The King's Staged Death

Betaal spoke again, telling of an aging king with no clear heir, uncertain which of his three most trusted ministers to name regent should something happen to him suddenly. Rather than ask them directly, which would only invite rehearsed answers, he staged an elaborate fiction: he took a strong sleeping draught that mimicked death perfectly, and had his physician quietly announce the king had died in the night, then arranged to watch, hidden, how each minister behaved when he believed himself truly gone.

The first minister, alone with the "body" before the court arrived, immediately began drafting letters to secure his own position and allies, treating the throne as already vacant and his to claim through speed and maneuvering. The second minister wept genuinely and at length, overcome with real grief — but did nothing at all afterward to see to the kingdom's continuity, its treasury, its borders, or its people, lost entirely in his own sorrow.

The third minister, though visibly and sincerely grieved, calmly began organizing the kingdom's immediate needs regardless — securing the treasury, sending word to border garrisons to hold steady, ensuring the marketplace would open as normal the next morning — treating his mourning and his duty as two things that could exist at once rather than one excusing the other. "Tell me, Vikram," Betaal demanded, "which of the three deserves the regency?" Vikramaditya answered: "The third. Grief that does nothing is not loyalty, and ambition dressed as urgency is not loyalty either — only someone who can hold sorrow and responsibility together, without letting either erase the other, is fit to hold a kingdom together." The king broke his silence once more, and Betaal flew, laughing, back to his tree.