After the Downfall

She showed him on the map. It was the nearest town east of the marsh. I might have known, he thought. “Their towns, now, their towns are truly strange. They’re more like overgrown villages than proper cities. But they aren’t like that, either. They’re … different.”

One of Bottero’s officers nodded. Hasso thought his name was Nolio. “I’ve been into Bucovin pretending to be a trader,” he said. They do know something about spying, then, Hasso thought. Nolio went on, “You just feel wrong going there. Out of place. Like even the walls and the floor are staring at you, let alone the people. And the people are worse. They don’t respect you the way Grenye are supposed to. They think they’re as good as you are, the dogs.”

“They are free,” Hasso said.

“Wild,” Bottero corrected. All the Lenelli around the table, Velona included, nodded solemnly. That was how it looked to them. How it looked to the Grenye… they didn’t care. And if you’ve got any brains, you won’t care, either – or you won’t let on that you care.

“What goes wrong when you visit Bucovin?” Hasso asked Velona. He’d tried to ask before, but he was getting better at the language now.

Not good enough, though. “What went wrong when I visited, you mean?” she asked. That was what he meant. He was starting to recognize past tenses when he read them and even when he heard them, but they wouldn’t come out of his mouth with any reliability. But Velona sounded as sheepish as she ever did when she said, “What went wrong? Everything, near enough.” She threw her hands wide, and almost knocked a mug of beer out of Nolio’s hand.

“Why? How? You have magic. You are the goddess.”

“It’s like Nolio says. In Bucovin, everything watches you. The towns, the people, I don’t know what, but something there seems to suck the life out of magic. It works, and then you get deeper in and it doesn’t work so well, and then it just… stops. Almost makes you think Grenye have their own magic. But they don’t – they can’t,” Velona said.

“That’s so,” King Bottero said. “When we fight there, it’s us against them. Spells mostly fail – and the more we depend on them, the worse the time they pick to fail. One of us, mounted, in armor, is worth, four, five, six, eight of those stinking churls on foot. But they’re starting to use more horsemen, and Bucovin’s a big place, too.” He pointed to the map again. “They have big armies, and they don’t fight fair. They mostly won’t give us standup battles. They skulk and they raid and they burn our wagons and – “ He broke off, an angry flush rising all the way up to his scalp. “What’s so cursed funny?”

“Sorry, your Majesty.” Despite the apology, Hasso had to work to make himself quit laughing. It was either laugh or cry, which would have surprised the king even more. Bottero’s complaints sounded much too familiar. How many German generals had said those exact same things about the Russians? One Landser was always worth a couple of Ivans, sometimes more than that. Throw enough Ivans into the fight, though… Stalin put out a fire by smothering it in corpses. If you had enough corpses, it worked, too. Picking his words with care, Hasso said, “My people fight a war like that, too.”

“Ah?” the king said. “With all your tricks and ploys, I bet you had better luck than we ever managed to find.”

“Well,” Hasso said, “no.” He bit down hard on the inside of his lower lip. Tears bubbled very close to the surface. He turned back to Velona. “The goddess not help the, uh, the plain you?” He hoped she would follow what he meant.

And she did, for she answered, “Even her power seems less there. Not gone, but less. To use it to go on – I couldn’t. They sniffed me out as being something that didn’t belong there. Maybe as a danger. I’m not so sure of that. When they were going to seize me, though, when I had to flee, then she gave me what I needed.” Her smile almost dazzled him. “Then she led me to you.”

One of Bottero’s officers swore softly. Hasso knew why. Any man who wasn’t dead or a fairy would want that woman smiling at him that way and saying those things to him. And Hasso was convinced that even a fairy, seeing Velona, would reconsider. Seeing her smile that way, hearing her talk that way, to someone else had to burn like acid.

“So,” the king said, “will you help us keep secrets? You want help with the wizardry, I’ll give you Aderno.”

The proud wizard would no doubt pitch a fit at working for a foreigner who’d literally fallen out of the sky. Hasso liked that idea. It wasn’t what swayed him, though. The job needed doing, and he could likely do it better than any Lenello. “Yes, your Majesty,” he said.