“We’ll go for a walk,” she said. She turned and snarled at the nearby sentries, “We are going for a walk. Got it?”

He couldn’t tell why they stood back and let her pass unrestrained. Perhaps they realized she was still spitting mad. Perhaps they saw that Brrr was calming her.

Muhlama led the way. She had a seriously keen sense of smell and followed a track through sweeping clusters of vine until, after a few minutes, she had reached the edge of a pool. Here she laid herself down, reclining her hindquarters fully, her chest torquing into an elegant curve, so her head reared back upon her neck. Nacreous shadow behind her, blue and lavender and mauve. Her eyes lowered. Her ears lowered. “There is no one trailing us,” she said. “I would hear them if they were.”

He sat down close. Not too close. Close enough that he could feel the heat from her pelt. Musk of a rare sort; he’d never apprehended such a naked barb of invitation. A scorched-pecan, apricoty, humid sort of appeal.

“You are so royal, you can bring on estrus at will?” A bold thing to say and would have been crude said to anyone but a princess; and indeed he meant it as a compliment.

“I am talented,” she replied, lifting her tail another parabolic sweep higher, “but you give me too much credit.”

They didn’t speak for a while, as the evening birds exchanged their bulletins, as the bullfrogs dove into the water out of a surfeit of modesty. A hummingbird, a whipping blossom, came along and perched on Muhlama’s ear, until it realized its mistake and fled.

“You can’t be so kind to me,” said Brrr after a while. “It isn’t possible. No one ever has. I don’t fit in.”

“It’s I who don’t fit,” she said, “I with my strong-minded ways, my temper, my appetite to leave the very home that I am tethered to. I look a princess, I know; but I am a slave here, no less than the tree elves, no less than you are. I don’t belong.”

She angled her rump, and the movement of her tail changed. It became the pendulum on a metronome, counting the slow moments until she pushed her pelvis higher and threw her head back, nipping at Brrr’s throat as he covered her beautiful coat with his own.

When he could think in words-was it then, was it later, he didn’t know-it was simply this: Now I fit in.

His reverie was delicious. Eyes closed. He was partly conscious of the floating strings of the world, its selvages restitching themselves into a prettier apprehension. Some might call it afterglow. For Brrr it was as if a new appetite was just beginning to stir out of his dreamy slumber. But it was interrupted by hissing alarums. He hardly knew what was closing in on him until it was over and done with.

The discovery in flagrante by Ivory Tiger scouts. The forced return to the camp. The accusation of Uyodor, his recitation of Brrr’s offenses against the noble line of the Ghullim camp. Was this an attempt to thwart Uyodor’s regime? Was Brrr a stooge of the Wizard of Oz, working his way in here, seducing the daughter of the chieftain of the Ghullim?