“Their chief, you mean,” the Lenello said scornfully.

“Whatever he is.” It didn’t matter to Hasso. “Or maybe you decide it’s too much trouble and you leave them alone. We had a big neighbor who we thought would be a pushover, too. That’s why I was fighting in what was left of my own capital.” If the Fuhrer had gone after England instead of trying to knock out Russia … Well, things could hardly have turned out worse.

“This whole land is ours. It is our destiny. If the savages don’t bend the knee to us, we’ll push them aside like the dirt they are.” Aderno didn’t care who was listening to him.

Sometimes disasters followed talk like that. Hasso had seen as much at first hand. But sometimes they didn’t. The Americans hadn’t worried about Indian raids for a lifetime. The aborigines in Australia had even less left to them than the redskins in the New World. Europeans ruled India and Africa. Conquest could work.

“Come on,” Hasso said. “Let’s get back to the castle.”

Aderno went off to commune with a fellow wizard and try to figure out why his magic failed. Hasso thought about telling King Bottero what he’d done, but decided not to. This kingdom was tiny by the standards of the Reich, but not so tiny that the man at the top would want to hear every little detail. Chances were he’d listen politely – once. Hasso didn’t care to burn up his credit like that.

He asked one of the guards where Velona was. The fellow shrugged, which made his mailshirt clink ever so slightly. “Don’t know,” he answered. Maybe he really didn’t. Or maybe he didn’t care for a jumped-up foreigner. His tone wasn’t rude enough to be insubordinate.

Hasso asked the same thing of a Grenye maidservant carrying a heroic amount of laundry wrapped in a sheet. “She is in the chapel, my lord,” the woman answered. Her Lenello was fluent, but flavored with an accent that said she’d be more at home in one of the swarthy natives’ languages.

“Thank you very much,” Hasso said. The maidservant looked as startled as the tapman at Negustor’s had. Lenelli didn’t waste much politeness on their social and political inferiors.

The chapel wasn’t so fancy as its name suggested. Hasso heard it with Christian ears, which gave him expectations the Lenelli didn’t have. The room was small and simple and spare. It had an altar with a low relief of the goddess carved into soft golden limestone. The lithe silhouette might have been taken from Velona’s – except that the altar had crossed with early Lenello settlers.

But for the altar and a few stools, the chapel was bare. Maybe Christianity needed more in the way of display because, in Hasso’s world, miracles were hard to come by. Here, with magic working and the goddess taking possession of her mortal acolyte, the impossible was as real as a punch in the nose.

Velona had prostrated herself before the altar. She didn’t notice Hasso come in. Was that a faint radiance hovering around her? He wouldn’t have sworn it wasn’t, not after the way she seemed to glow as she strode naked toward Bottero on the night of the solstice. Hasso grimaced, not wanting to remember the rest of that night.

He wondered if he ought to cough, or if it would break some kind of spell. Erring on the side of caution, he stood and waited. After a couple of minutes, Velona stood up and turned toward him. When she did, her eyes flashed fire like a wild animal’s. Human eyes didn’t do that … except hers did. Hasso had no doubt of what he saw.

“Who disturbs the goddess?” The voice wasn’t quite hers. It was deeper, more reverberant, as if it came from deep inside her – or maybe from far beyond her. Either way, the hair at the back of Hasso’s neck wanted to stand on end. “Who dares?”

“I is sorry,” he said, startled out of his grammar. He didn’t care to admit, even to himself, that he was scared out of it.

She recognized his voice. He could tell the moment she did: it was the moment her aura died away. Suddenly she was just a woman, just his woman, again. “Oh. Hasso,” she said, and her voice was the one he knew. “You … surprised me.”

“Sorry,” he said again, now certain to whom – and to what – he was apologizing. “Not mean to bother.”

“It’s all right. You didn’t know any better. I was almost done communing anyhow.” She made him feel like a kid who’d interrupted something very important that he wasn’t big enough to understand. The more she pretended it was all right, the more certain he got that it wasn’t. She tried to be brisk: “Well, you must have had a reason to come looking for me. What was it?”

In his halting Lenello, he told her about the curse Aderno had tried to drop on Scanno, how he’d failed, and how, despite failing, he’d seen that no magic protected the renegade. “I think you need to know this,” he finished.

“Well, you’re right,” she said. “I do. Thank you. The goddess needs to know it, too.” She kissed him. For a split second, the tingle that shot through him seemed even more than the high voltage Velona put into whatever she did. Imagination? In the world he came from, he would have thought so. Here? He had no way to know.

“What do you do about it?” he asked. “What does goddess do?”

She set a forefinger between her breasts. “I will take the word to the king. It marches too well with what happened to me when I went into Bucovin. One by one, my disguises and wards failed, but not for any reason I could find.”

“The wizard tell – tells – he, too,” Hasso said.

“No doubt. But Bottero will take it more seriously from me, because I am who I am and what I am,” Velona said. “As for the goddess…” Hasso could see the deity come forth in her. Her eyes brightened and focused somewhere not of this world. Her hair spread and thickened till it reminded him of a lion’s mane. She seemed altogether larger; though he still looked down at her, he felt as if she were peering down at him from a considerable height. She went on, “The goddess will deal with it in her own way.” Then divinity disappeared, and she was Velona again.

What is the goddess’ way? Hasso wondered. He didn’t ask, though. He didn’t have the nerve.

Her gaze sharpened in a merely human way. “If Aderno’s spell won’t bite on this wretch of a Scanno, what does that say? That he’s in Bucovin’s service, most likely. That he’s a spy, a viper. You should have brought him here. Pins and pincers would tear the truth out of him even if magic failed.”

If the Grenye in Bucovin couldn’t find a better spy than a man busy drinking himself to death, they were in more trouble than they knew what to do with. But that thought led Hasso to another: “Can – how you say? – test Grenye? If magic works, ordinary, safe people. If magic does not work, maybe they have to do with Bucovin. Yes? No? Maybe?”

Velona thought about that. Her eyes glowed in an entirely human fashion. The way she showed she liked an idea was more drastic than he’d known from any other woman, to say nothing of more enjoyable. Was it sacrilege on a stool in the chapel? Not, he supposed, if your panting partner was a part-time goddess.

“What if someone comes in?” he asked afterwards, but only afterwards – he didn’t worry about that, or anything else, while she straddled him.

She only laughed. “You ask the strangest questions. No one would come near the chapel while I was in it. No one but you, I mean, because you don’t know our ways.”

“Oh.” How big a blunder had he made? A good thing she was fond of him, or even standing in the doorway might have been dangerous.

Velona had no trouble figuring out what he was thinking. “Don’t worry about it. You told me things I needed to know. I did and the goddess did. Who knows? Maybe she even led you here.”

Even though he’d begun to realize they didn’t always fit in this world, Hasso clung to the rational, orderly patterns of thought he’d brought from the one that bred him. “How can she did that if she is here with you? If she is here in you?” he asked.