Always some itch that worrying couldn’t scratch. Brrr slipped sideways in and out of the kind of sleep that masquerades neatly as the actual moment—is he a Lion aware of being almost asleep in a summery pine forest, or is he dreaming of that same reality?

Apparitions of his past detached from the fretwork of chronology and drifted into consciousness, out again. The Lion swam in that underwater wonderland where action and consequence lose their grip on each other.

Look who’s here on conscience’s catwalk: striking poses between wakefulness and dream.

The nobleman who’d thought up for the Lion an agent’s assignment. The man who had smeled of licorice and tobacco. Avaric, Margreave of Tenmeadows. His thin pumpkin-colored mustache and goatee, that bearing few Animals could imitate. Damn the confidence of the titled!

Avaric gave way to Jemmsy, the first human Brrr could remember meeting—a humble soldier of the Wizard of Oz. The Lion’s first friend, so his first betrayal. What made Brrr think he could care for a little girl, even for a while? Doing damage—that was the Lion’s métier.

Jemmsy flew apart into ashes. In the Lion’s hypnogogic paralysis, Jemmsy resembled the swarm of Ozmists, said to be fragments of ghost who haunted the Great Gilikin Forest. What had they asked? “Tel us if the Wizard is stil ruling Oz.” And Cubbins, the boy-sheriff of the Northern Bears, had asked them a return question: “Tel us if Ozma is alive.” Why didn’t hooded phantasms in their sepulchral moan ever ask, “Tel us if salted butter is better than unsalted in a recipe for a Shiz mincemeat pasty?” Prophetic questions and answers only cared about rules—powers, thrones, pushiness.

Cubbins faded away into a pattern of sedges and paisleys. Brrr was nearly asleep, and then a thought of the ancient oracle known as Yackle intruded upon the artsiness of the mind yielding to dream.

She was so robust in his thoughts that he sat bolt upright. That cunning fiend! In his mind she was more demanding than ever. “Take care of the girl,” she’d hectored him not six months ago. “I need you to stand for her, if she needs standing for.” She’d been talking about the child of Lir and Candle. None other than Elphaba’s granddaughter. But was this girl who showed up—Rain—the right one? The Clock seemed leery of her, according to the dwarf. And Brrr couldn’t be sure. He lay down again. Behind his closed eyelids, as the girl stretched and rubbed against his spine and roled over, he tried to imagine her as green, though in daylight she seemed the same filmy milkweed color of so many Munchkinlanders and Gilikinese.

Clocks are color-blind, thought Brrr. Let the Clock recover its spring and go back to being the conscience of Oz. It can sort out Rain’s reality. I’m too tired.