“You do have good ears,” said Brrr. “Quite a liability to your peace of mind, I can see that.”

“Go to your rest,” she said. “I’m not going to talk to you tonight, so you might as well sleep. Should you have to run mighty fast in the morning, a good night’s sleep will benefit you.”

“I haven’t got what I need yet,” he said.

“You’re not going to get it now,” she answered. “I’m going to sit here a while, in the dark. I am thinking about whether to say any more to you at all. It’s possible I might. But I would like to grumble to myself a bit, and I don’t want to be overheard.”

“It’s time, Sir Brrr,” said the novice timidly.

She led him to the staircase, which dropped down a wide high stairwell. Above the polished wainscoting on the walls opened a large window with clear panes set in the center, colored borders on the sides. Brrr stood on the top step, waiting for Shadowpuppet to catch up. Brrr lengthened his spine, his neck, to look over the edge of the windowsill, over the curtain wall of the mauntery, to see if he could locate any sign of army divisions or sharpshooters. The sky came down almost to the ground-a flat geography in these parts. Nothing to see but a house or two with some lights on against the dark.

A house right in the way. Poor fools.

“Sir Brrr,” said the novice, using an aggrieved tone to chivy the Lion. He picked up the glass cat, resisting an urge to heave it at the novice’s skull, and followed her without speaking again.

The room to which the novice led the Lion was fitted with three clerestory windows. They were too high for him to leap through, should the place be attacked at night-the worries he carried with him!-and in any instance they were probably too small, too, since he’d put on something of a paunch despite the hard times.

Supper came, and it didn’t sit well, so it went the way it came. Shadowpuppet kept a distance, wrinkling its glassine nose at the stench.

He found he couldn’t sleep on the hard straw mattress, so he curled up on his coat. The stone floor was cold, and Brrr shivered enough to drive Shadowpuppet to the other side of the room, as if the small moony cat was afraid of shattering.

He tossed and twitched, avoiding the last yoke, the worst of it, but as he grew more tired his resistance thinned; and then it was upon him.

The men with their prods and harpoon guns, the net, the ignominious net. The surrender to capture, the terror in the cage, the shame. The accusations, the sentencing. The surgeon with his sedative, a needle and a plunger. Then the scissors of four or five barbers snipping around him, all at once. “Mortification is good for the maturing beast,” said a voice, the surgeon’s, someone’s. “Strip him of his honors, shave his mane, prune him down to nothing, and if he survives he will grow up stronger.”