Part of him wanted to tell her to leave and not to ask anyone else to come in her place. But he was almost painfully aware of how very long he’d gone without. It didn’t have to mean anything – just relief and, as she’d said, some momentary pleasure. “You’ll do,” he told her, and got out of his own clothes.

He wasn’t sure she enjoyed it, but he wasn’t sure she didn’t. She was certainly limber and uninhibited. He rode her the first time. After they finished, she sucked him hard again and straddled him. He squeezed her small, firm breasts as she bucked up and down. She threw back her head and groaned. If she came, it was right then. He knew he did a moment later.

“There,” she said, leaning down to brush her lips across his. “Is that better?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. She laughed throatily.

He slept without dreams that night. Drepteaza asked him about it at their language lesson the next morning. She seemed pleased at his answer. “Rautat was clever,” she said. “More clever than I was. You may have Leneshul any night you please – or another woman, if you’d rather.”

What about you? Hasso wondered. Drepteaza was cool, almost cold, as if she had no idea how pretty she was. That made the prospect of heating her all the more exciting. But she looked at him as if he were a side of beef. If he offended her, she could do anything she wanted to him. He kept his big mouth shut … about that, anyway.

“Leneshul is all right,” he told her.

“Then she will come to you again,” Drepteaza said briskly. And Leneshul did, two or three nights a week. On those nights, Hasso never had any of the dreams that disturbed him. He had them less often on other nights, too.

But when they did come on other nights, they seemed more urgent, as if whatever was behind them felt itself thwarted and so tried harder than ever to break through. That alarmed him; he felt pursued. He used the solace of Leneshul’s compliant body as often as he could.

No matter what he did, he couldn’t get it up every single night. He wished he were ten years younger; then he might have. But when he was ten years younger, the future stretched out before him with a broad and shining path. The Fuhrer was turning the tiny Reichswehr into the Wehrmacht, restoring German pride, restoring German power. What could stand in the way of a proud, resurgent nation?

Well, he’d found out what could, all right. And here he was in a strange world, older and more scarred and screwing his head off not for love or even lust but out of fear.

That helped wear him out, too. One night, he fell asleep right after supper. If Leneshul came to his room that evening, she quietly left again, and he never knew it. And so … he dreamt. And whatever had chased him for so long finally caught up with him.

“Hasso!” He heard his own name echoing, as if down a long, windy corridor. “Hasso Pemsel!”

He didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to acknowledge. The harder he fled, though, the more his name pursued him. Names had power. So the wizards said, and here he was a wizard – of sorts.

At last, hounded, he stood and turned at bay. “What?” he shouted back into the void.

Time passed. A minute? An hour? It was a dream – he couldn’t be sure. Time: that was all he knew. Then, dimly, a face appeared in the void, a face he knew. Aderno’s face, he realized. “By the goddess, I’ve had a demon of a time raising you!” the wizard said.

When he named the goddess, Hasso seemed to see the cult statue floating beside him. The German also seemed to see Velona’s face instead, or perhaps as well. He had trouble being sure which, but what difference did it make? It was only a dream … wasn’t it? “Well, here I am,” Hasso said.

Aderno nodded. “We heard you’d lived,” he said. “We weren’t sure, but it seems to be true. That was why Bottero tried to ransom you.”

“Yes, I’m still around. They take me to Falticeni,” Hasso said. Even in a dream, he stuck to the present tense as much as he could when speaking Lenello.

“You’re not – telling them anything, are you?” Aderno sounded more anxious than perhaps he thought he did. Maybe covering up was harder in a dream. Or was Aderno dreaming? So much Hasso didn’t know.

“No, I don’t say anything,” he replied. “You are well? Bottero is well? Velona is well? Mertois is well?” He asked after people he knew. He didn’t waste time asking after Orosei – he knew the master-at-arms was dead.

“Mertois has a broken leg. He will limp ever after,” Aderno said. “The rest of us are well enough. Bottero and Velona are wild for revenge against the savages. The Grenye can’t do that to real men and expect to get away with it.”

The first few times the Ivans gave the Wehrmacht a good clout, German soldiers felt the same way. Poland and the West and the Balkans had been easy. Nothing came easy in Russia, not even the victories. And, as year followed year, those got harder and harder to find. Sorry, Aderno. You don’t get walkovers forever, no matter how much you wish you did.

Or maybe you did with magic. The Lenelli sure thought so. They’d stripped themselves thin of wizards before the latest battle. What they’d had was Hasso, in fact. But nobody’d suggested that he try a spell to see if the Bucovinans were up to any funny business. Nobody’d imagined they could be. So much for understanding the enemy!

When Hasso didn’t answer right away, Aderno said, “We can do it! By the goddess, outlander, we can!”

When he called on the goddess again, the cult statue grew more distinct. So did Velona’s face. Were they two sides of the same coin? Hasso was no damn good at such things. The doctrine of the Trinity and the notion of transubstantiation only made his head ache. It wasn’t the goddess’ voice that called to him, though. It was Velona’s: “Are you all right, Hasso Pemsel?”

“Hello, sweetheart. Yes, I’m doing well enough, I guess,” Hasso answered. “I hope you are.”

“I miss you,” she said. “I didn’t think I would, but I do. I want to get you back. If I have to burn down all of Bucovin to do it and kill all the stinking Grenye savages in the way, I will.”

Not even the Fuhrer was that blunt. Hasso didn’t doubt she meant every word of it. Whatever else you said about Velona, she’d never once made the acquaintance of hypocrisy.

“Have they tried to trick you into doing things for them? Have they given you sluts to try to make you forget me?” she asked.

“I don’t do anything for them. And I can never forget you. You know that.” Hasso didn’t answer all of the last question. He had to share Velona with the king. How could she get mad at him for somebody like Leneshul?

Maybe you couldn’t keep secrets in a dream. Whether he told her or not, she knew. And she didn’t like it for beans. “I am a goddess! I do what I have to do!” she cried. “You – you’re only a man! How dare you take some smelly little black-haired twat? How dare you?”

Much too late, he remembered she hadn’t wanted him sniffing around Grenye serving girls back in Drammen, either. What could he say? That he had no idea whether he’d ever get away from Falticeni? She should have been able to see it for herself. If she could, she didn’t care – she was playing the woman scorned right up to the hilt.

“Aderno!” she cried. “Center my power while I smite this wretch!”

Hasso was a wizard of sorts. An ordinary man might well not have escaped the goddess’ wrath. He could feel it building like heat lightning on a hot summer day in the southern Ukraine. How to flee? How to get away?

He screamed himself awake.

XVI

He must have done some impressive shrieking. Next thing he knew, three guards were in the room with him, each man with a sword in one hand and a torch in the other. Their shadows swooped around and behind them like something out of a scary movie. Nobody in this whole goddamn world knows what that means, Hasso thought miserably. Nobody but me.