“... I did not set out to be beloved and just, only strong."'A King can be better than that," the Prince insisted."And so we all begin, determined to better our fathers' performances, knowing we can change the very nature of humanity, make it better, cleaner. But then daggers strike in the night, and peasants revolt, and all manner of atrocities become a necessity as breakfast. Only Princes believe in the greater good. Kings know there is only Reign, and all things may be committed in its holy name...”

“You have to be very specific when it comes to magic,” A-Through-L said sheepishly. “You must say things as carefully as you can. Magic is like a machine that only does exactly what you tell it to do. So you have to speak to it in a way it can understand. And magic only understands you if you spell it out slowly. And use small words. You didn’t tell the card which Prince or how quickly you wanted to go. For all we know this is the shortest path—or it thought you meant our fragrant friend here! Or perhaps the Alleyman is some sort of Prince, too. The word Prince is very open-ended. You can’t really trust anything that far down in the alphabet.”

“The world is not made of countries and outsiders. We are all just humans, and most of us fools and all of us longing for more than we have, to know more than we know--and yet even that is not enough, for if we knew everything we would only be disappointed that there was not one more secret to uncover.”

“You only had to choose which me to talk to, for, you know, we all change our manners, depending on who has come to chat. One doesn’t behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece.”

“I am a Prince," he replied, being rather dense. "It is the function of a Prince—value A—to kill monsters—value B—for the purpose of establishing order—value C—and maintaining a steady supply of maidens—value D. If one inserts the derivative of value A (Prince) into the equation y equals BC plus CD squared, and sets it equal to zero, giving the apex of the parabola, namely, the point of intersection between A (Prince) and B (Monster), one determines value E—a stable kingdom. It is all very complicated, and if you have a chart handy I can graph it for you.”

“Thieves are not so bad, and killing wears all possible costumes. There is no death, no murder that is better than any other. If you can kill me, the manner hardly bears consideration. You want to kill your own father, and you think it will make your sleep easier for the next seventy years if you can say you did it honorably. But your honor is blackened by patricide, and no amount of high-sounding formalities will make it white again.”

“Just as there are different types of stars—red and white and brown and blue and dwarf and giant and all that lot—there are different types of Quests, and if we determine what type you face, we shall have a much easier time managing the whole business. We’re doing very well. Already we know that Prince Myrrh is an Endgame Object Type W—that’s Wonderful, since we have yet to see if he will be any Use in governing. He sleeps suspended in a Theseus-type narrative matrix, however he does seem to have some gravitational pull on events, which is unusual for a T-Type. After all, we still remember him even after all these years. It’s far easier to forget something than to remember it. Remembering takes all kinds of magic. No one knows who he is or what he looks like or where to find him, and yet we all know of him. We all know he sleeps in an unopenable box on an unbreakable bower. That’s a frightfully strong E.K.T. Field for one little creature!”