YACKLE GROANED and made to sit up; Ilianora on one side and Brrr on the other helped her. She murmured unintelligibly. Then she spit on the floor, something thin and bubbly—liquid lace.
“I thought you were dead,” said the Lion.
“More’s the pity,” she replied, “not yet, but I may have seen my way out at last. I’ve had a Sighting, and maybe the truest one I ever had. But you have to help me. Get us out of this hell-nook.”
Brrr glanced at Ilianora and raised an eyebrow. “Lucky you,” he said to Yackle. “I’ve already cleared the doorway.”
“It’s very quiet here,” observed Yackle. She turned to Ilianora. “Where are your friends? They haven’t left without you, have they?” She became alarmed and turned back to Brrr. “It depends on them—on the Clock—I have seen it.”
“Don’t worry; they won’t have left without me,” Ilianora replied. “Give me your arm, old auntie.”
Yackle was irritable with fretfulness. “Are the sisters still in Council, or have they fled in advance of the approaching army? Help me on these steps, will you? I seem to have caught a tremble in my knees.”
“We’re here, on either side,” said Brrr. Yackle reached out her dry twiglike hand and squeezed the muscle of his right forward limb.
“Well, go ahead, you, and stop them if they are trying to flee without me,” said Yackle. “I’m not going to miss this omnibus!”
Brrr and Ilianora glanced at each other. Brrr nodded, and shifted his arms so he could support Yackle, supplying both a handhold and a backrest. Ilianora hurried down the steps ahead of them.
Shadowpuppet stuck close to Brrr’s side.
“I must rest a moment—a stitch in my side,” said Yackle. She leaned her forehead upon the stone wall and closed her sightless eyes.
“Was it upsetting? Your Sighting?”
Yackle said, “You gave it me.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You told me. You cued me to that line—‘You have to leave the way you came in.’ You told me that was for me. And I saw that it was true—it is true for me, and it is true for you as well.”
“None of this will hold up in a court of law.” But he knew that she would hear the sweet mockery in his voice as encouragement.
“I’ll tell you what I saw as it pertains to you. If you want.”
“For a lark, for a joke, to pass the time while armies are converging upon us…sure, what the hell.”
She reached her hand out, searching for his paw. He took it.
“The hunt for a Lion cub in the Great Gillikin Forest,” she told him. “Several decades ago, I’m guessing; I was never good at counting years. Male humans wanted a cub for experimental use in a lab of some sort. I saw a day of floating leaves. You know, the forest in the fall, all red and gold. I saw a circle of men closing in upon a pride of Lions. Most of them scatter, but there is a nursing mother, too tired to run, and her mate stays by her side. A family group. Around them come the men. Beating the bushes, using nets and snares, carrying for defense those hot charred stakes pulled from a portable furnace. Closing in, closing in. That Lion king, that paterfamilias, he is alert, leaping back and forth. The noose is tightening. The Lion family breaks up, hoping to cause confusion, diversion, hoping some might survive. The father and the cub escape before the explosion.”
Brrr is calmer than he’s ever been in his life. “And the mother?”
“The gelignite is lit. The rocks split and tumble skyward. The mother is crushed when they rain back to earth. She protects the other cub with the arch of her rib cage, though her spine is broken. The men take him away from her breast.”
Brrr says, “Umm—the other cub?”
“Yes,” says Yackle. “There are two in the litter. The escaped one is already looking like both the parents, with that tuft of dark fur at its chin. Did yours ever come in?”
“No.”
“I suspect it was scared out of you.”
“I suspect so.” His voice was exceedingly calm, almost as if he were still practicing to learn how to talk, with very very concentration.
“You have to leave the way you came in,” she finished. “That’s not just for me, Brrr. It’s for you, too. You arrived in a family, unlike me who arrived on a wing and a prayer. You are not supposed to be so alone.”
“I have no family.” No Cubbins, no Muhlama, no Piarsody Scallop, no Jemmsy, no allegiance to the yoke of his probation officer. Certainly no family feeling with a pride of tuft-chinned Lions who, it seemed, removed themselves to the Madeleines and saw fit to deny any relationship.
“You have time,” she told him. “It’s yours to do with what you choose.”
“They turned me out,” he said. “Again and again. They all did.”
“I have to wait for magic,” she said. “You don’t have to. Don’t wait for anyone else. Do it yourself.”
The light had moved on over the mauntery. Daylight, with its shifting dusty tremulous clarity, fell lengthwise down the shaft of the broad, foursquare stairwell. Yackle and the Lion and the glass cat. Elsewhere in the mauntery, a cold silence, patiently waiting for—for what was to come. Whatever it was.
“Come on,” she told him.
The stairs finished at a broad terrace that itself debouched through arches into a cloistered courtyard open to the sky. Favoring his shoulder, Brrr’s body leaned left, and his eyes trailed heavenward, noting the battalions of clouds that surged east. They were thick and grey enough to make the few blue patches look like water features—lakes, inlets, impossible seas—picked out in landmasses painted the grey of wet papier-mâché.
“It is a map of Oz,” he said, for a moment forgetting about the blindness of Yackle. But then he turned his attention to the structure in the center of the courtyard. “Sweet Ozma,” he growled, “that’s a stick of furniture and a half, en’t it?”