After the downfall

XI

Bucovinan raiders hit harder at Bottero's scouts and supply wagons once the Lenelli got over the Oltet. They didn't stop the king's army, but they harassed it and slowed it down — the last thing it needed as fall moved on toward winter. Falticeni, the capital of Bucovin, lay… somewhere up ahead, anyhow.

As winter snow came down, a few German units fought their way into the suburbs of Moscow and, in the distance, got a glimpse of the Kremlin. Then the Ivans threw them back, and they never came so close again. Hasso wished he hadn't thought of that, even if the weather here was milder.

The king's temper frayed. He gathered his generals and wizards together so he could shout at them all at the same time. "Why aren't you keeping the outriders safe, curse you?" Bottero bellowed.

"We're doing everything we know how to do, your Majesty." An officer named Nuoro had charge of the supply train. "But there aren't enough of us, and there are too stinking many Bucovinans. Things go wrong sometimes, that's all."

"That's all, he says!" King Bottero rolled his eyes. "If things go on like this, we'll be eating our belts and our boots before too long."

He exaggerated — by how much, Hasso wasn't sure. Nuoro gave him a stiff, almost wooden, salute. "What would you have me do, your Majesty?"

"Push the supplies through. Don't let the teamsters get massacred. How hard is that?" Bottero demanded.

"In a land full of raiders and bushwhackers, sire, it's not so easy. How many more soldiers will you give me to keep the wagons safe?" Nuoro asked.

"Well, maybe a few," the king said. "I can't give you too many more. We need them to beat the savages back. That's what we're here for, you know."

"Maybe we haven't got enough soldiers for everything we need to do… sire," Nuoro said. How many times had the Germans worked through the same agonizing choices in the vastnesses of the Soviet Union? How much good did their agonizing do them? Not bloody much.

But Bottero had options that weren't available to the Wehrmacht. He turned to his wizards. "If I string you out along the route back to the border, you can smell out ambushes, right? You can stop them?"

"Well, yes, your Majesty," Aderno said. "But then we won't be here with the striking force in case of battle."

"What?" Now Bottero looked — and sounded — highly offended, so much so that he might almost have struck a pose. People in a position to know said the Fuhrer did stuff like that. Acting had to be one of the things that went into ruling. Still offended, the king went on, "You think we can't beat the barbarians by ourselves?"

That question had only one possible answer, and Aderno gave it: "Of course you can, your Majesty. We might make it a little easier for you, that's all."

"By the goddess, we'll manage on our own," Bottero said. "But if you can't conjure up the grub we need to keep going — and it doesn't look like you can do that — the next best thing for you is to make sure the plain old ordinary grub from our own kingdom gets here safe. How does that sound?"

Aderno saluted. "As you wish it, your Majesty, so shall it be."

A German would have shot out his arm and said, "Heil Hitler!" An Ivan, no doubt, would have nodded and said, "Yes, Comrade General Secretary!" It all amounted to the same thing in the end.

Then Hasso had a disconcerting thought. Stalin had almost led his country right off a cliff in the early days of war on the Russian front, but the Ivans went right on saying, "Yes, Comrade General Secretary!" And the Fuhrer damn well had led the Reich off a cliff as the war ground on, but the Germans went right on saying, "Heil Hitler!" Obedience was all very well, but didn't it have limits somewhere?

Somewhere, certainly. Here? No. Bottero had given a reasonable order. It might not work out, but chances were it would. And Hasso also thought the Lenelli could beat whatever Bucovin threw at them. The natives were brave, but all the courage in the world didn't matter when it ran into technique.

So the Wehrmacht taught, anyhow. But who wasn't in Moscow, and who was in Berlin? So what if one German was worth three Ivans? If every Landser knocked down his three Russians, and then a fourth Russian showed up, and a fifth…

Exactly how big was Bucovin? How many swarthy little men did it hold, swarthy little men who didn't want to live under a big blond king who could roar like a lion? Enough for their numbers to cancel out the huge advantage in weapons and skill the Lenelli had? Hasso didn't know.

He hoped like hell Bottero did.

Off rode the wizards on their gleaming unicorns. Hasso was sorry to see them go, not so much because he'd miss them — they were a contentious, bad-tempered lot — but because he'd miss their mounts. The unicorns were marvelous and beautiful. Without them, the army seemed only… an army. Its glamour was gone.

Well, almost. Velona still rode with Bottero and his soldiers. Her glamour was of a different sort from the unicorns', which didn't make it any less real. Most of the time, she was just herself, not a woman in whom the goddess dwelt. Even as herself, she was striking, of course, but there was more to it than that. She held the memory of the goddess whether touched by the deity or not.

Hasso sometimes wondered if he was imagining that, but never for long. He knew better. That doubt was just the sputtering of his rational mind, here in a world where rationality mattered so much less than it did in the one where he grew to manhood.

As if to prove as much, two wagon trains in a row made it through to King Bottero's army. The teamsters were full of praise for what the wizards had done to help them on the way. "They sent them savages running with lightning singeing the hair off their balls," one driver said enthusiastically. "I'll buy those bastards a beer any day of the week, twice on Sundays."

Weeks here had ten days, and Sundays were feast days instead, but Hasso tried to turn Lenello into idiomatic German inside his head. Most of the time, he did pretty well. Every once in a while… Every once in a while, he might as well have been in another world. Funny how that works, he thought with a sour smile.

Things didn't get better the next day. The Lenelli were marching near a river — the Aryesh, it was called — that ran north and east. It should have shielded their left from any trouble from the Bucovinans. It should have, but it didn't. Somehow, a raiding party appeared at dawn where no raiding party had any business being. The enemy soldiers shot volleys of arrows into the startled Lenello infantry, then galloped off before King Bottero's horsemen could harry them.

Bottero, predictably, was furious. "They have no business doing that!" he shouted. "They have no right to do that! How did they get there? They came out of nowhere!"

"They must have crossed the river, your Majesty," said the infantry commander, a stolid soldier named Friddi.

"Brilliant!" The king was savagely sarcastic. "And how did they do that? No bridge in these parts, and it's too deep to ford. Maybe they had catapults fling them across!"

"Maybe magic flung them across, sire," Friddi said.

"Don't be any dumber than you can help," Bottero said. "They're Grenye, by the goddess! They can't do that. And we don't think they've got any renegades doing it for them. If they do, those bastards'll be a long, hard time dying, I promise you that."

Hasso thought of Scanno, back in Drammen. Scanno liked Grenye better than his own folk, and made no bones about it. Dammit, we never did pick him up and grill him about how he beat Aderno's spell, he thought — there was something that slipped through the cracks as the campaign revved up. But he was a drunk, a ruin of his former self. He wouldn't make a wizard if he lived to be a thousand, and Hasso wouldn't have bet on him to last another five years.

Stubbornly, Friddi said, "Well, your Majesty, unless it was wizardry, I don't know how the demon they got there."

However the men of Bucovin managed to cross the Aryesh, they threw the Lenello army into enough confusion to make it halt for the day. Hasso hunted up Orosei. "You know some men who are good trackers?" he asked.

"Oh, I might. I just might." The master-at-arms' eyes gleamed. "You've got an idea."

"Oh, I might. I just might." Hasso mimicked Orosei's tone well enough to send the Lenello into gales of laughter.

The half-dozen soldiers Orosei told off had the look of hunters, or more likely poachers. "You do what our foreign friend says," Orosei told them. "We've got some tricks he doesn't know about, but I expect he's got some we don't know about, too."

"What's on your mind, lord?" By one tracker's tone of voice, he was suspicious of Hasso on general principles first, then because the German was trying to order him around.

"Take me to where the Bucovinans cross the river. Track them back to there for me," Hasso said.

"If they did cross it," the Lenello said. "If they didn't just show up, like. I don't suppose Grenye can do magic, but you never can tell, now can you?" He seemed a lot less convinced than King Bottero. What that meant… Well, who the hell knew what that meant? Hasso had more urgent things to worry about.

"Track them back," he said. "Then we see. Till we try to find out, we can't really know." That was true in his world. Here…It had better be true here, he thought.

"You don't need us for this," another tracker said as they all set out. "A blind man could follow these hoofprints."

"A blind man, nothing," still another Lenello put in. "A dead man could."

"Fine. Pretend I am blind. Pretend I am dead," Hasso said. "But remember one thing, please. If you make a mistake, I haunt you." That got some grins from the men Orosei had picked, and one or two nervous chuckles. Back in Germany, he would have been joking. Here, as the first Lenello tracker said, you never could tell.

Back through the bushes and saplings the train led, back to the Aryesh. The trackers were right; Hasso could have done this himself. He shrugged. He hadn't known ahead of time. But now he had witnesses if his hunch turned out to be right. And if it turned out to be wrong, they would see him looking like a jerk.

He shrugged again. If you're going to try things, sometimes you damn well will look like a jerk, that's all.

The Aryesh was muddy and foamy. It looked almost like Viennese coffee. Hasso sighed. Along with tobacco, that was something he would never enjoy again. Nothing he could do about it. No, there was one thing: he could do without.

He unsheathed his belt knife and trimmed a sapling into a pole about a meter and a half long. "Nice blade," one of the trackers said. "Where'd you get it?"

"I have it with me when I come from my world," Hasso answered.

"How about that?" the Lenello said, and then, in a low voice to one of his pals,

"Never seen one like it before. Almost makes you believe that cock-and-bull story, doesn't it?" Hasso didn't think he was supposed to overhear that, but he did.

"What's he going to do now?" the other tracker said, his voce also not quite sotto enough. "Dowse with that stick? We already know where the cursed river is."

Hasso hadn't even thought of dowsing. In Germany, that was an old wives' tale. It probably wasn't here. If any kind of magic was practical, finding water fit the bill. But, as the tracker said, he already knew where the water was here. He was after something else.

He thrust the pole into the Aryesh. He wasn't enormously surprised when only the first twenty-five or thirty centimeters went in. After that, it hit an obstruction. His grin was two parts satisfaction and one part relief.

Orosei was only confused. "What's going on?" he asked.

Instead of answering with words, Hasso probed with the pole again. Then he stepped out into — or onto — the river. Walking on the water, he felt like Jesus. The Aryesh didn't come up to the tops of his boots. He strode forward, probing as he went.

"What the — ?" one of the trackers exclaimed.

"They don't put their bridge where we can see it," Hasso said, turning back toward the Lenelli. "They build it underwater, build it sneaky, so they can use it and we don't know."

"Well, fuck me," the tracker said. If that wasn't his version of coming to attention and saluting, Hasso didn't know what would be.

"I don't know, not till I see," Hasso answered. "But I think maybe. In my world, the enemies of my land use this trick." The Russians used every trick in the book, and then wrote a new book for all the tricks that weren't in the old one. The Wehrmacht used this one, too. A bridge that was hard to spot was a bridge artillery wouldn't knock out in a hurry.

Artillery couldn't knock this one out — no artillery here. Hasso looked across the Aryesh. He didn't see anybody, which was all to the good.

"What we need to do is, we need to pull up ten or fifteen cubits of this tonight," he said. He almost said five or six meters, but that wouldn't have meant anything to the blonds with him. They used fingers and palms and cubits, and weights that were even more cumbersome. What could you do? Since he couldn't do anything, he went on, "Then the Bucovinans ride across, go splash."

Orosei grinned at him. "If that doesn't make those bastards turn up their toes, I don't know what would!"

"That's the idea, isn't it?" Hasso said.

Even the trackers, who had been dubious about him, laughed and nudged one another. "He's not so dumb after all, is he?" one of them said.

"Not so dumb," another agreed, which struck Hasso as praising with faint damn. But he would take what he could get.

He made the trackers love him even more when he said, "You stay here and keep an eye on things. Orosei and I, we go back to the king and let him know what needs doing."

"What if the savages come across the river at us now?" a tracker demanded.

"Not likely, not in the daytime. They want to keep this a secret, right?" Hasso said. Before the trackers could answer or complain, he added, "But if they do, then you bug out." They couldn't very well bitch about that, and they didn't.

"An underwater bridge?" King Bottero said when Hasso brought him the news. "How the demon did they do that?"

When Hasso hesitated, Orosei took over. The German's Lenello wasn't up to technical discussions of pilings and planking. Bottero's master-at-arms finished, "I never would have thought of it. I didn't know what to think when I saw him walking on the water." (Yes, that was funny, though only Hasso in all this world knew why.) "But he says they use this trick in war where he comes from, so he was ready for it."

Nice to know Orosei doesn't try to hog credit, Hasso thought, or not when the guy who deserves it is around to hear him, anyway.

"What do we do about it?" the king asked. Hasso told him what he had in mind. Bottero stroked his beard. A slow smile stole over his heavy-featured face. "I like that, fry me if I don't. We'll do it tonight, and we'll watch the Grenye go sploot." Hasso didn't think sploot was a word in Lenello, but he had no trouble figuring out what it meant.

"Send a good-sized band of men, your Majesty," Orosei suggested. "If the barbarians decide to bring more raiders across tonight, they might swamp a little party of artisans."

Hasso hadn't thought of that. Plainly, neither had King Bottero. He nodded. "You're right. I'll do it." He turned and shouted orders to the officers who would take charge of that. Then he nodded again. "There. I've dealt with something, anyhow." A frown spread across his face like rain clouds. "Or have I? Have the Bucovinans built more of these underwater bridges, ones we don't know about yet?"

"A wizard could — " Hasso broke off, feeling stupid. All the wizards were scattered along the army's long supply line. Now that the main force needed one, it didn't have any.

Then he noticed that Bottero was eyeing him. "Didn't Aderno say you had some of the talent?" the king rumbled.

"He says it, but I don't know if I believe it." Hasso's voice broke as if he were one of the fifteen-year-olds to whom the Volkssturm gave a rifle and a "Good luck!" as they sent them off to try to slow down the Red Army. "And even if it's true, I don't know how to use it."

"About time you find out, then, isn't it?" Bottero said. "If you can do it, you'll give us a big hand."

"But — But — " Hasso spluttered.

"His Majesty's right," Orosei said. "Magic isn't a common gift. If you've got it, you shouldn't let it lie idle. The goddess wouldn't like that."

Did he mean Velona or the deity who sometimes inhabited her? Hasso didn't know, and wondered whether the Lenello did. "But — But — " he said again. He hated sounding like a broken record, but he didn't know what else to say.

The king slapped him on the back, which almost knocked him out of the saddle. If he'd fallen off the horse and landed on his head, it would have been a relief. "Talk to Velona," Bottero said. "She'll give you some pointers, and you can go from there. It doesn't sound like the kind of magic that can kill you if you don't do it right. Give it your best shot."

Hasso hadn't even thought about the consequences of a spell gone wrong. He wished his new sovereign hadn't reminded him of such things, too. But what were his choices here? He saw only two: say no and get a name for cowardice — the last thing he needed — or give it his best shot.

He'd long since decided that a big part of courage was nothing more than a reluctance to look like a coward in front of people who mattered to him. And so, reluctantly, he said, "Yes, your Majesty."

Velona came up and kissed him, which was a hell of a distraction for somebody contemplating his very first conjuration. "You can do it," she said. Her voice was full of confidence — and perhaps some warm promise, too. "I'm sure you can do it. The goddess wouldn't have brought you here to let you fail."

He didn't know why the goddess had brought him here. He didn't even know that the goddess had brought him here. King Bottero had a point, though. Velona knew a lot more about magic than he did. Christ! My horse knows more about magic than I do, he thought. Between her suggestions and his own few feeble ideas, he'd come up with what might be a spell.

It turned dowsing upside down and inside out. He wasn't trying to find water flowing underground — he was looking for unmoving objects concealed beneath running water. If everything went exactly right, the forked stick in his hands would rise when he pointed it at a submerged bridge.

The not-quite-dowsing stick was carved from one of the timbers the Lenelli had torn from the first underwater bridge. Velona said that would give it a mystic affinity with the other bridges… if there were others. The idea seemed reasonable, in an unreasonable kind of way.

Even so, he let his worry show: "If I find no bridges, does that mean there are no bridges? Or does it mean I can't find them? If I am no wizard, casting a spell does not help. Will not help." He remembered how to make the future tense. He didn't need to worry about the future, though. He was tense right now.

"Cast the spell. Then see what happens," Velona said. That also seemed reasonable — if your view of reason included spells in the first place. Hasso's didn't. Or rather, it hadn't.

Fighting not to show his fear, he started to chant. Velona had come up with a lot of the spell. Hasso would never make a poet in Lenello — come to that, he'd made a lousy poet auf Deutsch. What he had to remember here was to get the words right. He understood what the magic ought to do, even if he didn't perfectly follow all the phrases in the charm. Poetry was supposed to be challenging… wasn't it?

Velona gestured. That reminded him to move the not-dowsing rod. He swung it slowly from southwest to northeast, paralleling the course of the Aryesh. All of a sudden, it jerked upwards in his hands. He almost dropped it, he was so surprised. He'd no more thought he could truly work magic than that he could fly.

"There!" Velona said. "Go back, Hasso Pemsel. Go back and get the exact direction, so the artisans can find the hidden bridge."

He did, and damned if the rod didn't rise again. His own rod rose, too. He remembered how she'd called him by his full name when they met, there on the causeway through the swamp. He remembered what they'd done right afterwards, too, and he wanted to do it again.

His thoughts must have shown on his face, for Velona laughed, softly and throatily. "Soon," she promised. But then she tempered that, adding, "But not yet. First we see where the savages can sneak across the river."

"Oh, all right." Hasso knew he sounded like a petulant little boy who couldn't have what he wanted just when he wanted it. (Quite a bit like the Fuhrer, in fact, he thought.) Velona, who knew nothing about Hitler except that he was the man who ruled the country Hasso came from, laughed again, this time with rich amusement in her voice.

Hasso wished he had a compass, to give him a precise bearing on where that bridge lurked under the water. Nobody here had any idea what a compass was. If he could float an iron needle in a bowl of water… But he had too many other things to worry about right now.

Velona marked off the bearing as best she could. Hasso decided it would probably serve; they weren't very far from the Aryesh. "Go on," she urged him. "See if there are any more."

He wished she were urging him on while they were doing something else, but he saw the need for continuing with this. That need might not delight him, but he did see it. And working magic had a fascination, and an astonishment, all its own. He didn't think he'd been so delightfully surprised since the first time he played with himself.

And… "I'll be a son of a bitch!" he muttered. Damned if the rod didn't jerk up in his hand again. Chanting the charm over and over, he fixed the precise direction. Again, Velona marked it.

He found one more bridge after that, or thought he did. Part of him — a good bit of him — still wondered whether this wasn't some kind of delusion. But even in his world dowsers could — or claimed they could — find water. Maybe there was something to it.

Velona had no doubts. As soon as the spell was done, she plastered herself against him tighter than a coat of paint and gave him a kiss that curled his ears and made steam come out of his hair. Before he could sling her over his shoulder and carry her off to their tent — the first thing that occurred to him, even if she didn't weigh that much less than he did — she broke free and called for the artisans. After a moment, regretfully, so did Hasso.

The men came up with astonishing haste. Hasso didn't flatter himself that his shouts had much to do with it. When your goddess yelled for you, you went to her first and then wondered why she wanted you. (Hasso sometimes wondered why Velona still wanted him, but in a much more pleasant way.)

"Follow these bearings to the river, one by one," she said, pointing at the lines she'd laid out. "When you get there, probe under the surface. You'll find hidden bridges in each place. Tear them up."

They saluted, clenched fists over their hearts. "We'll do it!" they said, and hurried off. Hasso hoped they weren't going off for nothing, not least because he would look like a jerk if they were.

They must have found what they were looking for, because that evening King Bottero summoned Hasso to dine with him. He hadn't done that since Hasso's striking column slammed through the Bucovinans in the first — and, so far, only — big battle the two sides had fought. Bottero poured wine for Hasso with his own hand. "You see?" he said expansively. "I told you you could do it."

"Yes, your Majesty," Hasso said, which was an answer as useful here as Jawohl, mein Fuhrer! had been back in the Reich. And it wasn't even a lie this time around. Bottero did say so, and he was right.

"Why did you have any doubts?" the king asked. "If Aderno said you had the power, you did. Aderno may be a pain in the fundament sometimes, but he knows the difference between a snake and its cast skin."

"No magic in the world I come from," Hasso said. "Hard for me to believe anyone has it." He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. "Extra hard to believe I have it."

"Well, you do," Bottero said. "Get used to it. The artisans came back all excited about how you knew exactly where to send them. They said you made their work easy. One of them asked why our regular wizards couldn't do so well."

Hasso winced. "They shouldn't say that." He didn't want the regular wizards angry at him. Maybe he could work a little magic, however crazy that seemed. But he wasn't a pro, and he knew it. If somebody who was a pro decided to turn him into a prawn, he didn't know how to defend himself or fight back.

A pretty young Grenye woman brought in a platter of pork ribs and roasted parsnips. The robe she wore was so thin, it wouldn't have kept her warm long outside. The king ran his hand up her leg. Was her smile forced or real? Was she glad to be getting off as easy as this, or did she hate him for groping her — and, no doubt, for taking her, too? Hasso had no way to know, which might have been — surely was — just as well.

He concentrated on the food. After a while, he asked, "How far to Falticeni, your Majesty?"

"We're getting there," Bottero answered. "Pretty soon, the savages will have to fight us again. We'll whip them, and then we'll go on and take the place."

The woman stood by the king, waiting for anything he might want — for anything at all, plainly. "Should you talk with her here?" Hasso asked.

"Why not?" Bottero asked. "She knows how to say, 'Yes,' in Lenello, and that's about it. And she's not going anywhere anyhow. She's hot enough to keep around for a while." He fondled her again, then asked, "You want her to suck you off? She's good."

Hasso might have enjoyed that if he'd found the girl himself. With Bottero watching, as he plainly intended to do? "No, thanks, your Majesty. I just came from Velona."

"Ah." The king leered. "She can wear anybody out."

"Yes." Hasso left it at that, and hoped Bottero would. He wasn't lying; Velona had helped him celebrate his successful sorcery. He also feared being unfaithful to her. As a woman? No, not so much, though she would be incandescent enough if scorned. But as a woman with the goddess indwelling? The last thing Hasso wanted to do was face an irate deity.

He didn't say that to King Bottero. It didn't seem manly. Then Bottero said, "You're pretty smart. If she found out about you and some chit, she'd fry your nuts off, I bet. Forget I asked you."

So the king respected — if that was the right word — Velona, too? Well, he would. He really believed in the goddess, believed in his belly and his balls. (Hasso tried not to think of his belly on Velona, his balls slapping the inside of her thighs.) To Hasso, belief like that came much harder, no matter what he'd seen here.

"How do we make the Bucovinans fight us?" Hasso asked. "If they stand, we can beat them, yes?"

"We'd better!" Bottero said. "That's what I'm trying to do — take a big bite out of them. Instead, they've been nibbling on us… and I don't mean like Sfinti here." He swatted the Bucovinan woman on the backside. She smiled at him again. Again, Hasso wondered what went on behind her eyes.

But only for a moment — he had other things to think about. The Wehrmacht had wanted to get the Red Army to stand and fight, too. Instead, the Russians traded space for time, drawing the Germans on till they got overextended and then hitting back. The Bucovinans looked to be playing the same game against Bottero.

Would it work here? If the Lenelli took Falticeni, obviously not. Otherwise? Hasso shrugged. He was too much a stranger here to be sure of much. Hell, he hadn't even been sure he could do magic. He still had trouble believing it.

He didn't want to think about that now. He gnawed on ribs and drank beer and tried not to watch Bottero pawing Sfinti. It wasn't that he hadn't seen plenty worse, most recently at Muresh. But the way she just stood there and let the king do what he wanted raised Hasso's hackles. He wouldn't have wanted to sleep with her, not literally, even if she kept on smiling. Wouldn't you be much too likely to wake up slightly dead the next morning?

King Bottero didn't seem to worry about it. Bottero didn't seem to worry about much of anything. "The rest of the Lenello kingdoms will be so jealous of us once we've cut off Bucovin's head," he boasted.

"Jealous enough to gang up on you?" Hasso asked. That would be all Bottero needed: getting through one war only to end up in another that was worse. Against other Lenelli, he wouldn't have any special edge.

"Don't think so." No, the king didn't worry about much. "What it will do, though, is it'll draw us more people from across the sea. They'll know we'll have lands to hand out, lands with plenty of Grenye on 'em to work and to have fun with." He pulled Sfinti down onto his lap.

Hasso got to his feet. "Maybe I'd better go, your Majesty," he said. King Bottero didn't tell him no. He bowed his way out of the tent. As the flap fell, Bottero laughed and the Bucovinan woman giggled. The guards outside grinned and nudged one another. One of them winked at Hasso. He had to make himself grin and wink back.

He also had to make himself hope Bottero knew what he was doing in there. The king pretty obviously thought so. Were the Bucovinans smart enough to leave a pretty assassin behind to be captured? Or would an ordinary Grenye woman pull out a knife if she saw the chance?

And even if the answer to both those questions was no, what would happen to Bottero's kingdom after this campaign? Hitler's biggest mistake was thinking he could take on almost the entire rest of the world. Was the local king doing the same stupid thing? Again, Hasso had to shrug. He didn't know enough to judge — just enough to worry.

"You're back sooner than I expected," Velona remarked when he ducked into the tent they shared.

"His Majesty has other things on his mind." Hasso shaped an hourglass in the air with his hands.

The Lenelli didn't use that gesture, and Velona needed a moment to realize what it meant. When she did, she laughed… for a moment. "He didn't want to share with you?" she asked ominously.

He could, to his own relief, answer with the exact truth: "I don't want to share with him. I have better here."

He wasn't afraid of facing the Bucovinans in battle. He wasn't afraid of trying to work magic, either — though maybe he needed to be, now that he'd discovered he could do it. But facing an angry Velona… That scared him green. He would rather have jumped on a Russian grenade.

Her eyes flashed as she inspected him. It wasn't just a figure of speech; the spark in them seemed to light up the gloom inside the tent. Maybe he was imagining things, but he didn't think so. Her gaze didn't probe him the same way a wizard's would have, which was not to say it didn't probe him.

At last, grudgingly, she nodded. "All right. I believe you. But if you ever waste your seed with a Grenye woman…" She didn't go on, not with words. She did create the strong impression that that wouldn't be a good idea. And Captain Hasso Pemsel, veteran of five and a half years of war in Europe and a campaign season's worth in this strange new world, shivered in his boots.

He didn't shiver only because Velona intimidated him. (He tried not to admit to himself that she did — he tried for a good second and a half, and then gave it up as a bad job.) It was bloody cold in there. Winter was coming on, and the tent walls were about as good at keeping the chill out as they would have been on the Eastern Front. He threw more charcoal on the brazier, which might have raised the temperature half a degree: from arctic all the way up to frigid.

He breathed easier when Velona relented enough to ask, "Does the king think he can make the Bucovinans stand and fight?"

"He wants to." Hasso was glad to talk about the campaign instead of anything that had to do with Sfmti's charms. "Can't conquer them unless they stand — or unless they let us walk into Falticeni."

"They won't," Velona said flatly, and Hasso nodded. He didn't think the Bucovinans would, either; they were fighting the Lenelli every way they knew how. And they had sense enough to see that pitched battles weren't the best way to do it. Her gaze went far away. "It won't be easy." Her voice might have been coming from Beyond, too.

Was that prophecy? Could there be such a thing in this world? Once more, Hasso didn't know. He did know his shiver, this time, had nothing to do with the cold outside.