“Then where does fate come in?” asked the Lion. “Wouldn’t this Clock of yours have been able to name what was to happen? Or any blind old oracle worth her salt?”

“Fate is only fate once it has happened. Even our own deaths are only theoretical until we croak.”

Ilianora pursed her lips as if trying to decide whether to join the conversation. She did. “There is a fourth child at the base of the hill who can read the weather enough to know that lightning is likely. The child can rush forward to chase all the others off the mound, and she risks being killed in the process. If that brave child is slain by lightning, it is sullen fate at work. But the other children’s lives have been altered. History has been vexed by the intercession of a bit player. It is what we hope for, and what we dread, too. Isn’t it?”

The dwarf replied, “I dread nothing but garlic muffins. Listen, the child who can read the portents of weather may well have hurried the others back down the slope into the jaws of a manticore, itself sensible about lightning and waiting out the storm in the down-slope shrubs.”

“Not to act is to act, too,” insisted Ilianora.

The dwarf seemed to agree with this, or perhaps he was tired of the discussion. “Couldn’t be truer, sweet-cakes, but we haven’t time to keep nattering like this. I haven’t been stepping sideways for half a century just to be caught, by fate or accident, in some WC in a mauntery, of all godforsaken places. Break down that door, Lion, and we can all get out, and leave these holy women to their immolation. Might be lively entertainment for a maunt, to be violated and then martyred, but I can’t subject my Ilianora to the danger. Lion, the door.”

Brrr had little inclination to snap to the dwarf’s commands, but he had no inclination at all to stay put. “Always with the doors,” he said. “When I broke through at the Witch’s castle, I was in better nick.” He took off his weskit and folded it neatly as the boys surrendered their cards and collected their ivory quad-ribbed pieces. The little glass cat blinked, obedient and even docile, but it seemed ready to quit the company of oracles and acolytes.

Ilianora, with a placidity that under the circumstances suggested a mild mental incompetence, straightened the margins of her veil and stood up. “After you,” she said to the Lion, indicating the door.

For the Lion, staying in fighting trim had never been a daily ambition. He did several deep-knee bends and sprang back and forth across the room to get his blood going. Turning to Yackle, he asked, “Are you coming with us? Or is this what you’ve been waiting for? Death by an army sharpshooter? I shouldn’t hang around any longer than necessary-”

Yackle appeared to have passed out.

“The sight of me taking any exercise, I know: a taxation to credulity,” said Brrr.