Still, he found to his surprise that he felt some small measure of sympathy for Dorothy. He was no longer inclined to consider human beings warmly, but maybe he was able to make an exception because she was so clearly a foreigner. Brrr imagined she was an orphan like himself, as humans didn’t usually leave their young to wander the high road alone. And no half-decent parent of any species would hire a Scarecrow and a Tin Woodman as chaperones and aides-de-guerre.

“Come with us,” said the girl. “We’re headed for the Emerald City.”

Propitious words.

One doesn’t know, necessarily, when one meets the trip-action person in one’s life. A good teacher, a flirt behind the dry-goods counter, a petty thief wielding a knife. Any one of a thousand chance encounters might be the chance of a lifetime. Or a deathtime. A lost girl in a blue gingham skirt and a white pinafore hardly seemed a likely ambassador to a rosier future: still, stranger things had happened.

He considered joining them. What else did he have scheduled? He couldn’t risk running into the Ghullim again. Neither the nabobs of Shiz, nor the Bears nor the Ozmists, nor the Glikkuns with their dirks, nor any affectionate soldier boys astray in the Great Gillikin Forest.

It seemed there was nothing in the wild for him; it was civilization itself that must be tamed. Perhaps this was his lucky break. It sure was about time.

And who better to serve as his escort back into society but this Dorothy? She possessed a writ of safe passage from Lady Glinda, who had met the foreign girl when investigating the sudden death of Nessarose, the most recent Eminent Thropp and governor of Munchkinland. It took Brrr several weeks to pry the whole story out of Dorothy, about the tornado, the plummeting house, the glittering shoes. By then he deduced that Glinda was moving the girl out of harm’s way, because Munchkinland was up for grabs now that its governor was dead. Would Nessarose’s sister, Elphaba, come back to Colwen Grounds and rule the seceded nation?

Every step away from Munchkinland would be a step away from the Wicked Witch of the West, Brrr figured. Accurately or not, his name had been linked to her before; he wanted no reunion, thank you very much.

And once in the Emerald City-well, there was the famously reclusive Wizard of Oz to meet! The WOO! If Lady Glinda’s offices were as well connected as she had attested to Dorothy.

“Oh, do join us. Lady Glinda is so good,” said Dorothy. “I’m sure the Wizard will honor her request and see us. After I’ve come all this way-and through that dreadful storm, no less. A thousand miles from any outhouse. I won’t tell you what I had to do while aloft; it was revolting.”

Laboriously Brrr figured the dates backward and concluded that the great twister carrying Dorothy to Oz was the same storm that had given Uyodor H’aekeem nightmares and begun the sequence of events leading to Brrr’s expulsion from the Ghullim. He spent a few moments over a dark fantasy of revenge against Dorothy. But she hadn’t orchestrated that storm into being; she was a victim of fate as much as he was. So he let it go.