Yackle was irritable with fretfulness. “Are the sisters still in Council, or have they fled in advance of the approaching army? Help me on these steps, will you? I seem to have caught a tremble in my knees.”

“We’re here, on either side,” said Brrr. Yackle reached out her dry twiglike hand and squeezed the muscle of his right forward limb.

“Well, go ahead, you, and stop them if they are trying to flee without me,” said Yackle. “I’m not going to miss this omnibus!”

Brrr and Ilianora glanced at each other. Brrr nodded, and shifted his arms so he could support Yackle, supplying both a handhold and a backrest. Ilianora hurried down the steps ahead of them.

Shadowpuppet stuck close to Brrr’s side.

“I must rest a moment-a stitch in my side,” said Yackle. She leaned her forehead upon the stone wall and closed her sightless eyes.

“Was it upsetting? Your Sighting?”

Yackle said, “You gave it me.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You told me. You cued me to that line-‘You have to leave the way you came in.’ You told me that was for me. And I saw that it was true-it is true for me, and it is true for you as well.”

“None of this will hold up in a court of law.” But he knew that she would hear the sweet mockery in his voice as encouragement.

“I’ll tell you what I saw as it pertains to you. If you want.”

“For a lark, for a joke, to pass the time while armies are converging upon us…sure, what the hell.”

She reached her hand out, searching for his paw. He took it.

“The hunt for a Lion cub in the Great Gillikin Forest,” she told him. “Several decades ago, I’m guessing; I was never good at counting years. Male humans wanted a cub for experimental use in a lab of some sort. I saw a day of floating leaves. You know, the forest in the fall, all red and gold. I saw a circle of men closing in upon a pride of Lions. Most of them scatter, but there is a nursing mother, too tired to run, and her mate stays by her side. A family group. Around them come the men. Beating the bushes, using nets and snares, carrying for defense those hot charred stakes pulled from a portable furnace. Closing in, closing in. That Lion king, that paterfamilias, he is alert, leaping back and forth. The noose is tightening. The Lion family breaks up, hoping to cause confusion, diversion, hoping some might survive. The father and the cub escape before the explosion.”

Brrr is calmer than he’s ever been in his life. “And the mother?”

“The gelignite is lit. The rocks split and tumble skyward. The mother is crushed when they rain back to earth. She protects the other cub with the arch of her rib cage, though her spine is broken. The men take him away from her breast.”

Brrr says, “Umm-the other cub?”