Page 12 of A Lion Among Men (The Wicked Years 3)

“And why do you wear it, Jemmsy?”

“To give myself courage.”

The circularity of this was beyond Brrr.

“You want it? The medal? Take it. I don’t deserve it anymore, anyway. Going to pieces like this.” He unpinned it from his jacket. “You can fix it to the belt lashing those books together, and wear it around your mighty thigh.”

Brrr had to keep from stealing a look to see if his thigh was all that mighty. “I haven’t earned it,” he said. “Jemmsy.”

“It will be your passport in Tenniken. No one will harm you if you come in aid of a soldier of the Wizard’s army. If you deliver the news of my incapacity to my brothers-at-arms, they won’t forsake me. Soldiers take care of their own. Low ranking though I am.”

Brrr came forward and accepted the token by opening his mouth and gumming Jemmsy’s hand almost up to the elbow. It tasted lettucy, watery, unwashed. The hand was limp on Brrr’s tongue, and for a moment neither of them moved.

Then, extruding the hand through closed lips, and ejecting the badge onto the pile of books, Brrr said softly, “Pin it there on the belt, as you suggested. When I go, I’ll take the books with me, too.”

“Bless you,” replied Jemmsy. “If I were not to survive, would you tell my fellows to remind my father I loved him until the end? And forgive me my crimes against you and your kind.”

“I have no kind,” said Lion. “But okay, sure. If it’ll make you happy. What crimes might those be, Jemmsy?”

But Jemmsy had rolled over on his side, and he put the saliva-wet hand into his groin and drew his knees up, as far as the trap would allow. He didn’t speak again.

Gratitude, thought the Lion. He gripped the satchel belt in his mouth and left. He found, though, that the farther away he got, the less he could be confident of the small association that had sprouted between him and Jemmsy. Did a conversation constitute a friendship? If so, this was his first friendship, and he wasn’t sure how fragile it might prove to be. How could he abandon the fellow, just like that? What if Jemmsy fell asleep and had a bad dream, and cried out, as the Lion had so often done?

He circled back, then, but by old habit he settled out of sight in a shadowy clot of fallen and rotting tree limbs. He watched his friend sleep, and struggle against the trap, and grow still. Brrr reviewed the matter as best he could, inventing rhetorical forensics from the ground up.

On the one hand, Jemmsy and his companions had set that very trap. Or things like it. They were hunting him, or his kind. His kind. Right? Right? So now the soldier had him. Jemmsy had caught himself a Lion, just perhaps not in the way he had intended.

On the other hand, maybe experience—of any sort—was only valid if it caused you to redefine your terms. Courage, for instance. The courage to go versus the courage to stay? Which was more very couragey?

Any decision he made, Brrr realized, would affect his friend’s future one way or the other.

His heart burned with affection when, in a fever, the man called out, “Lion. Friend Lion! Have you forsaken me?”

It’s good that I am in your heart to give you hope, thought the Lion, hope unto death. He lay as close to the soldier as he dared, to keep the man warm at night until there was nothing left of him to warm. Even when Jemmsy died, and the smell grew worse, the Lion hated to leave the body.

“Now I’ll go for help,” he said to the carcass. “You’ve been very patient.”

Jemmsy didn’t reply.

“What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” said Brrr, but his tone sounded off and he closed his mouth.

My first conversation, he thought, and his bound had a new spring to it. He was nearly giddy. Of course, the finish had been awkward—death is a real stifler of repartee—but on the whole he thought it had gone rather well.

A conversation and a friend. Jemmsy had called out “Friend Lion!” So the friendship had been short-lived but real; now that it was dead, it couldn’t be revoked. It was preserved inviolable in his heart. And the medal shone like a portable compliment. The medal advertised Brrr’s own courage as he headed to Tenniken to keep his promise. He would deliver the news of the fallen Jemmsy to those grieving companions-at-arms. And through them the news could go on to Jemmsy’s father, that puzzle of a creature, for being capable of abandoning his son to the care

of the army.

“THE HEART OF a Lion,” murmured Yackle, almost purring herself. Brrr resisted the temptation to imagine she was being snide, but he couldn’t resist the domino-patter of memories, one after another, that had concluded his childhood. The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.

• 3 •

S O THE next memory toppled forward, a tremor following upon a tremor. Jemmsy. His body seeping into the ground like a pudding at room temperature. How long had it been since Brrr had thought of Jemmsy? The scab torn off, after all this time; a smell of earth leaching from that opened wound. The smell of those childhood woods from as far back as his mind could pick its way.

When was his unspoken pledge to Jemmsy hijacked by ambition? How soon was his hope to deliver the news of Jemmsy’s death superseded by his hunger for the reward of gratitude? Or had it not happened as baldly as all that?

He couldn’t now remember. Only the terror and giddy release at having a destination at all. Tenniken. Tenniken, a garrison town, and nearby, a soldier’s grieving father. A brick hearthside where Brrr might curl up like a house cat, like a surrogate son, purring, domesticated, basking in the warmth of approval.

He felt perverse and new, flayed by raw luck. For the first time, he felt naked. He felt he could outrun his timidity just by doing the job right.

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