Page 34 of A Lion Among Men (The Wicked Years 3)

“How long am I beholden to you for your kindness?”

“Ah, that I can’t say. The Clock spells out its designs of fate only as far as it wants me to know them.”

They were silent. More companionable than usual. The dwarf in his way was as indentured as she was in hers. She had seen him set up the Clock only once, to put

on an exhibition for a petty brigand who’d come across them on a stretch of paved road and threatened them with a pistol. She’d watched the sergeant-at-hand ratchet the gears until the whole tall instrument was quivering with tension. They all stood back as the Clock invented a little entertainment. She didn’t yet know if the Clock was merely distracting, a tiktok cleverness, or enchanted.

A puppet arrived under the arch of a little proscenium up top. He looked uncannily like the brigand, right down to the gusseted Lincoln-green tunic and the pistol. The puppet looked this way and that, as if to make sure he was alone. Then he sat down and clasped the pistol, barrel upright, between his legs and began to stroke the shaft of it.

No children’s puppet play, this. She’d closed her eyes.

“That’s filthy,” murmured the bandit, somewhat approvingly.

She heard the puppet rocking back and forth. Though there was no sound, she could tell by the quickening of the rhythm that the big pop was near. “Stop,” she’d tried to say, but her voice had fled: She knew no one was listening to her.

“Whoa,” said the bandit, “you’ve got some nerve—”

She had peered between lashes, she admitted it: The mouth of the pistol had fountained a surge of foamy blood all over the trousers of the puppet, who fell back, sated and, it seemed, dead.

Worried that the Clock was not just illustrative of morals but perhaps a hand of fate, she’d whirled to see the brigand. He was slack jawed at the performance (though that was the only part of him slack), and he hadn’t yet noticed that the boys had liberated him of his considerable wallet and his pistol both.

They kept the cash and the bullets and returned the pistol before releasing him. They had nothing to fear: He tore off crashing through the underbrush like a fox from hounds.

The blood was good, no? asked the dwarf. Juice of blood oranges and pomegranates thickened with cream of tartar. The Clock is talented but needs some fuel from time to time.

She hadn’t asked how it came to be that the Clock was supplied with a puppet resembling a chance highway robber. Such a turn put paid to the notion of chance at all. Still, in some ways that was consoling: She could stay where she was, clandestine and still, and freely believe that this must be her fate. The need to decide further was removed from her, which made something of a rest.

“I won’t keep you longer than I’m directed to,” said the dwarf now, as they headed toward the sanctuary he had divined might take them in.

“You did me a service by rescuing me. I’m not looking to leave you. I have no plans but to keep out of sight. I merely worry at the thought of armies massing around us.”

“Armies are only hunters in formation. Upright teams of precision hunters.”

“Once I hunted for information, but one of my informants was killed. I have retired from hunting, Mr. Boss. I am no fan of the spoils of the game.”

He reached out to pat her wrist but she tucked her hands in her shawl. Such reticence she showed! Hoping to further this unexpected moment of confidences, the dwarf asked her, “How would you feel about a Lion hunt?”

A Coward for His Country

• 1 •

A LION AT rest.

How old was he now? Thirty-eight? Forty? How long had he been waiting to see some shade of the world other than grim yellow?

That oracle, who was blind with age, could see more than he could. Damn her.

Was she holding out on him? Running for the chapel just when they were closing in on the questions he most needed to ask? Where is the Grimmerie? Where was Elphaba’s rumored son, Liir—where had he disappeared to? If anyone in Oz might know, it had to be Yackle. Yackle wasn’t the only person who had cared about Elphaba—there was Lady Glinda, among others—but Yackle was the one who had been able to see into the darkness of Elphaba’s life.

A vision like that—what he wouldn’t give to have some…some sense of scope. Some perspicacity. But he could never see forward. Even the act of looking back—at how he had gotten himself hip-deep in muck, again and again—even that was hard for him to fathom.

Well, he wasn’t giving up this time. He’d proved useless at his earliest tasks, like finding Jemmsy’s father. A total loser and no mistake. He’d always run off at the first sign of trouble. But now there was nowhere left to run. It was this or prison.

So he let her see of him what she would, with her oracle’s inner eye; she didn’t need to hear him voice his reservations about himself out loud. There were things he would never say to any female, whether she was a Lioness or a human, a judge or an oracle, a petty whore or a pettier maunt.

A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him—so why bother?—but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible. Yackle would prove no exception, he was sure.

How different his life might have been if he had emerged from the Great Gillikin Forest right at the outskirts of the town of Tenniken instead of at Traum. Sure, now he knew: A talking Lion would have had a rough go of it anywhere under the Wizard’s jurisdiction. Yet if Brrr had been able to deliver the medal of honor back to Jemmsy’s father, he’d have had an early experience of reaching a goal. Of not being diverted.

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