Then, at last, and who knows how, the word began to get out that he’d been paid for playing dead all those years ago.

The Traum massacre. The journalist in the train’s dining car, all those years back, had coined a phrase, the Cowardly Lion. The tag was an insult in remission, ready to metastasize in the public consciousness now that Brrr had established himself as a public figure.

The Lion who wouldn’t fight. The pesky Glikkuns who were mowed down. The big old peaceable pussycat. The dead trolls. The wussums with his wittle Wion’s tears.

Ah, but Brrr would have survived the shame of it a little better had he not taken the purse.

He’d been too wet, too inexperienced, too damn hungry to think twice about accepting it. In the end, as the stink of a questionable past began to bloom around him, it wasn’t as much the cowardice people commented upon, but that Brrr had been paid handsomely.

We all make mistakes. But we’re not supposed to profit from them.

What could he do next? The rumors kept doubling the amount of the sum he’d been awarded. If he’d had anything like such an initial investment, he’d be the wealthiest Animal in Oz by now. In gossip, presumed wealth is always overestimated by garish exponentials. That in itself was a burden to him.

He couldn’t give the money back to the hard-up burghers of Traum; that would be to acknowledge some sort of wrongdoing, and he’d done nothing wrong except to be young and ignorant.

Besides, he could never afford to give back the amount of money folks now said he’d earned on his first day in human society.

In any case, giving publicly to charity was thought unseemly. He’d only be able to contribute anonymously. And while this might help his soul, it wouldn’t salvage his reputation.

He tore his mane out at nights, sleepless and distraught. But he kept accepting invitations, for suddenly to drop out of society might also signal a sense of failure, of guilt. The soirées became ugly but he kept showing up, in part to prove he wasn’t scared to show up.

Then one evening, as he stood under the stone portico of the Sir Chuffrey Opera Palace, waiting in a queue of the great and the good for the next available landau, Brrr was approached by a young blueblood. “The Cowardly Lion! You’re the Lion from the labs at Shiz University,” he said. “Aren’t you? The little orphaned cubling! Doctor Nikidik tried to sever your language stem. I was there. I remember.”

“I was never in Shiz as an infant,” he replied, affronted, though as he spoke he realized he couldn’t be sure of this. Who remembers their own infancy?

It was a Margreave’s son, deep in his cups, slurring his words and making a scene. “Brrr. Is that right? I remember-the doctor named you Brrr because you shivered like a kitten with the flu.” Only it came out “shivered like a shitten.”