I can feel you sneering in sympathy. You think effeminate beasts are the only ones who don’t know their places?

So I came to the Emerald City to find my fortune, a toddler in the body of an octogenarian. I was astounded at the capital city’s noise and breadth and stink and lights and attitude.

The Emerald City, so called, wasn’t hugely emerald yet. It was more like a work in progress. Its name was a developer’s advertisement looking for investors. The green jewels being dug up in the Glikkus mines adorned only the Palace. The urban squalor around the Throne house looked like a heap of pigsties. Nonetheless, the Emerald City was beginning to practice the art of self-squawk.

Eventually, I saved up enough of my little pilferings and filchments to launch a new practice. I’d learned my lesson, though. No more financial advice. And I wouldn’t take on a client unless she-it is nearly always a she who cares about the future, isn’t it?-unless she promised not to call in the authorities if my reading provoked some catastrophe or other. In such an event, I declared, I’d consider myself released from our contract and I’d have to lower a chastening spell upon her.

I hadn’t any such talent at spells, mind you-I was never a witch of any stripe-but my talent for lying proved useful. Clients always acceded to my conditions. They were so greedy to know things.

And as I peered at them, and as I struggled to see the ways that they could lie to me as well as to themselves, I found out new things about them. And about myself.

Without a childhood, you see, I had to lightfinger an education from someone.

Don’t glare so. I can hear you glaring. Yes, the Thropps. I’m getting there.

In my third year at work in the EC-old Pastorius was still in power, parading his baby Ozma up and down the Ozma Embankment-I had a visit one cold autumn afternoon from a middle-aged domestic. Her name, she said, was Cattery Spunge, but she was known around the estate as Nanny. Well-upholstered in the rump and cushiony of bosom-professional attributes as a governess, I guess.

She liked saying estate, she adored saying she was known. She wore her affectations of gentility like so many foxfur castoffs of her lady employer.

It came out soon enough that this Cattery Spunge had served as overseer to several generations of a prominent family. The clan was headed by the Eminence of Munchkinland known at home as Peerless Thropp or, when in government circles, the Eminent Thropp.

Yes, we’ve reached the Thropp family at last.

Cattery Spunge brought with her a small pot of common ferns. She pushed it across the table toward me as I was clearing away lunch. Scraps of congealed tar-root and mash, I’m afraid. Proof of my humble station. “I don’t barter,” I said at the sight of the fern. “I take cash only.”

“It’s not a present,” said Cattery Spunge. “Nor a bribe. Nanny wouldn’t stoop to bribery.”