Stice stuck to the window (pp. 874–876)

Kenkle the phlegm-spitting graveyard janitor greets Hal in the exact idiom of the play the whole family is trapped inside. Twice he crowns him — "Good prince Hal," then "E.T.A.'s athe-ling, Brandt, whom I will wager rar-e-ly hunches," and again "good Prince atheling Hal" — atheling being the Anglo-Saxon word for a prince of the blood, the acknowledged heir. It arrives as pure janitorial nonsense, Kenkle riffing at dawn, but it lands the princeling reading the novel keeps declining to state outright: this is the son of the dead king and the mother who did not sufficiently mourn, being hailed as heir-apparent by a broken savant who covers his Ba'hai texts in folded newspaper. The crowning is correct and no one in the hall can hear it as anything but patter.