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“You certainly did last night,” the horse snickered.

I glared at him. He smirked. It somehow doesn’t seem right that horses are able to smirk, but they absolutely can.

“Would you please stop bringing that up?”

“Whatever do you mean?” he asked. “I am but a horse. A gentle, innocent creature. To me, sex between two humans is merely a natural act of no more importance than eating or sleeping. Certainly nothing that should cause embarrassment.”

“Good. Then—”

“Even if it makes one of the humans in question yowl like a tone-deaf banshee.”

Now that Ilyana and I were restricting our amorous activities to the evenings, we hadn’t been wandering off so far. We wanted to be within earshot in case there was any trouble with monsters in the night. Apparently Sunbeam had managed to overhear us. And, as predicted, found it hilarious.

I gave up on arguing with him and yelled at the bog wight again. “Hey! You! I have delicious eyeballs full of…” Why did bog wights like to eat eyes? I’d never thought to ask anyone. “Yummy, yummy vitreous and aqueous humors!” Nothing. Maybe its ears had rotted off and left it deaf. “Yoo hoo!” I cried, jumping up and down and waving my arms. “Fresh, tasty eyeballs over here!”

That got its attention at last. So it wasn’t both deaf and blind, at least. It shambled toward me, picking up its pace, green liquid dribbling out of its mouth in anticipation. When it reached the right spot, I sent a few tendrils of blue star creeper stretching across its path.

It tripped over them with a startled squawk, and Ilyana popped out of her hiding place and chopped its head off. The bog wight’s body collapsed on the ground, watery ooze leaking from its neck.

“There you go!” she said cheerfully as she handed back my sword. She gave me an enthusiastic kiss over the bog wight’s headless corpse. “Decapitation’s the only way to deal with these tut-puckers. You can stab them in the chest a hundred times and they’ll just keep coming.”

“Yeah. I found that out the first time I ran into one.” The Spear That Probably Won’t Break hadn’t been a very good head-chopping tool. Yudit and I eventually left the furious bog wight tied to a tree.

“It’s simple once you know,” she said. “Not like those spice-jammed rabbits. But hey, I found something more important. Come over here.”

Sunbeam and I followed her to her hiding spot. She pointed at the ground. Never have I been so relieved and excited to see a pile of cow manure. A huge pile of cow manure. It was almost as big as a cow itself. Just how large was the Wild Freemartin?

“That smells fresh,” Sunbeam said.

“Yup.” Ilyana unhitched Stinky’s reins from a nearby elm. “Took us long enough to find it, right? But it shouldn’t be difficult to spot the trail from here.” Her expression became uncertain as she turned to me. “You’re definitely fine with this?”

I nodded, although “fine” wasn’t exactly the right word. I was willing to see it through, though.

We followed the traces of the Freemartin’s passage, tracking the animal from one enormous pile of manure to the next. We walked side by side with the horses over the dangerous ground, as Yudit and I had done before.

“What about you?” I asked Ilyana. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

Her mouth tightened. “Yeah. I mean, I’m not excited about going to see the emperor afterward. But we haven’t got any good alternatives.”

“I notice,” Sunbeam said, “that neither of you have asked if I have any problems with the plan. Despite the fact that when we find the Freemartin, I’m going to be the one taking on all the risk.”

“That was your idea!” I protested.

“Sure, just forget about the horse,” he went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I am a mere beast of burden, scorned and ignored while I suffer the agonies of gout, and dropsy, and scrofula, and—”

He was cut off by a noise like two mountains slamming together. The elm trees shook, their leaves quivering.

“What the hell was that?” I had to shout to be heard.

“I don’t know!” Ilyana said. “I—”

We emerged from the shelter of the trees into a wide, grassy meadow. In the middle of it, the genius slowly backed away from the Wild Freemartin, his saber held at the ready.

“Flaming hole and dalmatian,” Ilyana said, awestruck.

Sunbeam stared wide-eyed at the beast we’d been searching for. “That’s…a lot of Wild Freemartin.”

We’d known the Freemartin would be big, but nothing could have prepared us for the experience of seeing the animal in person. Something few people had ever done, according to Ilyana; the magical cow was a creature of myth and legend in Moersbad, rarely glimpsed by anyone who survived the experience. The reason for that was now obvious. She was a very large cow indeed.