After the Downfall

And there lay Velona, her golden hair all sodden with blood. None of the Bucovinans had taken the sword from her hand. They knew who she was, and they knew what she was, and they didn’t want anything to do with her.

They weren’t so dumb.

Even Rautat hung back a couple of steps as Hasso knelt beside her. “So that’s what she looks like up close,” the underofficer said. “If you like great big blondes, I guess she’s pretty.”

Hasso hardly heard him. He eased the sword from his one-time beloved’s grip, then reached out to touch her hand. When he did, he frowned. She should have been cooler than that if she were dead. His index and middle fingers found that spot on her wrist by the thumb side of the tendons. Her pulse was slow, but it was there. “Jesus!” he muttered: another deity missing in action here.

“What?” Rautat said.

“She’s not dead,” Hasso said. “She’s just knocked out.”

Rautat started to draw his belt knife to remedy that. Then he jammed it back into the sheath. “I don’t dare,” he said, “not against the goddess.” He took off on the dead run.

Hasso would have stopped him if he had tried to kill Velona. He wondered why, when she’d come so close to killing him. He also wondered what the hell he was going to do with her – to her? – when she came to. He didn’t fear the goddess the way Rautat did, which probably meant he didn’t understand the situation as well as the native did.

Cautiously feeling, he found a knot on the side of her head. He nodded to himself. Going into battle without a helmet was great for heartening your friends and frightening your foes. When it came to actually fighting … not so good. He probed a little harder. If she had a fractured skull, she might not wake up – which might prove a relief for everybody but her.

She grimaced and tried to twist away from him. She wasn’t deeply out, then. That was a good sign, or maybe a bad one, depending on how you looked at things. Then her eyes opened. For a moment, she had no idea who he was, who she was herself, or what the hell was going on. Hasso sympathized. He’d been down that road himself the autumn before. A concussion was not your friend.

She blinked, and blinked again. Her mouth set. Reason was coming back. Those blue, blue eyes found his. “You!” she said, her voice a hoarse croak.

“Afraid so.” Lenello came rustily from his lips. He wasn’t used to hearing it without a rough Bucovinan accent any more, either. “Want some water?”

“Please.”

He had a jug on his belt. He took it off and held it to her lips. She drank and drank. “Better?” he asked when she’d almost emptied it.

“A little, maybe.” She needed two tries to sit up. When she looked around and saw Bucovinans roaming the field and Lenelli and their chargers down and dead in windrows, she looked first humanly astonished and then more than humanly outraged. “What did you do to us? What did we do to you to deserve … this?”

“Well, trying to kill me makes a pretty good start.” Hasso worked hard to remember the past tenses that had given him so much trouble; he needed them here. “I loved you, and you tried to cook my brains for me.”

He watched her gaze sharpen. If she could have slain him right there, she would have done it. But she couldn’t even start; it was like watching an archer try to shoot in a driving rainstorm. “My wits are all scrambled,” she muttered.

“I believe it,” Hasso said. “You are going to have headaches like you don’t believe. Takes days, maybe weeks, to get over.” He tapped the side of his own head. “I know.”

“What did you do?” Velona repeated. “The flying thunder … That forest of spears …” She shuddered, then winced, plainly wishing she hadn’t. “And none of our magic worked. We’ve had to deal with renegades, but this …! How the goddess must hate you!”

“I take my chances,” Hasso said, which shocked her. Well, too bad. It was too bad, in too many ways, but he couldn’t do anything about any of them now. He continued, “I tell you something else, too. You need to remember it. All Lenelli need to remember it.”

“Go on,” she said. “I’m listening. Right now, I don’t have much choice.”

“Simple. Easy. Four words – Grenye are people, too.” In Bucovinan, it would have been one word. “People,” Hasso said again. “Strong enough to stand against Lenelli. Isn’t that a big part of what makes people?”

Velona’s chin came up. “Little black-haired mindblind savages.” Cutting through a couple of hundred years’ worth of Lenello arrogance wouldn’t be easy or quick.

Hasso was about to remind her that King Zgomot’s so-called savages had whipped the living snot out of her kingdom twice running. Before he could, someone behind him said, “I didn’t know she would be so beautiful.”