"The people who haven't gotten enough rejection letters to fuel the bonfire, no doubt." He said it with a self-deprecating shrug, though - vintage Alasdair DeWitt, always good-natured about the piles of rejection - as he sank back in his chair.

"Maybe he wouldn't," he agreed. He wouldn't want to see it that way, after all, because the King had a personal stake in this. "But it is the same, at the core of it. They both demand excellence, and excellence doesn't just come."