A Lion Among Men Read Online Free PDF

own counsel. He sang softly in a lullabye voice, “I need to take your deposition, good granny. Don’t you worry your tired noggin over poor little me.”
    “I needn’t answer you merely because you ask,” she said. “‘In this country everyone must pay for everything he gets.’ Isn’t that what the old bastard, our dearly departed Wizard, used to say?”
    He hadn’t figured on her sass. “Perhaps you’ve been comatose through the current troubles. Oz has an Emperor now. One with an iron will, as it happens.”
    “Threats don’t work on the chronically dead,” she replied, “which is close enough to what I am to make no difference. So try again, mister. You tell me something about yourself first. I want to know who I’m talking to before I decide. And what you’re really after. And for whom you’re working. And what immunity from prosecution I might be afforded. My testimonial privileges. Then we’ll see if I feel like rewarding you by answering your questions.”
    He took a breath in. “And don’t lie to me,” she continued. “I can be vexed when I find I have been lied to.”
    Where to start? Always the question. “Well, for one thing, I am a gentleman sporting a very fabulous weskit,” he said, partly mocking, and to see just how blind she was. But he regretted the gambit at once. If she leaned forward to feel his vest, she’d rip it to shreds with her nails, and it wasn’t in such good shape to begin with, actually. Secondhand, if not fourth-hand.
    “Not a spot of mange?” she asked. Did she know he was a Lion, not a man?
    “I’m not talking about my own hide. I mean I’m decked out in a gentleman’s item. A bespoke article. It swims on me a bit, since I’m leaner than I once was, but it’s a Rampini original. Teck-fur detailing, with a kind of red highlight. Can you see color?”
    “No, but I can smell it,” she said. “Yellow, yellow, yellow.”
    The cozy old invalid was sneering at him. He unsheathed his claws, just for a moment. Let her droopy ears catch the release of each horny talon from its velvet socket.
    “A shame to start off on the wrong foot, don’t you agree?” he said. Plaintively, almost a miaow, to the castanet shuffle of his claws sliding against one another.
    She heard his feline assertion. “You are a Lion,” she said, and whispered theatrically: “the king of the forest, no less!”
    She used just the perfect phrase designed to poke the embers of his childhood into flamed memory despite his resistance. The King of the Forest. He shuddered involuntarily, hoping she couldn’t hear his jowls jiggle.
    She pressed her advantage. “I’m neither a judge nor a jury. I’m a witness. Tell me who you are, Sir Brrr, and how you got here. And tell me the truth. Then maybe I’ll comply. You weren’t already weaselly when you were young, were you? Even weasels aren’t very weaselly at first.”
    With elegant steps, looking sore of paw, Shadowpuppet paced to the legs of Brrr’s chair and purred to be picked up. Brrr obliged. The cat calmed him down.
    Taking this deposition would be one campaign he wouldn’t screw up. For the love of Ozma, wasn’t he the equal of this crazy old coot draped in a tablecloth? And he had his writ in hand, permission to take her into custody if need be. He would get the goods if they were to be gotten.
    If it was to be cat and mouse here, he had the genetic qualifications to play the cat. He had the motivation. He had the might of the bloody Court to back him up, too, if need be. He would redeem his reputation among the great and the good of Oz, and he’d wipe the smirks off their goddamn faces with his own beribboned tail.
    “You’re an oracle, I’m told,” he said. “You ought to be able to see my youth, if you want to.”
    “I like to hear it told,” she replied. “I have an appetite for childhoods. Insatiable, as it happens.”

The Nursery in the Forest

1
    T HE PARTICULARITY of other folks’ youthful memories always