AUTHOR’S NOTE

For those of you who care about such things, this novel is an alternate history set in a Europe whose geographic features are similar or even identical to our own, with the major (but not sole) divergence from our timeline having occurred in the year 363 ad, when Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, Constantine I’s cousin, was not killed in battle against the Persians (as he was in our world), but lived on for another forty years.

For the geographic and personal names herein, I used mostly Slavic, Hungarian, German, and Greek models; there are no silent letters in such constructs. Forward accents are intended to provide guides to stress in Slavic words, such emphasis often appearing in locations unfamiliar to west­erners; in Hungarian names, however, the accents merely indicate differences in vowel sounds. I’ve employed circum­flexes in Greek words to distinguish between the letters ep­silon and êta, and omicron and ômega. Umlauts can denote gutteral vowel sounds—or dress up otherwise pedestrian names. The letter “ß” stands for “ss.”

In the end, of course, I have my own ideas about pronunciation, and each reader will undoubtedly have hers or his. Mangle them as ye will, folks, and no one will be the wiser, unless you actually hear me read a passage someday, and then you can tell me, with as haughty an air as possi­ble, that I’ve got it all wrong! I do try to have fun when creating these things; some of the names here have been invented from the flimsiest of constructs, bearing no discernible relationship to anything that anyone but I will ever be able to determine. Oh, well!