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“What do we do now, then?” I asked. We still had to get out of the swamp alive—no easy feat. We were completely lost. And for that matter, I needed to bring the emperor more than just Ilyana in return for my sister’s life. “How do we find the Freemartin?”

“I can help with that. I know the signs to watch for. And…Oh. Cult-shoving whiz-bulls. We might have a problem.”

I shut my eyes. If there was a worse problem than the ones we currently faced, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “What is it?”

When I opened my eyes, she was looking at me with a serious expression that remained unchanged as her face shifted from round to oval to heart-shaped to square. My hand was still clasped in hers. “How attached are you,” she asked, “to your current genitalia?”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Sex in the Mud

“Holy shrift.” Ilyana collapsed onto the bed of pearlwort I’d raised, her chest heaving with ragged breaths.

I could only nod in agreement. It took a few more moments before I recovered enough to speak. Both of us were covered in a light coating of sweat, and a somewhat thicker layer of mud.

In the handful of days we’d spent searching for the Wild Freemartin, we’d gone further than kissing.

Considerably further.

The first time we left the horses behind to scout ahead, we were intending to do exactly that. After a while, however, we got distracted. The next day, we decided to “scout ahead” a second time. And then a third on the day that followed.

It was undoubtedly a dangerous practice in the Swamp of Monsters, but we weren’t letting that stop us. Besides, Ilyana’s presence lessened the risk considerably. She knew the swamp well—what to eat, how best to hide from danger, and the weaknesses of every monster. Where it was safe to leave the horses, and where it was safe to spend some time alone together.

Well, safe-ish. Once, when we had just gotten undressed, a wapaloosie—sort of a cross between a woodpecker and an inchworm, with a spiked tail—bit me right on the ass. My left butt cheek still hurt whenever I sat down.

I ran a finger along Ilyana’s torso, tracing her curves as they rounded and flattened, shrank and swelled. I could watch her all day. Lying next to her was a precious moment of calm at a time when my emotions were careening around in a way that left me dizzy.

She stretched—a fascinating sight—and said, “There was a pond a little way back. I think I’d like to have a wash. I’ve got mud all the way up my ash-crick.”

“Sounds good to me.” I was almost as sick of the mud as I was of the monsters. I gathered our clothes and called up a dense mat of clover to cushion our feet as we walked; my experiments with my new capabilities had continued. Using the gift still required concentration, and without the ring my range was short, but I could bring up anything from a single perfect tulip to a great cluster of daisies with no risk that they would run wild.

When we reached the pond, Ilyana stepped ahead of me to peer in, giving me a pleasant view of a few of her backsides in quick succession. She picked up a stick and held it over the water. “If there are any venomous snakelocks in there,” she told me, “they’ll jump up and sting it, and we’ll know we have to take a bath somewhere else.”

“Ah.” I had no idea what venomous snakelocks were, but they sounded like something best avoided.

We waited for a few tense seconds, but nothing happened; she tossed the stick aside and plunged into the water. I eased myself in at a slower pace. A cloud of silt washed off me as I went.

Ilyana popped up and shook out her hair, splashing me with droplets that stopped abruptly when it changed from a messy chestnut shag to close-cut auburn curls. She made a little spout of pond water fountain from her mouth, then lay back and let herself drift. I watched her float for a while.

She was almost certainly going to be forced to marry the Red Emperor.

Unless, that is, we failed to find a magical cow, but that would lead to her dickhead fiancé murdering my sister. A sister who was probably languishing in chains, alone and at the mercy of her captors, while I was having sex until I was sore in a swamp. In a deadly, monster-infested swamp that my other sisters were no doubt fighting their way through even then. And I was lost, afraid for my life, and would be covered in mud again shortly after we were done bathing—no matter how many flowers I grew for ground cover, the endless, inevitable mud got everywhere. Although even with that in mind, sex with Ilyana was incredible. I mean, wow. Not that I had anything to judge it against. It was my first time, because ever since the age of twelve I’d had to share a room with my sister or die. But after a decade of relying on her for survival, I didn’t need her anymore. Her survival depended on me instead.

So you can perhaps see why it had been a confusing few days for me.

The longer it took us to stumble across the Freemartin, the more I wondered how Yudit was faring under the hostile care of Dr. Nikidik Pipt. The deadline to save her life was fast approaching. Was she growing more frightened as the days passed by without any sign of me?

Once we return to the horses, I promised myself, I’ll get back to the search for the Wild Freemartin for the rest of the day. No more sneaking off. Ilyana had assured me that she would recognize the Freemartin’s trail when we came across it. If we came across it.

Ilyana closed her eyes as she floated. Each new form and figure shared the same look of deep relaxation. She sank deeper or rose higher as her weight and density fluctuated.

“Do you ever lose track of who you are?” I asked. “With everyone seeing you differently?”

“Sort of,” she said as she drifted in the water. “I think the real problem isn’t that people see different things when they look at me. It’s that they see the same thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“They see their fantasy. And a fantasy isn’t a person. They don’t care about anything past that.”