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Brrr shook his head. “I’m not getting the point of this, Dorothy. I think you’ve been away from your own kind too long.”
“That is exactly my point!” she exclaimed. “You see, I lost my parents, too. Auntie Em and Uncle Henry aren’t even relatives. They wrote away to an orphanage in Independence, Missouri, requesting someone because Auntie Em needed some help around the house, what with her sciatica. I’m who they got.” She chewed her pigtail. “Perhaps they regret it now, or maybe not. Hard to say.”
“Dorothy,” said Brrr, “I was about to take a nap.”
“Sorry. The point is: You and I are more alike than you think. And ornery as Auntie Em could be, and pigheaded as Uncle Henry is, they are my own family now, and I miss them and love them. I would cross the road for them, like my pet hen did for me. You must feel no different about your own family.”
“With all due respect, I have no family, Dorothy.”
She put her arms around him, which was an odd comfort.
“Take care of Liir,” she whispered. “Okay? He has no family either. And he’s a little…well, dim.”
“I don’t have any obligations to that boy.” Brrr was all too aware how he had failed Jemmsy and Cubbins. Better that Liir should get on in his life without being shackled with a big burly Lion for a sidekick.
“For me?” she said. “If the Witch was his mother, my word: it’s my fault he’s an orphan now, too. Like me and you both. I can’t bring him home with me, and I daren’t leave him alone. He needs someone, Brrr, and so do you.”
He pulled away from her, uncomfortable with this consultation. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, gravely. She was waiting for a promise. There was something eerie about her gentle manner and her steely patience. Winds would wear a cliff down to a stony strand before she would change her mind about the goodness of the world.
He had to love her for it. He kissed her furrily. He knew she was taking this as a promise to regard Liir as his own family, but he was just getting rid of her. He wasn’t in a position to take care of a minor, not when he was so minor himself.
“Good-bye, Dorothy,” he said. “I hope they learn to love you at home as much as we love you here.”
“Well,” said Dorothy, standing up, “I’ll tell them they just better.”
• 5 •
W ITHIN A few weeks of Dorothy’s departure, Glinda formally took the Throne. Brrr was able to get an audience with her, and, after a little fawning and purring, he wheedled a title. Sir Brrr, Lord Low Plenipotentiary to the market environs of Traum. It was, as he thought and others joked, a cruel blow: about as undistinguished a peerage as it was possible to acquire. One could pick up higher honors going through the garbage. Lord Low Plenipotentiary was a title without an estate, a job without a salary, an honorific without a voting voice in the Council of Agreement, which Lady Glinda had promised to reconvene after a lengthy hiatus.
And Traum? Traum, of all places? Lady Glinda was depositing him at the site of his public humiliation. Had she meant to rub his nose in it? Or in her giddy innocence did she hope to give him a chance to return as a conquering hero? He didn’t know and he didn’t bother to visit his district and find out. Let them get on without him.
He drank too much during the day, and he lost track of that agitated kid, Liir. When the Lion learned that the Scarecrow had been nominated to succeed Lady Glinda to the Throne—the Scarecrow elevated to be the Head of Oz, while the Lion groveled, a Lord Low Plenipotentiary!—well, he lost more acreage of guts to stomach acids.
Anhedonia, a doctor said. Fear of pleasure.
He almost bit the doctor, for the pleasure of it.
He might have survived the indignity if he’d had a circle of companions. Anything like a confessor, a crony.
But Dorothy was gone, disappeared perhaps the way Ozma Tippetarius had disappeared, too. The Scarecrow was busy with regal affairs and rarely met his public. (Some said he wasn’t even the same Scarecrow, but an imposter. Brrr never got close enough again to venture an opinion on the matter.) And Nick Chopper was filled with the romance of labor rebellion, getting in bed with dubious sorts to hatch out schemes to organize the tiktok workers, the mechanized servants of Oz. Change was in the air, everyone said—change of every sort except spare change: not that kind. Times weren’t better, they were just—different. Times were hard in a new way. You could be grateful for the novelty of it, but only up until teatime, when dried rye brisks and plowfoot jelly made their baleful appearance on the table. Unless you were Palace, of course.
He might have survived it if he had never learned to read. But what else was there to do but hang out in cafés frequented by the demimonde, sip stale tea or watered-down plonk in the Burntpork district, and scrutinize the cast-off newsfolds?
THE WORTHY SCARECROW HOLDS A PALACE RECEPTION
Dateline: Emerald City
Peers of the realm, from the level of Minor Establisher and up, gathered in the glittering Ozma Arcade last night in one of the season’s most exclusive soirées—
See and Be Seen! Tizzy Splendthrift, society spy, reports on a very naughty party held last night in an undisclosed private residence in the tony district of Goldhaven, to which Oz’s glittera-muses, the great and the good from as far up the social pyramid as can be mounted, got up to no good—and we do mean up…
Whipping the pages so hard they tore. The financial columns and the editorial pages arguing about whether Nick Chopper was well connected enough to bring the Throne’s attention to a proposed scheme of merit-credits for the tiktok workforce…. Whether it would be any good for Oz…. The social obligations, if any, of rewarding clockwork for ticking on time…. The suffering of laborers and their families if a general strike was called…. NICK CHOPPER: BLEEDING HEART OR BLOODY HEARTLESS?
Brrr di
dn’t care. It was the parties he wasn’t invited to, the salons, the committee meetings dedicated to raising funds to repaper the libraries in imperial Ozma style, now that it was no longer forbidden to speak her name…. The drunken lunches of the newsmongers who laughed at the excesses of the high and mighty! He’d have been glad enough to rag on his former friends, had he been invited to do so.
Then some journalist, writing under a nom d’espionnage, published a column questioning the correctness of the Palace’s having awarded even so much as a Low Plenipotentiaryship to a Lion who had been, after all, a collaborationist. He’d worked at the Wizard’s bidding, hadn’t he—when more respectable Animals were imprisoned, or had fled into the outback?
