A Lion Among Men recap

The Cowardly Lion, now titled, indebted and working as an agent of the Emperor's court, arrives at a rural cloister in the path of an advancing army with orders to interrogate its strangest inhabitant: Yackle, an ancient woman shut in the crypt because she cannot manage to die. What the court wants from her is the Witch's book of magic and any surviving trace of the Witch's family. The novel alternates their two testimonies. Yackle cannot say where she came from, remembers no childhood, and suspects she was made for a purpose tied to the Witch's line. Brrr recounts his whole life: waking as a cub alone in the forest, the dying soldier Jemmsy, the Ozmists who found him useless, years of failing to belong among either Animals or humans, an errand for the Emerald City that ended in other creatures' deaths and his own escape, and the accidental fame of walking to the Emerald City with Dorothy. In the end Yackle produces the Grimmerie from beneath the cloister, is at last allowed to die, and Brrr, instead of delivering the book to the Emperor, takes it and goes.

Previously in the series: Elphaba Thropp, born green, grew from a dissident student into the sworn enemy of the Wizard who ruled Oz, retreated to the mountain castle of Kiamo Ko, and became the figure Oz remembers as the Wicked Witch of the West. She died there when a girl from another world, Dorothy, threw water on her. Left behind were her book of magic, the Grimmerie, her broom, and Liir, a boy of about fifteen whom she never acknowledged as her son and never disowned. In Son of a Witch, Liir searched the Emerald City and the prison of Southstairs for Nor, the girl carried off from Kiamo Ko by soldiers, served in the Emperor's forces long enough to take part in an atrocity in Quadling Country, and traced a wave of aerial killings to a secret stable of war dragons, which he burned. Shot out of the sky, he was nursed back to health at a rural cloister by a Quadling girl called Candle, who afterwards bore him a green-skinned daughter and hid her from the government. Meanwhile the Wizard's throne passed to the Scarecrow and then to an Emperor Apostle who rules Oz as a living saint and who is Elphaba's own brother, Shell. The country has since split: Munchkinland has seceded, and Loyal Oz is at war with it over water.

Loyal Oz and Munchkinland are at war, and the army's line of march runs through the Cloister of Saint Glinda, a rural convent whose maunts are packing to evacuate. Into this arrives Brrr, the Cowardly Lion of legend, now a titled and thoroughly compromised agent of the Emperor's court, travelling with the Clock of the Time Dragon, its owner the dwarf Mr. Boss, and a veiled woman called Ilianora. His commission is to interview the cloister's oldest and least explicable resident: Yackle, an ancient woman kept in the crypt because she cannot manage to die. The court wants what she knows about the Witch's book of magic and about anyone left of the Witch's family. Yackle agrees to talk, on terms of her own, and begins an account of her life that satisfies nobody. She has no memory of being young, no idea where she came from, and a firm suspicion that she was made rather than born, and made for a purpose she never chose. Brrr, who needs this errand to succeed more than he will admit to anyone, settles in to listen.

Against Yackle's testimony the book sets Brrr's own, beginning at the beginning. He woke as a cub alone in the Great Gillikin Forest with no parents, no pride and no name, and had to work out what he was from scratch. Wandering deeper in, he blundered into the Ozmists, the crowding dead of the forest, who wanted news of the living world and found the cub had none to give. He also found a young human soldier named Jemmsy, lost and dying of his injuries, and stayed with him: the first creature ever to treat him as company. Jemmsy died, and the memory of him, and of what he left behind, became the standard the Lion measured himself against ever afterwards. Brrr came out of the forest having learned that he was conspicuous, unaffiliated and easily shamed. Yackle, meanwhile, describes surfacing into an existence already old, keeping herself by fortune-telling and by being a shopkeeper's oddity, and finding that her path crossed the Thropp family's again and again without her ever being told why.

Brrr's account continues through years of trying and failing to belong. He was taken up briefly by humans as a curiosity, tried and failed to find a place among other Animals, and discovered that Oz under the Wizard was no country for a talking beast without a patron: the Animal population was being pushed out of the professions, off the land, and eventually into hiding. Being neither wild enough to disappear nor connected enough to be protected, he made himself useful to whoever would have him, which is the beginning of everything he is later ashamed of. Yackle's own testimony keeps circling the same problem from the other side. She has watched Oz change across a span no ordinary life covers, has turned up repeatedly at the edges of the Thropp family's story, and cannot say whether she was steering events or was merely put where they were going to happen.

The most damaging stretch of Brrr's history. Employed by the Emerald City's authorities, he was sent north on official business among Animals who had every reason to distrust anyone arriving with a government commission. He was by then entangled with Muhlama H'aekeem, an Ivory Tiger of a proud northern clan who despised exactly the accommodation he had made, and who let him follow her without ever pretending to want him. When the errand went wrong, Brrr saved himself. Others did not get out. Whether that made him a traitor or merely a coward is a question the book puts to the reader rather than answering, but it cost him what standing he had among Animals and left him permanently in debt to the human government that had sent him.

Brrr's public career reached its one moment of glory by pure accident. A girl from another world, Dorothy, was walking to the Emerald City with a scarecrow and a tin man, and the Lion fell in with them. What followed made him famous, and the Wizard's court awarded him a medal for a courage he did not feel he had earned, in front of an audience that would go on remembering it. The fame did not survive the Wizard's departure. Brrr came out of the affair with a title, a reputation he could not live up to, and obligations to whichever government held Oz next, which is how he became a debt collector working the provinces on the court's account. At the cloister, the interview grinds on, Yackle giving up her story in exchange for scraps of his, and neither of them yet saying plainly what they actually want.

The war catches up with the cloister: the army is close, the maunts finish their evacuation, and the interview in the crypt runs out of time. Brrr's later history closes the gap to the present. How he came by his title, how he came to be travelling with the Clock of the Time Dragon and its dwarf, and how he met the veiled Ilianora, whose withheld past turns out to run straight back into the Witch's household at Kiamo Ko. Yackle, for her part, comes to the point. She knows the cloister better than anyone living, she has been part of the Witch's story since before the Witch was born, and she has been waiting a very long time for someone to ask her the right question.

Yackle gives Brrr what the court sent him for and then refuses to let the court have it. Beneath the cloister she leads him, the dwarf and Ilianora to what has been hidden there: the Grimmerie, the Witch's book of magic, put out of reach in the crypt and left in the keeping of a woman nobody believed. Having handed it on, Yackle is at last permitted to stop. She is laid in the ground, and this time the ground keeps her. Brrr does not take the book to the Emperor. He leaves with the Clock company and the Grimmerie instead, giving up his title, his commission and any prospect of being forgiven by the court, and takes on the protection of what is left of the Witch's inheritance. Little Daffy, the cloister's dispensing maunt, walks out of the convent with them. The army moves into the emptied buildings behind them, the war goes on, and the Lion who has run from everything all his life is now carrying the most dangerous object in Oz.

Yackle finishes her deposition on her own terms. She reveals that the Grimmerie, the Witch's book of magic, has been hidden beneath the Cloister of Saint Glinda all along, and she gives it up not to the Emperor's court but to Brrr and the company he travels with. Her long refusal to die ends with the handing over: whatever she was made for is discharged, and she is put in the ground, willingly, and stays there. Brrr then makes the first uncowardly choice of his life by defaulting on his commission. He keeps the book, walks away from his title and his creditors at court, and leaves with the dwarf Mr. Boss, the veiled Ilianora, whose history reaches back into the Witch's own household, and Little Daffy, the dispensing maunt, who abandons the convent to go with them. The cloister is left empty for the advancing army. The war between Loyal Oz and Munchkinland is still escalating, the Emperor still wants the Grimmerie and still wants the Witch's descendants, and a green-skinned child of that line is somewhere in the country, unaccounted for. The Clock of the Time Dragon rolls on with the most sought-after object in Oz aboard it and a disgraced Lion walking alongside.