A Lion Among Men: Volume Three by Gregory Maguire

Author:Gregory Maguire
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Epic, Lion, General, Oz (Imaginary Place), Fantasy, Cowardly Lion (Fictitious Character), Witches, Fiction
ISBN: 9780061711787
Publisher: HarperLuxe
Published: 2008-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

They looked at him.

“We’re not drafted against our will, surely.”

“De facto, we are,” said the Scarecrow. “It’s only our having a commission from the Throne of Oz that keeps those soldiers from picking you up, anyway. The Animal Adverse laws haven’t been lifted, Pussycat. You don’t see many Animals in the streets of this fair city, do you?”

“Besides,” said Dorothy, “I want to go home. I’m sick of this place. Not of you, dear friends, never of you. But all this rigamarole, all this kowtowing. It’s exhausting. Let’s just consider this little military action something we have to go through. In any event, I’m going, on my own if I have to.”

“You’d kill a witch, just like that, at someone’s suggestion?” asked the Tin Woodman. “How unfeeling. You’re a monster.”

“I didn’t say I was going to kill her,” said Dorothy. “Perhaps we can make a private arrangement with her. Broker a peace deal, a compromise of some sort. Who knows. In any event, my house did sort of smush her sister, and I haven’t had a chance to deal with the trauma of that, what with all the festivities and so on. I mean, I need some closure here.”

The Wizard of Oz, it seemed, had them all by the short hairs. So against his better judgment, Brrr signed on to the mission. Maybe Dorothy’s preternatural innocence would call good luck upon them, and he could be a partial beneficiary. And the Wizard had promised Brrr a suitable reward should the mission succeed.

Now, was it forward to victory? Or was it out of the frying pan into the fire? The stakes were never higher. Whatever happened, it would be impossible to retire anonymously after all this. Perhaps Brrr should have roared that tiny little Toto into an early grave and gotten out while he could.

The trip to the West was taxing in every sense. Eventually the Witch’s Winged Monkeys showed up to give them a lift up the steepest of the slopes of Knobblehead Pike to the Witch’s castle, known as Kiamo Ko. The Tin Man and the Scarecrow were left below, but the Lion and Dorothy and Toto were deposited in the courtyard to meet the Witch and her little entourage: the other monkeys, that lad named Liir, and the old Nanny whom Yackle, it seemed, had met all those years earlier.

Liir was the least of creatures on the scene, a scrambling aide-desorcière as the Lion remembered. Fumbling, earnest: a knockabout kid who looked as if he could fall out a tower window without much surprise. The Lion had paid little attention to him: Who knew that Liir’s whereabouts would come to intrigue the high and mighty in the Emerald City one day?

And of the so-called Witch, what could Brrr now recall? His whole life had seemed to lead up to this fatal event: the instruction to murder the Wicked Witch of the West. So you would think he’d have a better grasp of that Elphaba Thropp.

Yet he had only

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