After the Downfall

Rautat chose that exact moment to come back with the honeycomb, which didn’t hurt. Hasso set Drepteaza down for a moment and kept his promise to the unicorn. Then he picked her up again.

She had the sense not to kick and flail. She alighted on the unicorn’s back as smoothly as she could, and sat very still once she got there. The animal snorted and rolled its eyes, but it didn’t try to buck her off.

Hasso patted its flank. “Walk,” he told it, and damned if it didn’t take a couple of steps.

“It can’t do that,” Drepteaza said. “I’m not magic!”

“You are to me, babe,” Hasso said. She gave him a look that warned she would have a lot to say to him later, but this wasn’t the time or place. Pretending he didn’t notice, he went on, “Maybe it just needs someone who can do magic close by. Or maybe the Lenelli are full of shit. Who knows?”

“We could never ride them,” Drepteaza said. “If we caught them and tried to tame them, they starved themselves to death. But I’m really on it, aren’t I?”

“You really are. And everything is good, yes?”

“Yes!” she said, but then, “Maybe you’d better get me down. I don’t think I want to push my luck.”

“All right.” Hasso took her in his arms again. He wanted to give her a quick kiss before he set her on the ground, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to look like a big blond taking advantage of her in front of her people. As her feet touched the ground, she patted him on the hand, as if to tell him he’d done that right.

“I’m a Grenye,” she said. “I’m a Grenye, and I’ve ridden a unicorn. Who could have imagined that?”

“Will it carry other people?” someone asked.

“It won’t carry me, the stupid creature,” Rautat said. The glare the unicorn gave him told the world he was right, honeycomb or no honeycomb.

Wondering whether the unicorn disliked Grenye men in particular, Hasso asked a cook’s wife if she wanted to try it. “Sure, if the creature will let me,” she said.

She giggled when he lifted her off the ground. He didn’t giggle; she was at least fifteen kilos heavier than Drepteaza. But the unicorn made it very plain it didn’t want her on its back. “Sorry,” Hasso said, setting her down.

“Don’t worry about it, foreign sir,” she replied with more grace than a lot of noblewomen probably would have shown under the same circumstances. “I know I’m no priestess. The unicorn must know the same thing.”

Did it? If it did, how? The cook’s wife smelled of garlic. But so did Drepteaza. All Bucovinans did; they ate the stuff with everything except melons and strawberries. So what made the difference? The unicorn wasn’t talking.

Lord Zgomot came over to see why people were kicking up a fuss. “A unicorn?” he said. “Well, well. I have never been lucky enough to see one close up before.” He gave Hasso something that was more than a nod but less than a bow. “An advantage to having a wizard with us that I had not thought about.”

“It let me on its back, Lord!” Drepteaza exclaimed. “Me!”

“Really?” Zgomot did bow to her. “I am jealous.”

“Do you want to try, Lord?” Hasso asked. Zgomot wasn’t much heftier than the cook’s wife. Hasso thought he could get him onto the unicorn’s back. Whether the unicorn would put up with it…

“Me?” The Lord of Bucovin sounded surprised.

“If it doesn’t want you up there, it lets you know, but it doesn’t hurt you. It is a polite unicorn,” Hasso said.

That made several Bucovinans smile, so it probably wasn’t just the word he should have used. But what the hell? It got his meaning across. And the cook’s wife affirmed that she’d tried, failed, and still had all her giblets. Lord Zgomot plucked at his beard. “Well, why not?” he said. “Let us see what will happen.”

The unicorn let him come up alongside it. It let him touch it, which seemed to impress him as much as it had Drepteaza. “Can you lift me up there?” he asked Hasso.

“I think so, Lord,” the German answered. “You don’t eat a big lunch, I hope?”

Zgomot smiled a crooked smile. “No, I was moderate.” Wonderingly, he stroked the unicorn again. You had to touch a unicorn like that. If you were a man, it was like touching your first girl, only more so. “Whenever you are ready,” Zgomot said.

Hasso picked him up. The unicorn laid back its ears and snorted when the Lord of Bucovin’s behind touched its back, but it didn’t buck or run wild or do any of the other things that could have made Zgomot’s bodyguards use Hasso for a pincushion. “You are on a unicorn,” Hasso told him.

“I am on a unicorn.” Lord Zgomot sounded amazed. Well, who could blame him?

How the Bucovinans cheered! Drepteaza looked as proud of her sovereign as could be. And Hasso said, “King Bottero never does this.”

“No? He is missing something, then,” Zgomot said. “Will it walk for me?” He urged the unicorn forward as if it were a horse. But it wouldn’t go, not even the couple of steps it had for Drepteaza. Shrugging, Zgomot slid off. “I am a Grenye, and I have been on a unicorn,” he declared, as Drepteaza had. By the way he said it; he might have been the first man to set foot on the moon.

His subjects cheered louder than ever. Hasso looked at the unicorn. It looked back at him. If it didn’t wink, he was losing his mind. Or maybe he was losing his mind if he thought it did wink. No one else seemed to notice. Was he going to start collecting omens and portents?

Why not? Everybody else in this world did. And, as far as he could see, a winking unicorn couldn’t be anything but a good one.

A Bucovinan named Shugmeshte was almost out of his mind with glee. He was one of the gunpowdermen who’d gone forward to slow down Bottero’s advancing army. “I fooled ‘em!” he told Hasso and Zgomot. “Bugger me blind if I didn’t fool ‘em!”

“What did you do?” Hasso asked.

Shugmeshte swigged from a mug of beer. “So I dig holes in the road and run fuses to them, right? This is before the big blond bastards get there, you understand. So then I plant some real jugs in the field alongside, but real careful-like, so you can’t spot ‘em easy.”

Hasso gri

“So the blond pricks come by,” Shugmeshte said. “So they see there’s trouble in the road. So they get smart – or they think they do. So they ride into the field so whatever happens in the road doesn’t hurt ‘em. So I light the fuses, and bam! They go flying! I blew up a unicorn, I did.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear that,” Hasso said – he was still riding the wild one himself. But he clapped Shugmeshte on the back. “You do good – you did good. And this says something important.”

“What?” Zgomot asked.

“It says the amulets really do keep Lenello wizards from spotting gunpowder. This is good news.” Hasso wondered whether Shugmeshte had blown Aderno to hell and gone. That would be very good news. He could hope, anyhow.

“Ah.” The Lord of Bucovin nodded. “I see. Yes, what you say makes good sense. You seem to have a way of doing that.”

“Thank you, Lord,” Hasso said. Coming from a resolutely sensible fellow like Zgomot, that praise meant something.

Zgomot turned back to Shugmeshte. “Are you ready to do this to the Lenelli again?”

“Lavtrig, yes!” the gunpowderman exclaimed.”We can hurt them. We can scare them. We’ve never been able to scare them before. I like it.”

“Go, then,” Zgomot said. Shugmeshte saluted: clenched fist over his heart, the same gesture the Lenelli used. How long ago had the Bucovinans adopted it? Did anyone here even remember? Hasso wouldn’t have bet on it. Zgomot nodded to Hasso. “We have kept security as well as we could. None of the gunpowdermen knows how to make the stuff. Not many folk besides us and the men who get them – oh, and Sca