“I’ll come with you,” he told Dorothy and the others.

At this point-the moment when Brrr stepped into the limelight of history-he was perhaps twenty, though of course as a Lion that meant he was middle-aged. Twenty, and he’d conducted his sordid affairs and peccadilloes only in Gillikin and Munchkinland. But he’d spent his life within earshot of Oz’s great capital city, which pulsed with so much power it was almost a nation unto itself-a state on its own. Perhaps what was scandalous elsewhere, in hidebound provincial centers like Shiz, would seem penny-candy stuff in a capital city. Perhaps the EC was large enough, urbane enough, to consider Brrr’s trials and shames not only incidental but unremarkable.

He had little to lose now. If Dorothy’s stamp of approval from Lady Glinda proved genuine, he might be traveling with diplomatic immunity. After all, Dorothy had shown him a writ on a scroll, though he couldn’t read it well enough to parse its curlicued grandiosity.

The Kiss of Lady Glinda, it was called: a passport requiring its bearer safe passage to the Emerald City under penalty of prosecution to the fullest extent of the law, et cetera, et cetera.

It was signed with a flourish and a little scribble of a heart with a smile inside it, which looked to Brrr like a picture of an extracted tooth delighted to be liberated from some foul mouth.

A good deal of what happened next-the Matter of Dorothy-was a story he didn’t choose to dwell upon. How déclassé, to arrive with a crippled human decked out with tin prophylactics and with a Scarecrow, sweet enough but clueless as to his own origins-though who wasn’t? Brrr liked Dorothy, though. One evening he found himself imagining her as Jemmsy in a dress and pigtails, which seemed too weird, if fun, so he steered his attentions elsewhere.

The Emerald City lifted itself onto the horizon, more pomp and glory than Brrr had imagined possible. Emerald overdrive. Even the loo paper was green, which Brrr considered a sort of design error. But The Kiss of Glinda worked its magic, as it were. The magnificent and dreadful Wizard of Oz agreed to meet them, though in separate interviews. Brrr’s was last, and he was expecting a great Head, like the one that had shown itself to Dorothy, but perhaps the wine had been more toxic than he’d realized, for all he could see was light shining from the throne.

Steeling himself, Brrr remembered the Ozmists, and thought: Barter! He would negotiate for some government sinecure in exchange for having escorted this foreign dignitary to the palace. “I have a request of you,” he began, “O great-and-powerful-and-all-knowing Oz.”

“Courage,” said the Wizard.

“No, not courage,” said the Lion. “I mean, well, courage would be nice. But I was thinking of something more in the line of a job.”

“I will give you what you most need,” said the Wizard, “if you bring down the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“Bring her down? I had hoped she wouldn’t even come up,” murmured Brrr. The Wizard was better at bartering than he was.