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 spring 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.