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“I love you, too.” She wrapped her arms around me, and I hugged her back.

As we separated, Ilyana and Dr. Pipt—or Nikidik, if my sister insisted—returned and draped themselves across whatever furniture was handy.

“Well, that’s taken care of,” Nikidik said. “Word should travel quickly to the troops.”

“Took long enough to convince the guards. Bunch of rent-lacking mouseholes.” Ilyana took my hand. “Do you want to go find out what happened to the rest of your family?”

I very much did. “As soon as there isn’t an army in the way, yes.”

“Before any of us hares off, shouldn’t we figure out an explanation for what happened?” Nikidik pointed at the corpse of the Red Emperor.

The four of us had been alone in a room with Emperor Osvald Augustus Maximus, first of his name. Now he was dead. Surely there would be questions. And we might not have any good answers. Since we had, in fact, killed him.

“Well,” Ilyana said, “if you can stand hanging around here until morning comes, I’ve got one idea.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Homeward Bound

So it came to pass that the Red Emperor was widely believed to have died of sexual exhaustion following a night of passion with Ilyana the Golden. She was found the next morning weeping very convincingly over his naked corpse. No other likely cause was found, since a certain rare frog was at that moment being discreetly taken to the Swamp of Monsters, where it would, I thought, fit right in.

It wasn’t a perfect plan, but in the chaos that followed the Battle of Moersbad Gap, as it came to be known, no one was eager to launch an investigation. It wasn’t even clear who would’ve been in charge of such an investigation. During the weeks and months when it might have been conducted, the Red Empire fell apart with astonishing rapidity.

The empire’s armed forces had already been feeling rebellious on the march over, since one in every twenty of them got turned into a radish by their own side. Then, instead of charging to the rescue of the famous beauty Ilyana the Golden, they had a weeklong wait beside a rain of fire which ended with a single disastrous fight.

Given enough time, the Red Empire troops would certainly have defeated the vastly outnumbered Ecossics and Tailliziani. But in the few hours they had before the retreat was sounded, the Red Empire was only there long enough to get their asses kicked by an entrenched, well-positioned force taking advantage of the terrain.

After that, the soldiers came back to the camp and learned that Ilyana had been rescued before the battle began, and the emperor had died leaving no clear heir. In a very short time, the army dissolved. No orders could keep the men, including all the emperor’s royal hostages, from returning to their home provinces. Provinces which promptly declared their independence as sovereign nations once they realized nobody was going to stop them.

None of that, of course, was known to me on the morning after we killed the Red Emperor. I was much more concerned about the fate of my sisters than anything else, so Ilyana and I went to the stables to saddle up Sunbeam and Stinky as soon as we had a chance. We took care to avoid the shrieking herds of radishes running aimlessly about. I didn’t want to step on any of them.

Nikidik came with us to make sure we had no trouble leaving, but Yudit was busy taking the frog to the edge of the swamp. She planned to catch up with us when she was done.

“Is it even possible to die of sexual exhaustion?” Sunbeam asked.

Ilyana shrugged. “The man was seventy. We’ll say he had an underlying heart condition or something. It never came up before because he couldn’t die.”

“I’m old as hell, but in breeding season, with a nice talking mare, I can go five times a day, no problem. And I’ve got mud fever, windgalls, and sweet itch.”

“Heart disease has got to be more dangerous than…what is sweet itch, anyway?”

Nikidik, in the meantime, had been wandering around the stables as if making an inspection, carefully looking over the horses, the harnesses, even the manure piles—everything but us. My suspicion that he had something on his mind was confirmed when he cleared his throat.

“I believe,” he said to Ilyana, “that I owe you an apology.”

“Probably,” she replied. “What for, in particular?”

“I discovered the secret of your ring a few months ago. It feels like much longer.”

He’d also charred my hair with a lightning bolt back in Tailliz, but I decided not to remind him of it. Seeing as how doing so might also remind him that I’d been swinging a sword at his head in turn.

Maybe he really had missed on purpose. I could live without an apology of my own.

“The ring was mentioned in an obscure treatise on nonreversible moldboard ploughing techniques,” he went on. “One of your distant ancestors helped a fairy queen improve her crop rotation system during a time of famine and was given the magic ring as a reward. When I read that, I remembered that the emperor had standing instructions to the university to alert him of any possible life-extension methods. His fairy gifts were never a secret, so I thought I’d found a neat little theoretical workaround. I told him about it straightaway. I was hoping he’d give me more funding.”

Nikidik let out a mournful sigh. Stinky licked his face consolingly, and he paused to wipe off the copious deposit of horse saliva.

“Instead, Osvald appointed me grand vizier and roped me into his plots,” he said. “He planned a new campaign of invasion and ordered me to turn all my research to military applications. Then he told me to destabilize the northern kingdoms in a way that couldn’t be traced back to him. With murders. Everything happened so fast. I didn’t know what to do. I’m sorry.”