“How do you say, ‘I am sorry’?” he asked.

She told him. Before he could try it, she added, “That is how a man says it. The form for a woman is – ” Hasso winced, and hoped it didn’t show. Somebody’d told him Polish had masculine and feminine verb forms. To him, that proved it wasn’t a civilized language. Oh, well, he thought.

He repeated the masculine form, as well as he remembered it. This time, Drepteaza nodded right away. Hasso felt absurdly pleased with himself, as if he were a dog that had won a scrap of meat for a trick.

Then the guard said, “You better learn that one. You need it a lot, you – ” He said something in Bucovinan that the priestess didn’t translate. Hasso doubted it was an endearment.

She taught him a few more words. He asked, “May I have pen and parchment, please, to write them down?”

She raised a dark eyebrow. “The Lenelli taught you their letters?”

“Yes. But I have my own letters before. I probably use those. I am more used to them.”

“Your own letters,” Drepteaza murmured. “I had not thought of that. But you are supposed to know all sorts of curious things, aren’t you? Yes, you may have parchment and pen and ink. I don’t think you can use them to get away.”

“Neither do I,” Hasso said. “I wish I did.”

The guard who spoke Lenello chuckled. Drepteaza didn’t. She was a hard sell. But she did unbend enough to speak to the guards in Bucovinan. One of them touched a bent forefinger to his forehead. The salute wasn’t in the least military, but was respectful. The guard hurried away.

He came back a few minutes later with writing supplies. Drepteaza taught Hasso their names in her language. He wrote them down. Drepteaza looked at the way he did it. “That is not Lenello,” she said. “Is it your script?”

“Ja,” he said absently, and then, “Yes.”

“Is it easier to learn than Lenello?”

He had to think about that. “About the same, I suppose. Lenello has more characters, but that is good and bad. Each sound has its own characters with Lenello. With my writing, you need more than one letter for some sounds.” He showed her some examples: sch and ei and ch. She caught on fast.

“Better to stick with Lenello writing,” she said after some thought of her own. “Then we can still read what the blonds do.”

“That make sense,” Hasso agreed.

“Say the words you know. Write them, too,” Drepteaza told him. She had to remind him of some he’d forgotten. He was just glad she didn’t punish him for forgetting. She said, “Memorize what you know. I will come back. We will go on from there. Do we have a bargain?”

“Do I have a choice?” he asked.

As Rautat had, she said, “There is always a choice.”

“Do I have a choice besides dying right away?”

“If you don’t care to learn our tongue and show us some of what you know, Lord Zgomot will decide you’re more trouble than you’re worth. He’ll probably kill you to make sure you don’t go back to the Lenelli and their goddess.” Was that scorn or fear in Drepteaza’s voice, or maybe both at once? And did she know about him and Velona? He wouldn’t have thought so … till this moment. She resumed: “He may just break your legs so you can’t escape. Is that better or worse?”

“I don’t know. It’s pretty bad,” Hasso said.

“Yes. Learn what I teach you, then. I’ll see you later.” Drepteaza left the cell. So did her guards.

She didn’t say what she would do to him if he didn’t learn, though that warning about Zgomot’s wrath certainly gave him food for thought. But he wanted to have something to do in his cell besides calisthenics. He would have tried to learn even if she told him not to. He smiled crookedly to himself. He might have learned better had she told him not to.

She gave him a couple of days to digest what she’d taught. Or maybe, since she was a priestess, she had enough other things to do that she couldn’t bother with him for a couple of days. That crooked smile came back. What is Hasso, that thou art mindful of him?

She returned not long after breakfast. A growling belly wouldn’t distract him, anyhow. He bowed to her. “Good day,” he said in the best Bucovinan he could command.

Drepteaza and the little swarthy soldiers with her all started to laugh. She corrected his pronunciation, explaining in Lenello, “When you say it the way you did, it means ‘purple day.’“

“Oh.” Hasso walked to the slit window and looked out. He couldn’t see much, but what he could see wasn’t purple. “No, I guess not.”

A couple of the guards smiled, but Drepteaza was harder to amuse. “Say it the way it should be,” she said in Lenello. Then she added something in Bucovinan. She returned to Lenello: “That means the same thing in my tongue. Listen.” She repeated it. “You will hear it a lot, I think.”

Are you just a cool customer or a cold fish? Hasso wondered. She seemed interested in Hasso Pemsel the curiosity, Hasso Pemsel the possible font of knowledge. Hasso Pemsel the man? She might have been dealing with a talking mule.

If she had been dealing with a talking mule, before long it would have been talking in Bucovinan. She knew how to teach. “Do you teach Lenelli to speak before?” he asked. He carefully didn’t say other Lenelli. He wanted her to think of him as something different. Whether she would or not…

She nodded now. “Yes, I’ve done that,” she answered. “We try to learn what we can from you invaders. The more we learn, the better our chances. King Bottero is not the first to try to invade us. He won’t be the last.”

That struck Hasso as likely, too. “If I learn good, do you let me out of this cell?”

“Lord Zgomot will decide that. I won’t.” Drepteaza showed that the Bucovinans knew how to pass the buck.

“If you ask him, will he listen? If you tell him I am safe, will he believe?” Hasso trotted out future tenses in Lenello. Sooner or later, he’d have to do it in Bucovinan.

“Are you safe? Should anybody believe that?” Drepteaza asked, and then went back to the language lesson.

XV

Little by little, Hasso learned to speak Bucovinan. He’d started feeling at home in Lenello, which didn’t work too differently from German. Bucovinan was another story. Conjugating verbs with separate masculine and feminine forms was the least of the strangenesses. Bucovinan had long vowels and short vowels. Some words had the one, some the other. None had both – except a few borrowed from Lenello, which Drepteaza called bastard words. Bucovinan didn’t have real past tenses, only tenses that showed whether an action was completed or not. And Bucovinan had more trills and chirps than Lenello and German put together.

“How am I doing?” Hasso asked after a while. It probably came out more like How I doesing is? The only thing he was sure he had right was the evin at the start of the question: a little word that warned the listener it was a question. You could also put evin at the end of the sentence. Then it was still a question, but a sarcastic or rhetorical one.

“I’ve heard blonds speak worse.” Drepteaza was relentlessly honest about such things. From everything Hasso had seen, she was relentlessly honest all the time. Maybe it was because she was a priestess. Maybe it was just because she was who she was.

Hasso bowed. “Thank you.” That had a particle that went with it, too. If you put it at the start, it meant Thank you very much, and you meant what you were saying. If you put it at the end, it meant Thanks a lot, and you didn’t. Hasso put it at the end.

Drepteaza smiled. “See? Many Lenelli would never know to do that. But your pronunciation is terrible.”

“I am not a Lenello,” Hasso said, for what seemed like the ten millionth time.

“I have seen that,” Drepteaza said, or maybe it was something more like, I am seeing that. “You make different mistakes.” The verb form she used wasn’t one for completed actions: Hasso was still making those mistakes.