“And why do you wear it, Jemmsy?”

“To give myself courage.”

The circularity of this was beyond Brrr.

“You want it? The medal? Take it. I don’t deserve it anymore, anyway. Going to pieces like this.” He unpinned it from his jacket. “You can fix it to the belt lashing those books together, and wear it around your mighty thigh.”

Brrr had to keep from stealing a look to see if his thigh was all that mighty. “I haven’t earned it,” he said. “Jemmsy.”

“It will be your passport in Tenniken. No one will harm you if you come in aid of a soldier of the Wizard’s army. If you deliver the news of my incapacity to my brothers-at-arms, they won’t forsake me. Soldiers take care of their own. Low ranking though I am.”

Brrr came forward and accepted the token by opening his mouth and gumming Jemmsy’s hand almost up to the elbow. It tasted lettucy, watery, unwashed. The hand was limp on Brrr’s tongue, and for a moment neither of them moved.

Then, extruding the hand through closed lips, and ejecting the badge onto the pile of books, Brrr said softly, “Pin it there on the belt, as you suggested. When I go, I’ll take the books with me, too.”

“Bless you,” replied Jemmsy. “If I were not to survive, would you tell my fellows to remind my father I loved him until the end? And forgive me my crimes against you and your kind.”

“I have no kind,” said Lion. “But okay, sure. If it’ll make you happy. What crimes might those be, Jemmsy?”

But Jemmsy had rolled over on his side, and he put the saliva-wet hand into his groin and drew his knees up, as far as the trap would allow. He didn’t speak again.

Gratitude, thought the Lion. He gripped the satchel belt in his mouth and left. He found, though, that the farther away he got, the less he could be confident of the small association that had sprouted between him and Jemmsy. Did a conversation constitute a friendship? If so, this was his first friendship, and he wasn’t sure how fragile it might prove to be. How could he abandon the fellow, just like that? What if Jemmsy fell asleep and had a bad dream, and cried out, as the Lion had so often done?

He circled back, then, but by old habit he settled out of sight in a shadowy clot of fallen and rotting tree limbs. He watched his friend sleep, and struggle against the trap, and grow still. Brrr reviewed the matter as best he could, inventing rhetorical forensics from the ground up.

On the one hand, Jemmsy and his companions had set that very trap. Or things like it. They were hunting him, or his kind. His kind. Right? Right? So now the soldier had him. Jemmsy had caught himself a Lion, just perhaps not in the way he had intended.

On the other hand, maybe experience-of any sort-was only valid if it caused you to redefine your terms. Courage, for instance. The courage to go versus the courage to stay? Which was more very couragey?