“Nonsense,” said Brrr. “This is my first episode in Shiz. I should remember an earlier visit.”

“The cage,” prompted the inebriate, “a cunning little cage! I remember because your name was pronounced like the first syllable of berserk.”

Avaric Tenmeadows, the Margreave’s son, it turned out, had attended some classes with Elphaba. The dreaded Wicked Witch of the West, as she’d come to be known. On the day in question, she’d witnessed the dustup, swore the Margreave’s son. She had!

Heads turned. The Witch was big news just then, because her sister, Nessarose, recently had orchestrated the secession of Munchkinland from Oz. The Thropp family was in dudgeon, both sisters alike. No one yet had taken any measure of their baby brother.

Overnight-as the rickshaws and buckboards and broughams pulled sloppily into the rain-the Lion’s reputation was tarnished in another way. Suspicious through association. Complicit. A familiar…

The Witch had rescued the poor little cub from the experiment, said a letter to the editor, signed Anonymous (a pensioner).

No, it was a pair of fey boysies called Crope and Tibbett, said someone in a gossip column. The Witch actually wanted the cub killed so she could drink its baby Animal blood.

No, the Witch had hexed him, that poor little Brrr.

Are you kidding? He’d been hexed at Brrrth. Ha-ha.

I wish I’d been hexed with a trust fund like his.

Within a few weeks, vaudeville comics on the variety stages of Ticknor Circus were mocking Brrr’s precision in speech. When he made an attempt to talk street-thuggy, they mocked that even more.

What astonished him-when he had achieved the distance from the events to interpret them without rages-was the extent to which a comic accusation could, by dint of repetition, begin to be taken as received wisdom. The Witch, after all, was on her way to becoming feared and despised, but she was still only a distant threat. Whereas if the Lion was her familiar-hah! It made the threat of the Witch seem more like a joke.

When the joke faded, the sentiment remained. The bemused tolerance that had attended his myopic insistence on being a civilized Animal in Shiz began to evaporate. His silvered tray was empty of calling cards; the morning post brought fewer and fewer requests to call, to dine, to take a promenade through the Scholars’ Arbor, to attend a charity function at considerable cost. He was stuck with a stock of expensive old mettanite engravings he couldn’t shift, and he owed a bundle on them.

Miss Scallop began to be not at home to him, when, on her receiving afternoons, Brrr came to call.

In the week that no such invitations arrived, and the columnists grew snarkier in their insinuations, Brrr finally saw what others had seen many months, even years, before. Things were not going well for talking Animals in general, and for a talking Animal with a tainted reputation, for having been defended by the Witch, a known enemy of the state-well, if he didn’t get out soon, it would be his own fault.