“Go, then,” said Ilianora. “If you must. Someone might as well chase the schoolchildren away from the lightning-wreathed hill.” She didn’t look at him, but drew her veil tighter, and covered her mouth with it. Was she covering a smile-did she believe he was lying, out to betray the company of the Clock?-or did she think him a hero, for having so far-fetched a notion of charity?

Brrr bounded forward and pulled from the back of the Clock of the Time Dragon the shroud that Yackle had left behind. She wouldn’t need it now. He dressed himself in it. Not a white flag of surrender but an advertisement of his neutrality. A plea to let him pass.

“Go,” she repeated. “Bread for the aged and the desolate. It’s as good a job as tending the book. Maybe a better one.”

“We’ll look for Liir,” he said. “When I come back.”

“We’ll look for Liir.” She was trying the idea on for size: the idea that someone might be left to her, after all her losses. Her color was high, making her own veils look like the glazed white paper in which Shiz merchants wrapped freshly cut flowers. Which made her a kind of bouquet. “You and I together? You’ll catch up to me?”

“I’ll catch up to you.”

“Is that a promise?” But she wouldn’t have heard an answer even if he had given one. The dwarf was braying out that the boys should push, push, put their backs into it. The dragon’s sallowwood limbs were creaking and its leather wings fell to flapping in the commotion, like a bellows swung about in a circle. A mile or two off, the music of war went tintinnabulary. Clarion horns of the hunt sounding, thunder of horse hoofs on stony ground, shatter of artillery, the clamorous ringing of swords.

Louder than any of that: men roaring like beasts.

The Lion turned into the wind, on the run once more. Neither an envoy of the EC, just now, nor a foot soldier of the underground opposition. Not even a neutral protector of oracular justice and magic hopes. He was a free agent, a rogue Lion, just as he’d started out in the Forest. A rogue Lion with the beginning of an education.

He headed for the sag-roofed, slipshod cottage. He had so little time. He would frighten the old couple there with an offer of help. It was neither the least nor the best he could ever do. It was simply an action that didn’t follow obviously from all his earlier campaigns. It was an exercise in refusing to barter. It was an exercise in refusing to play dead. And that was the only way he could imagine how to vex history.

A plodder, he watched his feet on the ground. Had he turned to look up, to review the map of Oz in the clouds, he’d have seen the first stain of battle smoke rising against the white. Lightning was waiting in the heavens, of course. Sooner or later, the lightning comes to us all. In the meantime, for a moment, the clouds had rearranged themselves, and he might have said that they looked like a flying creature, a shadow angel, all light and impermanence. But the clouds suggested this only to themselves, while he kept his head down, bent to his task.