The Adventure of the Demonic Ox (Penric and Desdemona, #14) by Lois McMaster Bujold Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy
Series: Penric and Desdemona #14
Pages: 139
Published by Spectrum Literary Agency on July 10, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble
Goodreads
When sorcerer Learned Penric hears of the suspected demonic possession of an ox at his brother-in-law’s bridgebuilding worksite, he thinks it an excellent opportunity to tutor his adopted daughter and student sorceress Otta in one of their Temple duties: identifying and restraining such wild chaos elementals before harm comes to their hosts or surroundings.
What begins as an instructive family outing turns anything but routine when a mountain search becomes a much more frightening adventure for Penric and his charges. What is undergone there by both mentor and students will yield lessons both unexpected and far-reaching.
My Review:
To begin at the beginning, the idea that the ox might – or might not – be demonic doesn’t mean the same thing that it would in our world. In the World of the Five Gods, it means that the poor, confused ox might be possessed by a demonic spirit that is literally on its way up in the world, possessing larger and larger – and in the case of an ox, MUCH, MUCH larger – animals with more brainpower on its way to becoming a full-fledged demon in the service of the Fifth God, the Lord Bastard, the “master of all disasters out of season.”
If the ox really has been possessed, the whole situation is already a disaster for the poor owner of the beast – as he’ll be out one ox no matter what happens. He’ll get paid, but the ox WAS well behaved and well trained before the incursion of the demon, and all that work will have to be done all over again.
But at that beginning, no one is certain whether or not the poor ox in question truly is demonic. Sorcerer-divine Learned Penric’s son Wyn, currently working off his ninth summer working for his bridge builder uncle has come home to bring his father back to the worksite, because Penric and his own demon, Desdemona, will know in an instant whether the ox has a demon or an disease – and be able to treat whichever is the case.
At first, this ‘adventure’ doesn’t seem like much of one. The ox is fairly placid, as oxes go, in spite of the demon. It turns out that the ox is definitely hosting a demon, but that’s actually easier to deal with than a communicable disease. After all, the demon can only infest one creature at a time while diseases aren’t nearly so…limited.
Penric has been treating the whole thing as a bit of a family outing. The bridge builder is his brother-in-law, he gets to see his young son start on the road to adulthood, and the whole enterprise is an excellent bit of training for his adopted daughter and apprentice, Otta, who already has a demon of her own while his other daughter, Rina, gets a chance to see a bit more of the world as well as serve as Otta’s companion and vice versa.
Of course, it’s when Penric and everyone else THINK that the situation is under control that they relax their guard. Which is just when the Lord Bastard sows his own special brand of chaos and everyone’s lives and hopes and dreams get thrown out of whack.
And all the children have to take a few more steps on the road to adulthood than their parents and guardians are ready for – as it’s up to the kids to save Penric from a catastrophe of his god’s own making.
Escape Rating A-: This is the 14th entry in the Penric and Desdemona series which started up ten years ago as an extremely welcome offshoot of the author’s World of the Five Gods series. What has consistently made this novella series so much fun is that they are not, individually, big stories, but they tell a delightful, often cozy, frequently intimate, story that combines found families, high fantasy, and a profound calling to service by following the life of a character who experiences a huge amount of his world and sees it all with the eye of a compassionate, educated scholar who never stays put in an ivory tower and never gets full of himself.
His demon Desdemona makes sure that Penric never gets full of himself. She has over THREE CENTURIES of wrangling Learned Divines like Penric and she’s not done yet. Nor is she willing to let this one go now that she’s gotten him trained up the way she wants him.
I like Penric a lot. I enjoy following his adventures – especially when they don’t start out as adventures. Often, like this one, they are about family in some way. In this particular case, the ox is the literal deus ex machina – or perhaps that should be deus ex bovis – to tell a story about children setting out on their paths to adulthood and their parents caught between the desire to keep them children a little longer even as those same children get ready to fly free.
And often in directions their parents hadn’t planned or even thought of.
From one perspective, this story is about a whole lot of mini-conspiracies, as Penric’s three children are each trying to figure out how to maneuver their parents into letting them set out on the paths that call to them. From another, it’s about those three children growing up right before their father’s eyes once Penric is gored by that poor, suffering, Chekhov’s Gun of a an ox, and they are forced to band together, far from reach of aid or assistance, to keep their father alive while they wait for help to finally reach them.
From that perspective this is a story about a really bloody path to empty nest syndrome, as Penric’s demon Desdemona does her very literal damndest to keep her friend and companion knitted together long enough to get rescued.
So this one is a story that starts out quietly domestic, takes a hard left turn into a bit of, well, demon-estic, and then comes round right with Penric’s life and world changing – but in exactly the way it’s supposed to be.
In the end, it’s a cozy fantasy and a comfort read set in a fascinating world following along with a cast of truly charming characters. I’ll be delighted to see how the events of this story shake out in the next one, whenever it magically appears!
