After the Downfall by Harry Turtledove

watches you. The towns, the people, I don’t know what, but something there seems to suck the life out of magic. It works, and then you get deeper in and it doesn’t work so well, and then it just... stops. Almost makes you think Grenye have their own magic. But they don’t - they can’t,” Velona said.
    “That’s so,” King Bottero said. “When we fight there, it’s us against them. Spells mostly fail - and the more we depend on them, the worse the time they pick to fail. One of us, mounted, in armor, is worth, four, five, six, eight of those stinking churls on foot. But they’re starting to use more horsemen, and Bucovin’s a big place, too.” He pointed to the map again. “They have big armies, and they don’t fight fair. They mostly won’t give us standup battles. They skulk and they raid and they burn our wagons and “ He broke off, an angry flush rising all the way up to his scalp. “What’s so cursed funny?”
    “Sorry, your Majesty.” Despite the apology, Hasso had to work to make himself quit laughing. It was either laugh or cry, which would have surprised the king even more. Bottero’s complaints sounded much too familiar. How many German generals had said those exact same things about the Russians? One Landser was always worth a couple of Ivans, sometimes more than that. Throw enough Ivans into the fight, though... Stalin put out a fire by smothering it in corpses. If you had enough corpses, it worked, too. Picking his words with care, Hasso said, “My people fight a war like that, too.”
    “Ah?” the king said. “With all your tricks and ploys, I bet you had better luck than we ever managed to find.”
    “Well,” Hasso said, “no.” He bit down hard on the inside of his lower lip. Tears bubbled very close to the surface. He turned back to Velona. “The goddess not help the, uh, the plain you?” He hoped she would follow what he meant.
    And she did, for she answered, “Even her power seems less there. Not gone, but less. To use it to go on
    - I couldn’t. They sniffed me out as being something that didn’t belong there. Maybe as a danger. I’m not so sure of that. When they were going to seize me, though, when I had to flee, then she gave me what I needed.” Her smile almost dazzled him. “Then she led me to you.”
    One of Bottero’s officers swore softly. Hasso knew why. Any man who wasn’t dead or a fairy would want that woman smiling at him that way and saying those things to him. And Hasso was convinced that even a fairy, seeing Velona, would reconsider. Seeing her smile that way, hearing her talk that way, to someone else had to burn like acid.
    “So,” the king said, “will you help us keep secrets? You want help with the wizardry, I’ll give you Aderno.”
    The proud wizard would no doubt pitch a fit at working for a foreigner who’d literally fallen out of the sky. Hasso liked that idea. It wasn’t what swayed him, though. The job needed doing, and he could likely do it better than any Lenello. “Yes, your Majesty,” he said.
    Aderno was as thrilled about working under Hasso as the Wehrmacht officer figured he would be. Thanks to his translation spell, the wizard didn’t have to pull any punches, either. “If you weren’t sleeping with the goddess, King Bottero never would have given you this post.”
    “I know,” Hasso said calmly. That made the wizard’s jaw drop. Still calmly, Hasso went on, “If I hadn’t rescued the goddess, I wouldn’t be sleeping with her. I didn’t see you anywhere around when I did it, either. So why don’t you just shut up?”
    “I ought to turn you into a - “ Aderno broke off most abruptly, as any man with a gram of sense would do when somebody aimed a Schmeisser at his belly button. Unlike people from Hasso’s own world, he didn’t know exactly what the weapon would do, but it had killed three Grenye, after all, so he was convinced it would do something dreadful. And he wasn’t wrong, because it would.
    “Don’t