophie and Howl went and talked to the King. The King created two new posts called Ambassadors Extraordinary for the Realm of Ingary and gave those posts to Abdullah and Flower-in-the-Night that same evening.
The wedding of the Prince and the ambassador made history, for Princess Beatrice and Flower-in-the-Night had fourteen princesses each as bridesmaids and the King himself gave the brides away. Jamal was Abdullah’s best man. As he passed Abdullah the wedding ring, he reported in a whisper that the angels had departed earlier that morning, taking Hasruel’s life with them.
“And a good thing, too!” Jamal said. “Now my poor dog will stop scratching.”
Almost the only persons of note who did not attend the wedding were Wizard Suliman and his wife. This had only indirectly to do with the King’s anger. It seemed that Lettie had spoken so strong-mindedly to the King, when the King wished to arrest Wizard Suliman, that she had gone into labor rather earlier than her time. Wizard Suliman was afraid to leave her side. But on the very day of the wedding Lettie gave birth to a daughter with no ill effects at all.