Seeing nothing else to do, Eddie just marched up to him. Well, stumped up.
As he came near, the man looked at him and gave him a formal little bow. More in the way of an exaggerated nod, really.
"Good evening, Imperial Count of Wismar."
"Ah . . . Lieutenant Eddie Cantrell, please. That count business was none of my doing and I'm not too comfortable with it."
The stranger's blocky face was suddenly creased by a smile. One of those genuinely friendly smiles that made Eddie instinctively sense he probably liked the guy.
"Yes, I know," the man chuckled. "They made me the imperial count of Narnia right after I arrived. But I'm actually just Thorsten Engler."
He stuck out his hand and Eddie shook it.
"What are you doing here, Thorsten, if I might ask? And are you kidding about the Narnia business?"
"To answer your questions in reverse order, the Narnia issue is still unsettled. My betrothed thinks that it's preposterous to force a whole town to change its name on a royal whim, and she's insisting that the princess tell her father to change it back. Princess Kristina, on the other hand, insists that 'count of Nutschel' sounds stupid and she likes Narnia and so there. In this instance, unlike many, I suspect the princess will win the contest of wills. As to the first . . ."
He looked up at the row of windows on the third floor of the palace. The very many windows on a palace the size you'd expect Christian IV to build. "As to the first, I'm faced with a quandary."
The proverbial lightbulb went off. "You're engaged to Caroline Platzer. Uh, betrothed, I mean."
"Yes, indeed. A simple farm boy, in my origins, who never expected he'd someday have to figure out which window . . . Ah!" He pointed an eager finger. "There!"
Looking up, Eddie saw that a window had been opened and a rope was being lowered. Thorsten began moving toward it.
Before he'd taken three steps, however, another window was opened and another rope began coming down.
The imperial count of Narnia came to an abrupt halt. "And now what?"
"Who ordered this?" demanded Eddie.