Aderno audibly ground his teeth. Hasso kicked him in the ankle under the table. He said, “The goddess does not hate me.” There, at least, he could be positive. Then he asked, “What is better than to serve the king?”

“Anything short of an arrow in the ass,” Scanno answered. That was plenty for the last Grenye at the table, who got out while the getting was good. Scanno went on, “I mean, look at me.” He jabbed a thumb at his chest. “I serve myself, nobody else. I’m better off than your shadow here any day of the month, ‘cause I’m free.”

“Your so-called freedom is a recommendation for slavery,” Aderno said icily.

“Hush,” Hasso told him. The wizard looked not only affronted but alarmed. Was he wondering whether Hasso was about to join the forces of drunken lawlessness? It looked that way to the German.

He’d succeeded in surprising Scanno, too. “What’s with you?” the renegade said. “You look like a Lenello, but you sure don’t act like one.”

“Is better to act like Grenye?” Hasso asked. That made Aderno perk up, deciding Hasso likely was on King Bottero’s side after all.

And Scanno, drunk and hoping he’d found a friend, wasn’t on his guard. “You’re cursed well right it is,” he said. “Would I be here if it wasn’t?” He drained the mug Hasso had bought him. Hasso signaled to the tapman, who carried over another one. Scanno would have a head that pounded like a drop-forging plant when he came down from this bender, but that was his worry.

He seemed to think the fresh beer had got there of its own accord. “What do you have against your own folk?” Hasso asked him.

“Waddaya think?” Scanno said. Since Hasso had no idea, he kept quiet and waited. Scanno got to his feet and staggered over to a corner, his gait like a ship at full sail on a rough sea. After easing himself, he lurched back. For a wonder, he remembered where he’d been going before the interruption: “Ever watch a twelve-year-old steal a ripe pear from a kid half his size?”

“I know what you mean,” Hasso said. And he did. The image held a lot of truth. Aderno looked as if he were about to burst. Hasso kicked him under the table again. Aderno’s idea of gathering intelligence was tearing what you wanted to know out of whoever had it. Teasing it out seemed beyond his mental horizon.

“Well, that’s what we’re doing here,” Scanno said. “By the goddess, it is! I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I said a plague on it – and here I am.”

“What about Bucovin?” Hasso said. “Bucovin not so small. Not so…” He looked for a word, and was glad to find one without needing help from the wizard: “Not so easy.”

“Bucovin had time to figure things out, see?” Scanno said. “The little Grenye kingdoms, the ones by the sea, they went down bam, bam, bam like nobody’s business. They never knew what hit ‘em. But Bucovin watched and started figuring stuff out.”

“Like what?” Hasso asked. “Bucovin full of Grenye. No magic in Bucovin. How to fight against Lenello wizards?”

“Magic? Magic – “ Scanno spat on the straw-strewn dirt floor. “That for magic! That’s about what it’s worth.”

“Shall I sing you up a case of boils, wretch?” No, Aderno wouldn’t keep his mouth shut even when he needed to. “Shall I show you what magic’s worth?”

“You’ve got emerods on your tongue, Turdface,” Scanno said. Hasso had spent enough time in Lenello barracks to have no trouble with the insult. Scanno aimed a shaky finger in Aderno’s direction. “I knew what you were before you started bragging. I could smell it, I could. Do your worst. You’re not such a big pile of shit as you think you are.”

Holding Aderno back after that would have been impossible. Hasso didn’t even try. The wizard snarled his spell – plainly one he knew well – rather than singing it. “Skin break, skin bubble, skin burn!” he cried, and aimed his finger the way Hasso would have aimed his Schmeisser: with purpose and with malice. “Transform! Transform! Transform!”

And nothing happened.

Aderno stared at Scanno, who was drunk and surly but not disfigured. He stared at his finger as Hasso would have stared at the submachine gun after a misfire. Hasso could hope to clear a jam. What did you do when magic misfired?

The first thing Aderno did was try the spell he’d used on Hasso when they met in the courtyard of Castle Svarag. He sketched a star in the air between himself and Scanno. Hasso saw him do it, but didn’t see the star glow on its own, as it had when the wizard did it with him.

Aderno did some more staring, this time at his own index finger. He tried the spell with Hasso, who saw the same golden star he had before. After Aderno made sure he had, the wizard shook his head. “The magic seems to be in order. But – “

“It doesn’t work,” Hasso finished for him.

“It doesn’t work,” Aderno agreed. “And I don’t know why not. This miserable sot has no magic, used no magic. And yet my spell would not bite. And I don’t know why.” A German engineer couldn’t have sounded any more upset if he’d watched a book fall up instead of down.

“Told you so, know-it-all,” Scanno jeered.

Lenello magic, from what Hasso had heard, grew weak and erratic in Bucovin. Scanno was right here, but Aderno’s magic didn’t want to work against him, either. What did that mean? Hasso had no idea. Plainly, neither did Aderno.

V

Aderno wanted to take Scanno back to Castle Drammen to experiment on him. The wizard didn’t put it in quite those words, but that was what it boiled down to. Scanno, not surprisingly, didn’t want to go. “You aren’t going to play games with me,” he said.

“It’s for the good of the Lenelli,” Aderno said.

Scanno blew beer fumes in his face as he laughed. “Like I care!”

“Come on,” Aderno said to Hasso. “We can get him there.”

Hasso didn’t feel like fighting a drunk who was unlikely even to notice if he got hurt. He also didn’t want to wreck whatever chance they had of getting voluntary cooperation from Scanno. “Forget it,” he said – in Lenello, so Scanno could follow. “We come back a different time.”

“I wouldn’t come back here for half the gold in the treasury!” the wizard exclaimed.

“Fine,” Hasso said. ‘I come back a different time.”

“You’re a peculiar one,” Scanno said. “You belong with me, not with this tight-arsed twit.”

“No.” Hasso let it go there. He didn’t want to tell the renegade that he’d killed Grenye. He didn’t want to tell him he was sleeping with the goddess on earth, either. If Scanno asked around, he could hear it for himself. Hasso got to his feet. “Come on. We go.”

The tapman gave him a polite nod as he left. He nodded back, which seemed to surprise the Grenye again.

Out on the street, Aderno lost his temper. “What do you think you’re doing, taking that lout’s side? Are you crazy? Are you a traitor, too?”

“Shut up,” Hasso said in Lenello, an officer’s snap in his voice. He went on in German, knowing the wizard would understand and the Grenye all around wouldn’t: “Let him think I’m on his side, or I might be. Let him think that, and who knows how much we may learn from him? Get rough now, and we end up with nothing.”

Aderno gaped. “Maybe you’re playing your own game. Maybe you think all of us are children.”

“You act like it sometimes.” Hasso said that in Lenello. Aderno flushed, for he used the second-person singular, not plural.

A Grenye with a pheasant feather stuck in his cap said something about his nice, clean sister and pointed to the brothel across the street. Hasso shook his head. The Grenye didn’t want to take no for an answer. He reached out to tug at Hasso’s arm. Aderno said something too fast for the Wehrmacht officer to follow. The Grenye got it, though. He disappeared in a hurry.

“If our magic fails against the Grenye, how are we supposed to conquer Bucovin?” Aderno said.

“Maybe you do it one bite at a time,” Hasso answered. “Maybe you go on to Falticeni and take it away from their king.”