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And who better to serve as his escort back into society but this Dorothy? She possessed a writ of safe passage from Lady Glinda, who had met the foreign girl when investigating the sudden death of Nessarose, the most recent Eminent Thropp and governor of Munchkinland. It took Brrr several weeks to pry the whole story out of Dorothy, about the tornado, the plummeting house, the glittering shoes. By then he deduced that Glinda was moving the girl out of harm’s way, because Munchkinland was up for grabs now that its governor was dead. Would Nessarose’s sister, Elphaba, come back to Colwen Grounds and rule the seceded nation?
Every step away from Munchkinland would be a step away from the Wicked Witch of the West, Brrr figured. Accurately or not, his name had been linked to her before; he wanted no reunion, thank you very much.
And once in the Emerald City—well, there was the famously reclusive Wizard of Oz to meet! The WOO! If Lady Glinda’s offices were as well connected as she had attested to Dorothy.
“Oh, do join us. Lady Glinda is so good,” said Dorothy. “I’m sure the Wizard will honor her request and see us. After I’ve come all this way—and through that dreadful storm, no less. A thousand miles from any outhouse. I won’t tell you what I had to do while aloft; it was revolting.”
Laboriously Brrr figured the dates backward and concluded that the great twister carrying Dorothy to Oz was the same storm that had given Uyodor H’aekeem nightmares and begun the sequence of events leading to Brrr’s expulsion from the Ghullim. He spent a few moments over a dark fantasy of revenge against Dorothy. But she hadn’t orchestrated that storm into being; she was a victim of fate as much as he was. So he let it go.
“I’ll come with you,” he told Dorothy and the others.
At this point—the moment when Brrr stepped into the limelight of history—he was perhaps twenty, though of course as a Lion that meant he was middle-aged. Twenty, and he’d conducted his sordid affairs and peccadilloes only
in Gillikin and Munchkinland. But he’d spent his life within earshot of Oz’s great capital city, which pulsed with so much power it was almost a nation unto itself—a state on its own. Perhaps what was scandalous elsewhere, in hidebound provincial centers like Shiz, would seem penny-candy stuff in a capital city. Perhaps the EC was large enough, urbane enough, to consider Brrr’s trials and shames not only incidental but unremarkable.
He had little to lose now. If Dorothy’s stamp of approval from Lady Glinda proved genuine, he might be traveling with diplomatic immunity. After all, Dorothy had shown him a writ on a scroll, though he couldn’t read it well enough to parse its curlicued grandiosity.
The Kiss of Lady Glinda, it was called: a passport requiring its bearer safe passage to the Emerald City under penalty of prosecution to the fullest extent of the law, et cetera, et cetera.
It was signed with a flourish and a little scribble of a heart with a smile inside it, which looked to Brrr like a picture of an extracted tooth delighted to be liberated from some foul mouth.
A good deal of what happened next—the Matter of Dorothy—was a story he didn’t choose to dwell upon. How déclassé, to arrive with a crippled human decked out with tin prophylactics and with a Scarecrow, sweet enough but clueless as to his own origins—though who wasn’t? Brrr liked Dorothy, though. One evening he found himself imagining her as Jemmsy in a dress and pigtails, which seemed too weird, if fun, so he steered his attentions elsewhere.
The Emerald City lifted itself onto the horizon, more pomp and glory than Brrr had imagined possible. Emerald overdrive. Even the loo paper was green, which Brrr considered a sort of design error. But The Kiss of Glinda worked its magic, as it were. The magnificent and dreadful Wizard of Oz agreed to meet them, though in separate interviews. Brrr’s was last, and he was expecting a great Head, like the one that had shown itself to Dorothy, but perhaps the wine had been more toxic than he’d realized, for all he could see was light shining from the throne.
Steeling himself, Brrr remembered the Ozmists, and thought: Barter! He would negotiate for some government sinecure in exchange for having escorted this foreign dignitary to the palace. “I have a request of you,” he began, “O great-and-powerful-and-all-knowing Oz.”
“Courage,” said the Wizard.
“No, not courage,” said the Lion. “I mean, well, courage would be nice. But I was thinking of something more in the line of a job.”
“I will give you what you most need,” said the Wizard, “if you bring down the Wicked Witch of the West.”
“Bring her down? I had hoped she wouldn’t even come up,” murmured Brrr. The Wizard was better at bartering than he was.
Later, Brrr said to his new companions, “I’m all for engaging in a little cut-and-run action here. Why should we do the Wizard’s dirty work? He has his own military presence. The EC is crawling with soldiers.”
Some of those middle-aged military personnel might once have known Jemmsy. But Brrr let that thought pass.
“Yes,” said Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodman. “And any one of those soldiers could take you into custody for refusing the request of the Wizard.”
“He didn’t order us out to the West,” said Brrr. “We’re volunteering. Aren’t we? Aren’t we?”
They looked at him.
“We’re not drafted against our will, surely.”
“De facto, we are,” said the Scarecrow. “It’s only our having a commission from the Throne of Oz that keeps those soldiers from picking you up, anyway. The Animal Adverse laws haven’t been lifted, Pussycat. You don’t see many Animals in the streets of this fair city, do you?”
“Besides,” said Dorothy, “I want to go home. I’m sick of this place. Not of you, dear friends, never of you. But all this rigamarole, all this kowtowing. It’s exhausting. Let’s just consider this little military action something we have to go through. In any event, I’m going, on my own if I have to.”
“You’d kill a witch, just like that, at someone’s suggestion?” asked the Tin Woodman. “How unfeeling. You’re a monster.”
“I didn’t say I was going to kill her,” said Dorothy. “Perhaps we can make a private arrangement with her. Broker a peace deal, a compromise of some sort. Who knows. In any event, my house did sort of smush her sister, and I haven’t had a chance to deal with the trauma of that, what with all the festivities and so on. I mean, I need some closure here.”
The Wizard of Oz, it seemed, had them all by the short hairs. So against his better judgment, Brrr signed on to the mission. Maybe Dorothy’s preternatural innocence would call good luck upon them, and he could be a partial beneficiary. And the Wizard had promised Brrr a suitable reward should the mission succeed.
Now, was it forward to victory? Or was it out of the frying pan into the fire? The stakes were never higher. Whatever happened, it would be impossible to retire anonymously after all this. Perhaps Brrr should have roared that tiny little Toto into an early grave and gotten out while he could.
