“There was no seduction, sir!” Brrr was aghast. He glared at Muhlama, looking for testimony. Muhlama neither concurred with her father nor protested his accusations. She couldn’t speak. For anger, for regret? Then he saw what they had seen already. She had begun to bleed. The iron stench of it, a wound too large to hide. A rivulet of orangish blood that wouldn’t stop.

It seemed he hadn’t quite fit in, but she’d let him try anyway.

With a cold resolve, she hectored him, too. “Go. Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? Go, before they have your head on a trophy backboard. You’ve done quite enough.”

Perhaps because she was still Uyodor’s daughter, they let him go. Though Uyodor declared, as Brrr backed away, “You are no creature of the wilderness, Lion; you do not belong here. Should we come across you again, or should our allies, you are fair game for the predator. A marked beast. You have ten minutes before we enact our promise to seek vengeance.”

So he pelted away, but ever after he wondered why. Was it just to preserve his own life? His life had a tinny cast to it, an artificial quality, hardly worth preserving. Or had he left not so much to save his own skin as to avoid having to see Muhlama’s life bleed out of hers?

In any case, he was gone. Not for the first time, nor the last: an ignoble retreat from a fray that had grown too hot for him.

Back into the wild, back into woods, back into exile. And this time he would endure a loneliness made more cutting by the recent experience of consanguinity. Or call it love, if you must.

Exiled, even unto himself, until and unless something came along to redeem him.

What came along some time later-days, or was it weeks?-near where the Wend Fallows petered out into the Corn Basket, was that toothsome morsel known as Dorothy. Another rare and delicate human, a girl this time, improbably making her way along the stretch of Yellow Brick Road that originated in central Munchkinland.

4

I T WAS an accident of the light, nothing more, that caused the little girl and her pair of noodnik companions to leap in terror at the sight of him. Or had it been too long since his most recent wash-and-set? In any case, he steeled himself for the inevitable interview, and wondered how much of his sorry history he could gloss over. Maybe they had some provisions to share.

Dorothy, though, was not riven with wild curiosity. She seemed to take his bowdlerized biography at face value. She asked no probing questions. She just smoothed the edges of her apron and consoled her quivering little pup. “Oh, Toto, have you ever imagined a Cat so big in your wildest nightmares? I hope you don’t lose your lunch.” She nuzzled her face against her dog’s in a way that might cause some citizens of Oz to question her sanity.