Free A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire

no impression on the creatures, but he was glad he could still roar. It meant he wasn’t dead. Presumably.
    “Excuse my volume; I have no self-control,” he said. Well, why not talk to the phantoms? He had meant to avoid Cloud Swamp at all costs, but opportunity was presenting itself. And conversation was his only skill.
    “Begging pardon for the intrusion. Frightfully thoughtless of me,” he went on. “Is there a spokesperson among you who can answer a question or two? If you’ve time to spare?”
    There was a sort of drumming in the air, as if a billion miniature throats were clearing themselves. Languidly the sound resolved, its pitch rising and consolidating toward a common note. But it died out, bearing no word for Brrr upon its pressured breath.
    “Allow me to introduce myself,” he said more forcefully. “I am, in actual fact, the King of the Forest.”
    No reply. The apparent lack of interest on the part of a congress of ghosts shamed Brrr. It also frightened him. Of course they would realize he was no kind of king at all. He organized his thoughts with more honesty.
    “I didn’t come here to disturb your rest,” he stated. “Indeed, I hoped to pass without pestering you. Shall we just nod courteously and say ‘Good-bye’ or ‘Piss off’ or whatever’s appropriate and then breeze on our separate ways?”
    The assemblage of ghosts seemed to hover, listening, or drumming its fingers against its forearms, so to speak. Tacit. As yet uninvolved.
    “Wait,” said a voice, not Brrr’s, but a normal worldly voice. Jemmsy? The Lion swiveled his head, not certain from which direction the sound approached.
    Cubbins blundered down the side of an invisible bluff, snapping the branches of an invisible birch tree to break his descent. He splashed through the vision of ghosts and arrived at Brrr’s side with slicked thighs. Under one arm dripped a wedge of honeycomb.
    “I forgot to tell you that you need to offer a tribute if you want to speak with the ghosts,” said Cubbins.
    Another little secret about conversation. How did folks learn to get on in this tricky verbal negotiation called chat? How much had it cost him to grow up without the banter of family life?
    Still, Brrr was glad to see the boy sheriff. (Out on his own again, the little dickens!) Almost as glad as if Jemmsy himself had coalesced out of a matrix of midges, free of an iron snare, smiling a soft-cheeked hello at his final friend, allowing Brrr to grin back at his first. But Cubbins was decent company, and Brrr felt both enriched and a little traitorous to the memory of Jemmsy to like Cubbins, too, and so quickly.
    He said, hiding his gratitude, “How do you know you need to offer the ghosts a gift if no one in your tribe believes in ghosts?”
    “I asked Ursaless. She claims never to have seen the Ozmists, but she insists this is the way it’s done by long-standing custom.”
    The Lion raised an eyebrow. “Don’t ask,” said Cubbins, sighing. “I don’t expect to follow her line of reasoning. I just listen and obey.”
    “But you’re not allowed to go running off alone,” said Brrr. “Isn’t one disobedience a day enough?”
    “You are brave enough to strike out on your own,” replied the cub. “And ten minutes after you left, no one could remember you had been there. So I realized you were right. What is there for me in the court of Ursaless?”
    “They’re your family!”
    “They’re not the whole world. I can always come back if I want.”
    Brrr spoke cautiously. “What if you can’t find them? What if they have moved on?”
    Cubbins laughed. “Move? That’s the whole point of the Northern Bears. They never move on. So I’m taking a cue from you…”
    He put the comb of honey on a rock in the clearing. The midges swarmed nearer it. In the act of crowding together their apparition took on a more coherent aspect. Not a human face, perhaps not even a face at all, but something with an enriched identity.
    “Are