A Lion Among Men characters

Also known as the Wicked Witch of the West

Appears from the start

The green-skinned woman remembered across Oz as the Wicked Witch of the West, dead for years by the time this book opens. Her book of magic, the Grimmerie, her broom, and anyone descended from her are still being hunted by the government of Loyal Oz, which is the only reason Brrr has employment at all.

Appears from the start

The Witch's presumed son, grown and long since vanished from public view. What became of him, of the Grimmerie, and of any child of his are precisely the questions the Emperor's court has sent an agent out to ask.

Appears from the start

The Cowardly Lion of legend, now middle-aged, titled, and working for the Emperor's court as a collector of debts and information. He arrives at a rural cloister standing in the path of an advancing army, carrying a commission to interview an ancient woman kept in its crypt, and his own reasons for needing the errand to succeed: his standing, his property and his liberty are all provisional. Vain about his appearance, easily wounded, and thoroughly practised at the retreat that earned him his name.

Appears from the start

An impossibly old woman shut away in the crypt beneath the cloister because she will not die. Blind, cracked, and perfectly lucid when it suits her, she agrees to give her interrogator an account of her life in exchange for something of his. Her testimony is the strangest thing in the book: she cannot say where she came from, remembers no childhood at all, and suspects she was made rather than born, for a purpose bound up with the Witch's family.

Appears from the start

A veiled, self-contained woman who travels with Brrr and the Clock company and is, by the arrangement between them, his companion. She keeps her face and her history covered, speaks little of either, and has made herself unreachable in a way Brrr has learned not to press.

Appears from the start

The bad-tempered dwarf who owns and drives the Clock of the Time Dragon, a travelling theatrical contraption that stages prophetic tableaux for whatever audience it can find. He claims the Clock is older than Oz and that he is bound to it rather than the other way round, and he takes an interest in the cloister that has nothing to do with anyone's commission.

Appears from the start

The elderly head of the Cloister of Saint Glinda, presiding over an evacuation: the war has reached the district and the house stands in the army's line of march. She grants the visiting Lion access to her crypt and its occupant with a briskness suggesting she would be glad to be rid of the problem.

Also known as Shell Thropp

Appears from the start

The ruler of Loyal Oz, who governs as a religious figure and is the dead Witch's younger brother. Brrr does not deal with him face to face, but the commission that sends the Lion to the cloister comes from that court, and what it wants is the Witch's book of magic and any surviving trace of her line.

First appears in chapter 8

A young human soldier, lost and badly hurt, whom Brrr comes across in the Great Gillikin Forest when the Lion is barely more than a cub. He is the first person to treat the young Lion as company rather than as an animal. He dies of his injuries, and what he leaves behind fixes itself in Brrr's mind for the rest of his life.

First appears in chapter 8

The clouded, insubstantial dead who linger in the deepest part of the Great Gillikin Forest, hungry for news of the living world. The cub who stumbles into them can tell them nothing worth having, and they let him go with a poor opinion of him. It is the first of many occasions on which Brrr is found wanting and knows it.

First appears in chapter 14

A short, brisk Munchkinlander maunt who runs the cloister's dispensary and knows a good deal more about what grows in the surrounding hills than her superiors realize. Decades of convent life have made her busy rather than devout.

First appears in chapter 22

An Ivory Tiger of a proud northern clan, striking, sardonic, and entirely unimpressed by the Lion who attaches himself to her. She has contempt for Animals who make themselves useful to human government and no patience for Brrr's need to be liked. He follows her anyway.

First appears in chapter 30

The girl from another world who turns up in Oz and collects, on her way to the Emerald City, a scarecrow, a tin man and a lion. Brrr joins her party more or less by accident, and the fame and the medal that come out of it define the rest of his public life, mostly to his cost.