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“It belongs to the government,” said Avaric. “I hope I haven’t misplaced my trust in you, Brrr.”
“Not at all. I was merely making conversation. Wondering if perhaps Liir had found it after all, somehow.”
“I don’t think he has,” said Avaric. “Because the betting parlors have it nine to one that when or if the Grimmerie falls into Liir’s hands, he would find a way to use it against the Emperor.”
“Is our national security policy governed by the odds in betting parlors?”
“You’re funny,” said the Margreave in a voice that betrayed little evidence of amusement. “Liir led a sort of protest of sorts against the Emperor seven or eight years ago. He commandeered a huge armada of Birds and they flew over the Emerald City. He had the Witch’s broom and her cape. If he gets his hands on her book, too, there’s no telling which corner the trouble will start in. The fact that things have been so quiet this past decade suggests he is looking for it as hard as we are.”
“Maybe he isn’t,” said Brrr. “Maybe he’s melted away like his so-called mother. He’s done his conscientious objection—”
Avaric started.
“I mean his rabble-rousing,” continued Brrr. “And if the rabble refuses to rouse itself further, why bother? Maybe he’s retired to the country to take up croquet.”
“He’s certainly gone to ground,” agreed the Margreave. “But it isn’t Liir we want, specifically. It’s the Grimmerie. Keep your eyes on the matter at hand. My advice is to start with Madame Morrible. She was, apparently, engaged by the Wizard to keep Elphaba under some sort of surveillance. She died two decades ago, but her effects are archived in the college of Shiz University, where she was headmistress. Crage Hall, it’s called. Start there.”
When they were about to take their leave of each other, Brrr asked, “How will you have me report?”
“I trust you,” said Avaric. He pulled his cloak about his shoulders. Despite the spr
ing efflorescence, a cold wind had sprung up, smelling of old ice. “You are the Cowardly Lion, dear fellow. You will fulfill your commitment to the Throne or find your pardon revoked. One can always trust a coward to behave in a certain manner; they are predictable as rust. That’s why you’re so useful.”
“You are too kind,” said Brrr.
Avaric laughed. “You can’t even do obsequy with any conviction. The perfect spy. Here’s hoping for your sake, and for ours, you can carry it off.”
Freed to wander about again, though without his glad clothes. Brrr was reduced to seconds bought off the rack at the Poor Fair Boutique in the Burntpork district. A Lion snatching for a Rampini knockoff and fighting over it with a toothless gentleman who wanted it, he said, to make purses out of. Brrr won the tussle but lost his dignity. Well, as if he had any left to lose.
Supplied with a sheaf of writs and a small purse for expenses, Brrr headed back to Shiz. It was eerie to be middle-aged, tramping about the quadrangles as a functionary of Secret Affairs, where once as a dandy he had sprung along the graveled walks in an opera cape and a daringly rose-scented cologne. Everything now looked as seedy as he felt. He didn’t know if this was the aging process—the retreat from insouciance—or if the university was falling on hard times.
He’d met the archivist, Miss Greyling, a stoic in sensible shoes, and he decided that she was nuts. She couldn’t work the latch on the casement window, or remember with which hand to shake Brrr’s paw—nor whether touching the felted pad of an Animal was gauche or daring or illicit or morally profound. How could she deduce what the half-a-spell was saying? It would be a half-magic not worth the coin, he guessed. Her credentials, in addition, seemed dubious. But she was devoted, and flustery, and her cheeks grew pink if he let his language get coarse, which he did now and then, to remind her that he was, after all, an Animal.
“Oh, sir,” she’d say, “muffins at Lurlinemas, I shall scream!”
He was amused, and also chagrined. So it comes to this. I say naughty things to aging spinsters, to get a rise out of them. What a wolf I am. What a loser.
She found him the name of Yackle, though, and in time, with worryingly few other leads scrawled in his notepad, Brrr made to leave that hothouse atmosphere.
A glass cat had been sitting, grooming itself at the porter’s lodge. Perhaps unused to seeing a Lion in the streets of Shiz, the cat had gone all devotional and even romantic, purring up a storm in its aging larynx. So this is what it’s like to have a pet, thought Brrr, and while he didn’t encourage the creature, he didn’t kick it away, either. It had been too long a time since anyone, creature or human or Animal, had purred in his presence.
Why did the cat cross the Yellow Brick Road? To reach the Lion waiting on the other side.
Brrr had accepted the companionship. It was a novelty. He named it Shadowpuppet for its bright transparency, for its tendency to skulk in the shadows as if to keep from being overheated by the sun.
Going overland again—into the part of Oz most likely to see military activity—was no picnic. Until the first sign of battle, though, he preferred imminent danger to the froufrou of cottage guest rooms for hire. The lavender sachets, the geranium-mint teas, the caged songbirds embellishing the air with the pretty sound of their distress. Spinsters can decorate their own hearthsides with handiwork and camouflage, but to the Lion it seemed another sort of prison.
However, he was striking out in a new direction, and that had some merit. He had always relished the look of a virgin horizon. He headed due south, bypassing the EC, southwest toward the place where the dead lake called Kellswater most nearly approached the great reservoir of Restwater. The provinces of the Vinkus and Gillikin met here, and the Free State of Munchkinland to the east nudged up against them both. It was, quite possibly, the hottest spot on the map just now, due to the need for fresh water.
The various biddies from their porches agreed: Just north of the oakhair forest he would find the Cloister of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows. He nodded and kept on. With luck the old bitch, Yackle, would still be clinging to life. If she’d survived to this unholy age, she’d be a pushover. He wasn’t worried about it.
He would pursue any lead he could to learn from Liir, or from any source, the whereabouts of the fatal book of magic known as the Grimmerie. Even daring to dart about a landscape gone noisy with the movement of infantry divisions. Where, in a slightly horrifying night, he had come across Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire tending the wounded, and persuaded them to let him and Shadowpuppet accompany them back to the mauntery.
HE SAT IN the darkening room. Early evening was always the hardest to negotiate. He tried to concentrate on the immediate. The wind had died down a little; the oakhair forest moaned less strenuously. A moon was rising; it would be ducking in and out of clouds tonight. The world first in shadows and secrets, then in naked prominence.
Nothing in his own life was worth remembering, really. Every turn had promised reward, and delivered something less. So in truth, searching out the twists of someone else’s life—be it Madame Morrible’s, or the wretched Liir’s, or even old Yackle’s—was a downright comfort. A welcome distraction. It was diverting to consider lives that had been as hobbled as his own troubled existence.
From a witch’s familiar to a collaborationist of the Wizard to this: a civil servant yoked to the information agencies. Abhorred by the right and the left alike, as Avaric had said. In some ways, rounded upon by everyone, Brrr had nothing left to be, to become, but himself.
