“Yes,” says Yackle. “There are two in the litter. The escaped one is already looking like both the parents, with that tuft of dark fur at its chin. Did yours ever come in?”

“No.”

“I suspect it was scared out of you.”

“I suspect so.” His voice was exceedingly calm, almost as if he were still practicing to learn how to talk, with very very concentration.

“You have to leave the way you came in,” she finished. “That’s not just for me, Brrr. It’s for you, too. You arrived in a family, unlike me who arrived on a wing and a prayer. You are not supposed to be so alone.”

“I have no family.” No Cubbins, no Muhlama, no Piarsody Scallop, no Jemmsy, no allegiance to the yoke of his probation officer. Certainly no family feeling with a pride of tuft-chinned Lions who, it seemed, removed themselves to the Madeleines and saw fit to deny any relationship.

“You have time,” she told him. “It’s yours to do with what you choose.”

“They turned me out,” he said. “Again and again. They all did.”

“I have to wait for magic,” she said. “You don’t have to. Don’t wait for anyone else. Do it yourself.”

The light had moved on over the mauntery. Daylight, with its shifting dusty tremulous clarity, fell lengthwise down the shaft of the broad, foursquare stairwell. Yackle and the Lion and the glass cat. Elsewhere in the mauntery, a cold silence, patiently waiting for-for what was to come. Whatever it was.

“Come on,” she told him.

The stairs finished at a broad terrace that itself debouched through arches into a cloistered courtyard open to the sky. Favoring his shoulder, Brrr’s body leaned left, and his eyes trailed heavenward, noting the battalions of clouds that surged east. They were thick and grey enough to make the few blue patches look like water features-lakes, inlets, impossible seas-picked out in landmasses painted the grey of wet papier-mâché.

“It is a map of Oz,” he said, for a moment forgetting about the blindness of Yackle. But then he turned his attention to the structure in the center of the courtyard. “Sweet Ozma,” he growled, “that’s a stick of furniture and a half, en’t it?”

The Shroud of the Cowardly Lion

1

B RRR DELIVERED Yackle safely onto the cobblestones of the courtyard. He could feel the quickening of her pulse; it matched his own. He was aware of Ilianora standing to one side, neither demure nor deferential, just a handmaiden to her own life. The sun struck the silvery stitching in her veil. If she was a eunuchess, she was a striking one, coming forward to offer Yackle her arm.

“Well, there you are,” said the dwarf, poking his head out of a window halfway up. “Never known the gears to stick, ever. But I think I just fixed it. Maybe it was balking until you arrived. What took you?”

“A vision took me,” said Yackle in a theatrical voice.

“Visions, schmisions,” said the dwarf. “We got the corner on that market, darlin’.”