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I.
The door swings open with a muted creak, spilling light into the stuffy halls; dust motes float in a beam of light from the outside, flickering and glittering against the rows and rows of shelved books. There’s an echoing, oppressive kind of silence; though she isn’t breaking any rules, Lyra feels like there’s a distinct sense of you shouldn’t be here resonating off the shelves.
That feeling is only strengthened by Pantalaimon, who’s been keeping up a whispered rant for the past five minutes, curled around her shoulders and whispering furiously into one ear. “Lyra, come on, let’s go to bed, what are you doing, we’re going to get caught and they’ll just laugh – you’re being a very silly little girl, you know that’s what they’ll all think, and then we’ll be called back for another little chat with the Master, and…”
“Oh, hush,” Lyra says quietly, walking slowly between the towering shelves, her lamp held high enough to read the titles on each book she passes. “We’re allowed.”
Pantalaimon mumbles something that sounds very much like “Just because we can doesn’t mean you should,” and Lyra – as she’s been doing all week – ignores him.
She’s been back in her room at Jordan for almost a full week now, the first term at St Sophia’s over and the boarding school cleared out for the Christmas holidays. The girls in her dormitory – a quiet, studious girl called Susan, the freckly Davis twins, and Lyra’s closest friend Jessica, a tiny scrap of mischief and skinned knees – have gone home to their families, and Lyra… Lyra has come home to her Jordan. The scholars have welcomed her back with open arms, and for a few moments at a time Lyra can fool herself into thinking nothing has changed; she’s still Lyra of Jordan College, dodging scholars and stealing food from the kitchens, haunting the rooftops of her Oxford; but everyone treats her different, now. There’s a kind of…respect to how the scholars talk to her, almost reverence. She’s the girl who crossed worlds, and it’s supposed to be a complete secret – which means, of course, that no one’s really talking of anything else. The undergraduates whisper behind their hands when she slips past them in the corridors, the Palmerian Professor keeps trying to corner her at dinner, everyone just wants to know if she’s all right, all the time. It’s getting tiring already.
Still. She’s here for the whole holiday, and she might as well use her time, and start working on… The thing she’s not thinking about, the thing that’s brought her to the library after dark – not because she’s got a curfew, but because the librarians are bound to report back to the Master if she starts reading any kind of dangerous books, and Lyra doesn’t want to have that talk. Not now, not ever.
Pan’s not happy with her – his fur is standing on end, bristling against her neck – but Lyra just absentmindedly pats his paws, and keeps looking. The books on experimental theology fill half a room, but she’s done her homework and knows exactly which shelf and which row to aim for. And there it is – a thin, dusty little volume, its faded green cover noticeably worn and falling apart. On Angels.
“I don’t like this, I don’t like this, I don’t like this…” Pan’s voice is high and anxious in her ear. Lyra opens the book, and scans the table contents.
“Look at this, Pan,” she says, half-disbelieving of her good luck. “Angelic Matter… Angelic substance - what we might call Angels - passes from this world to the next without difficulty, an unstoppable force and yet untraceable… That’s it, Pan!”
“Untraceable,” he repeats back to her, waspish, and Lyra scowls.
“S’only the first sentence. Come on.”
And with that, she slips the book into her shoulder-bag, sliding it into the space next to the Alethiometer, and turns back towards the doors. She’ll read the rest of the chapter in bed, and somewhere between the lines of the dreary sentences and the spiders-scrawl diagrams, will be the first wisp of information. And that’s…that’s all Lyra needs. The first step, just a little nudge in the right direction, the first, tiniest, hint of possibility.
She’s going to find out how to cross worlds again. She has walked into the stars and she has walked into hell, and she isn’t going to give up now.
***
II.
The cold bites at Will’s fingers, and his toes ache. There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for both these hurts – the first, he ran out into the courtyard without a jacket on a rainy February evening, the second, he just kicked a rubbish bin hard enough to leave a dent in it – but he’s not feeling all that reasonable right now, so it hardly matters. Tears prick at the backs of his eyes, and he blinks hard to hold them back, pressing his lips tightly together.
“Will?” Mary’s followed him downstairs, and she’s watching him from the doorway now, voice pained with concern. “Come back inside.”
Will swallows back a scathing insult, and just looks away, his jaw tense. “No.”
“Will…”
“I don’t care,” he snarls, vicious. “Leave me alone.”
Mary just sighs, and Will feels something inside him shift, a tiny crack of disappointment eating into the initial, white-hot rush of fury. He should apologise to Mary – for shouting, for running out on her, for being so very rude to her when all she’s done is invite him to her study for tea – but the words stick in his throat.
“I thought –“ he starts, and cuts himself off; he shakes his head mutely, and focuses his eyes on a leaf blowing feebly in the gutter, brown and deformed and a little pathetic-looking next to the first snowdrops and crocus flowers.
“I didn’t think to clear them away,” Mary says softly, gently – her voice is too gentle, almost motherly, and again Will has to fight a sudden desire to kick something, he’s not a child – “I like having reminders up, they’re…comforting.”
Not to me they’re not, Will thinks, and says nothing; Mary seems to read his thoughts anyway, because she lets out a quiet, humourless laugh. “Maybe I’m getting old.”
“It’s not right,” Will says suddenly, turning his head to look at Mary so fast he feels the bones in his neck click against each other. “We shouldn’t – not after everything – and it’s not going to stop, I’m going to get older and older and older, and it’s not – right.”
Mary smiles at him, a little sadly. “I know you feel…” she hesitates a little, and then carries on. “Right now, you might feel like it’s not going to go away.”
“It’s not,” Will repeats, his voice sharp and too loud for the confined space of the courtyard. He shouldn’t expect her to understand; what does she know, what does anyone know, of promises made in another world, of the pain that sits just behind his ribcage every second of every day, pulling and pulling him out of this universe – “It’s not just going to…fade.”
The word sounds hollow, and a little disgusting, to his own ears. He doesn’t want it to fade. He doesn’t want her to fade.
“You’re…Will, please don’t bite my head off again, but you are still very young,” Mary says carefully, and Will just scowls at his shoes, scuffed and dirtied from his walk through the rain this morning.
“I don’t care,” he says mulishly. “It’s not going to fade. I don’t want it to.”
Mary nods, a little too understandingly for his liking. “What do you want, then?”
Lyra.
“I don’t know,” he says, turning quickly away again. “Not this.”
“Do you want to…” Mary’s voice sounds careful, a little tentative. “Talk about – anything?”
Will laughs out loud at that, the sound echoing unpleasantly around the small courtyard. “What use would that be, then?”
“Will, in…times of sadness, or grief –“ Mary sounds surer of herself now, perhaps slipping into words she was taught as a nun, the healing power of prayer dressed up in talking about it. “You might find it helpful, to just…talk, and remember, and make it a little – easier –“
“Easier?” His voice rises in pitch, and he hears Mary take a startled step back. Good. “Don’t you get it? We’re still here, and none of the – the souvenirs in your office are gonna change that, no matter how much you like remembering it all, and she’s still gone, and -”
He takes a deep breath, and balls his hands into fists in his pockets.
“And that hurts,” Mary says, when he doesn’t continue. “I know. I know, and that’s alright.”
“You don’t know – “
“Yes, I don’t know, no one knows,” Mary cuts him off, sounding for the first time a little impatient. “No one could possibly understand how you’re feeling, and everyone in the world is out to get you, and you’re the loneliest person alive at the age of 14.”
Her words sting, just enough to make Will feel just a bit bad for yelling at her and running out on their afternoon tea – she’d put biscuits on a plate and everything – but the feelings of guilt are vague and lukewarm, overshadowed by the boiling, seething rageat the injustice of it all.
“Fine,” he says finally, his voice cold. “I’m a silly little kid, got it. See you later.”
Pain flashes across Mary’s face. “Will – “
But he’s already turned on his heels, crossed the courtyard, and wrenched open the gate onto the street.
***
III.
“Please, Serafina.”
“Child…”
“Please, just take me with you, I’ll be ever so helpful, and quiet –“
“It’s not a question of noise, Lyra,” Serafina says calmly, striding half a pace ahead of Lyra as they make their way through the foggy London night.
“I’ll help!” Lyra says quickly, just barely avoiding tripping into the gutter as she hurries to catch up. “I can cook now, and everything – “
“Lyra Silvertongue,” Serafina says suddenly, stopping dead in the middle of the road and turning so quickly that Lyra almost goes rushing straight past her. “There is no place for you on board the ship. There’s barely a place for myself – I will be flying, child, guiding the ship north – “
“You could teach me,” Lyra mumbles at her feet, half-hopeful; Serafina only sighs.
“Perhaps, had we a great number of years…”
Lyra tosses her hair with a snort, and lifts her chin up to meet Serafina’s eyes with steely, arrogant determination. “I learnt the Alethiometer in a couple days.”
Serafina just smiles at her – always smiling, always calm right up to the moment when she isn’t. “This is another kind of knowledge, girl. Extraordinary you may be, but you’re no witch.”
The thought hits Lyra all at once – she feels her pulse jump with excitement, feels Pan curl warningly against her chest from where she’s tucked him into her coat. “Could I – “
Serafina opens her mouth as if to interrupt, and then seems to think better of it.
Lyra pushes on, the words tumbling out of her in an excited, half-formed rush. “Could I become one, then? Can you do that - make me like you? I read about it, there’s spells, you can make new witches, and I’ve already done half of it, ‘ent I? With Pan, and the – the boat?”
Pantalaimon shivers against her throat, and Lyra feels a responding tremor run down her spine; an echo of a memory, the feeling of being torn away – she shakes her head to clear the sudden rush of half-remembered sensations, blinking hard, and keeps her eyes fixed on Serafina.
Serafina seems, for the first time since Lyra had got it into her head to ask to come north again, lost for what to say. “Child…” she starts, and then pauses. “Lyra. Why is it so important that you travel north?”
Lyra doesn’t waver, just keeps staring up at the witch who has become her closest, and oldest, friend. “I want to see the lights again – I want to visit Trollesund, and not run for my life – and my father’s things are all still up at Svalbard, and…” she pauses, and lets a carefully-measured hint of pain tremble through her next words. “And that’s where Roger was killed, and I just…want to go back. And see Iorek, I aint seen Iorek since everything, and it’s – can’t you understand that, Serafina?”
Serafina gives her a distinctly shrewd look, and Lyra flushes angrily. “Lyra the liar,” Pan whispers, close to her ear, and she gives him an impatient nudge with one hand.
“What else, Lyra?” Serafina asks evenly, raising both eyebrows and tilting her head slightly; a gust of wind blows her hair away from her face, and in one sudden moment Lyra is reminded that she is talking to a witch, and not just any old witch – Serafina Pekkala, Queen of the Lake Enara clan, and old, older than anyone pushing past them on this staggeringly ordinary London street. Older, perhaps, than the buildings surrounding them… And fierce, and powerful, and looking Lyra straight in the eye.
“Nothing else,” Lyra says sulkily, though it comes out as barely more than a mumble. “I dunno.”
“The breach to Citagazzé has been closed,” Serafina says, her voice ringing with authority; Lyra twists her face into a grimace, but refuses to look away. “You know this.”
“No harm, then,” Lyra fires back, and for a moment she sees something like laughter flicker across Serafina’s face. “Is there?”
“You have made your choice,” Serafina says softly, changing her approach so suddenly that Lyra almost cracks at the sudden kindness, at Serafina’s fingers closing lightly around her wrist. “It was a difficult, brave, terrible thing to do… But you have made it, Lyra.”
Lyra wants to scream – wants to yell at Serafina that it wasn’t a choice, there was no choice to make, there was just the raw, horrible certainty of seeing every door close, every other possibility dance just a breath out of reach – she wants to cry, and curl up in Serafina’s lap, and sleep without dreaming.
“I just thought – “ her voice surprises her when she next speaks; she sounds young even to her own ears. “If I could get a message – “
“You couldn’t.”
“If I could just look – “
“There’s nothing remaining to look at.”
“I can try – “
“Yes,” Serafina says, nodding gently. “You could try. For years, decades perhaps, you could yearn and travel until you have searched every last corner of this world. You could devote your life to it – your whole life – and you could become very knowledgeable, certainly more knowledgeable than I or any of my sisters, about the walls between worlds. But…”
Serafina tails off delicately, and watches Lyra wrestle with the weight of what she’s hearing; she thinks of Lyra as her sister, her equal in so many regards, that it’s always a slight shock to see the fourteen year old girl emerge from within the world-weary exterior.
“But,” she continues, when it becomes clear that Lyra is unable or unwilling to finish the thought herself. “That is not what you set out to do. I can’t tell you what to do with your time, Lyra. No one can. But I can tell you that it would be a disservice to the child you were, to the young woman you became. And…”
“Will,” Lyra mumbles, so quiet as to be almost imperceptible.
Serafina nods. “Yes,” she says simply. “The one other who made the same choice as you. “
“We promised,” Lyra says miserably, her face very white and still. “Not to…waste our lives, missing each other.”
“Then you have your answer,” Serafina says kindly. Lyra nods, and takes a deep shuddering breath; Pantalaimon is pressed against her chest, his pules beating in time with hers, and she’s not alone, really. She never has been.
But –
“If we could just talk to each other,” she says, half-hating the sound of her own words. “If you could teach me that – how we can sit in our own Oxfords and just talk - “
Serafina starts walking again, her pace slow enough for Lyra to reluctantly drag her feet and almost keep up with her; she doesn’t answer Lyra’s last, stubborn attack, and after a few minutes of obstinate silence Lyra pulls her coat tightly around her shoulders and speeds up. They talk about the diplomatic lunch they attended, the first of its kind between witches and what remains of the Magisterium; they talk about the goings-on at Jordan; they talk about their last day in London tomorrow. Serafina pretends not to see the tears glistening on Lyra’s still-flushed cheeks, and Lyra pushes through every angry tremor in her voice, and they don’t mention the north again.
***
IV.
Sunlight streams in through the open windows, hot and uncomfortable against the back of Will’s neck. He could get up and close the blinds; he could get out of bed and go outside, let the sunshine soak through his skin; he could do one of the dozens of pieces of homework and revision that have been sitting on his desk all week. Instead he just turns his face into the cool side of his pillow, and shuts his eyes tight.
It’s getting harder and harder, as the days drag on, to find reasons for doing pretty much anything other than lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling, at the glow-in-the-dark constellations he and his mum had tacked onto the white plaster, the first week in their new home. They’d made a project of it, and for the last few months Will has become intimately familiar with every last star, every last pattern that could be drawn between them.
Orion the Hunter; the Big Dipper; five steps of his forefinger and thumb away, the North Star.
Sometimes, he draws other patterns in the sky – the Bear, the Mother, the Bridge and the River – Lyra had taught him them all, in long nights lying on the deck of the ship wrapped in furs, both dizzy with exhaustion but unwilling to lose too many of their precious hours on sleep.
The North Star, that’s the same, though, she says, leaning on her elbow and grinning when he blinks at her.
I know how to find that one, he tells her, his voice slow and thick with sleep.
Lyra rolls over to face him, her nose very close to his, her grey-blue eyes bright, so bright, even in the inky black night. We’ll both watch for that one, then.
Missing her strikes him in waves, relentless and unceasing. The days are getting longer, the time shortening to their first appointed…Whatever they’ll call it, the hour on the same bench. And it’s getting harder. Everyone – Mary, his mother, even the kind-faced counsellor he’d been sent to at school and who had only known that Will had lost his father – had told him that he’d find it easier and easier to get through each day, that it would fade.
When Will asks his mum if missing dad ever just stops, she gives him such a hurt look that for a few seconds Will just feels horribly, viciously guilty. And then she gives him a sad, understanding smile, and somehow that’s worse, because she’s not supposed to be this nice to him when all he knows these days is how to lash out –
“I had you,” she’d said, her voice just on the edge of breaking. “And…yes. With time. You learn how just – be here. It gets easier.”
And maybe it will. Maybe someday, when he’s older and settled and grown up properly, he’ll think of Lyra and smile, and it won’t even hurt to remember her. In a crude, harsh way, it already has gotten easier. The routine of school, homework, cooking and cleaning gives his days a rudimentary backbone, and he goes whole stretches of identical days without once thinking he can see a doorway hiding at the edges of his vision, just out of the corner of his eye.
But he’s had a whole week off, and every hour bleeds into the next with crushing, exhausting predictability; doing nothing tires him so much quicker than being busy, and he’s spent more time this break in bed than out of it.
Will’s stomach is growling now, the hunger pangs he’s been blankly ignoring for the past few hours finally demanding he pay some attention to them. His mum will be home soon, maybe she’ll have brought a take-away on her way home from her support group. They’ve reached a tacit kind of understanding about the days where Will just doesn’t cook dinner, the days where he barely makes it downstairs to pour himself a bowl of cereal at two in the afternoon. Sometimes, she’ll come and sit on his bed, and just stroke his hair for a few minutes. It makes Will feel both very young and very old, and although it does pull him out of the fog clouding his mind for a few minutes at a time, he mostly just wishes she would leave him alone. If he lies motionless and silent for long enough, he falls asleep; and when he’s asleep, he dreams.
Sometimes, half-waking from a fitful nap, his whole world doused in shadows and lights, Will thinks he sees her; hears her voice, calling out to him, trying to reach him - he shouts back, or tries to, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly, his throat aching and raw. Maybe the walls dividing their worlds are still weak; maybe there’s an occasional tiny chink in the air between them; maybe he’s just dreaming.
Maybe it doesn’t make a difference.
***
V.
There’s a sleepy, lazy hush in the Botanical Gardens; the undergraduates are packing up their rooms for the summer, or sleeping off the celebrations of the night before; the gardeners are taking their work one slow step at a time, enjoying the sunshine and the birdsong; there are never too many visitors, but today it seems especially quiet, especially still. Lyra picks her way through the beds of plants nimbly, feet quick and sure of the old, familiar path – past the pine tree, through the stone wall and into the newer gardens, past the little bridge with the lazy, cool water splashing against her ankles when she dodges over the stepping stones, and –
She hasn’t been to this bench – her bench, in her Oxford – since before…Everything. In fact, Lyra thinks suddenly, her heart beating very fast against her chest – in fact, the last time she was here, she’d been hiding from a gang of Emmanuel kids, when their game of kids-and-Gobblers had taken them all the way into the Botanical Gardens.
Kids and Gobblers, Jordan College, Emmanuel College, college kids and townies and Gyptians… The chase, the capture, the struggle and the triumphant escape – they’d done it all, gone through every motion, always practising for the real world, for the real wars they’d fight, someday. And when night fell and dinner bells sounded, they were all just kids, grubby feet and skinned knees and the promise of a pie when they came back to the college kitchen.
There’s none of that noise and squabble today, though; today it’s just her, and the age-worn wood of the bench, sun-warmed to the touch, and Pan darting through the poplar trees lining this part of the garden. It’s ten minutes to twelve; she’s been good, she’s kept herself busy all morning, even though she’s been itching for what feels like hours to just come here, and wait – for what, she’s not even quite sure.
*
The Botanical Gardens are swarmed with tour groups, and families, and noisy crowds of students enjoying the sudden burst of sunshine after three days of thunderstorms – the air is filled with shouts of laughter and the babble of dozens of simultaneous conversations, but they’ve all faded to a muted blur.
Will’s been sitting on the bench for the last three hours, alternately scuffing his shoes in the dirt and trying to read the interminably dull book he’s brought with him. His wristwatch tells him that there are just five more minutes to go – five minutes until… Something happens. He’s been waiting for so long – it feels like he hasn’t stopped waiting since the day he shattered the knife – and now the day is finally here, Will feels suddenly uneasy.
Five minutes, and then an hour of something, and then… A whole year of waiting, another eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours of this – this nothingness, the dull, shapeless fog that has settled over his days and sunk into his bones.
What if nothing happens? What if he doesn’t feel any different?
And what if he does?
*
It’s twelve o’clock.
Nothing changes, not really. Lyra imagines she feels the wind settle a little bit, the hushed silence sharpening into something almost sacred, but she knows that’s all her.
Still, she smiles, and lets her right hand rest lightly on the wooden slats of the bench, flexing her fingers.
“Pan.” Lyra’s voice is soft, but Pantalaimon comes scampering towards her immediately, a blur of red-gold familiarity, flowing onto her lap and pressing his snout against her ear. She squirms and giggles, and then they’re both silent again, the girl and her dæmon sitting on the bench, just…listening.
*
It’s twelve o’clock.
The babble around Will seems to grow to a roar, rushing through his eardrums; he closes his eyes, shutting it all out, and it seems to at least fade into an indistinct rumble.
He grits his teeth, and rests his left hand on the bench, his remaining fingers curling into a tight fist around the long-healed wounds.
When he opens his eyes again, it’s to see a grey shape detach itself from the poplar trees that line this part of the garden; and Kirjava comes slinking towards him, her eyes dark and unblinking and filled with breath-taking familiarity. She climbs onto his knees with an impossibly well-practised ease, and butts her head against his chin.
Will laughs, and the sound of his own voice startles him; some of the tension eases out of his shoulder-blades, and he lets the fingers of his right hand run through his dæmon’s coat, feeling for the first time in almost a year like he can just….be here.
*
At one o’clock, Lyra hears the church bells start to chime the hour, and it feels like waking from the most restful sleep she’s ever slept.
She flexes her fingers against the bench for a moment longer, and for a heartbeat of imagination she feels a ghost of a touch against her hand, three smooth fingers and the callused stumps where two were cut away –
Lyra holds it for as long as the impressions lasts, and then stands up.
“See you next year,” she says, her voice sounding strange and unused; and then she feels slightly ridiculous. In the ringing silence, though, it feels – alright.
*
At one o’clock, Will’s wristwatch starts beeping, and all at once the energy that’s been thrumming through him for the last hour seems to dissipate. He feels wide awake, more awake than he has in almost a year, but he knows that sitting here any longer won’t do anything to keep the alertness alive in him.
He flexes his fingers against the smooth, sun-warmed slats of the bench, and for what feels like a heart-stopping eternity, there’s a hint of an imprint there, a small, warm hand closing over his –
Will stays absolutely still until the feeling goes again, as quickly as it had arrived, and then stands up.
“See you in a year, then,” he says quietly, smiling when Kirjava rubs her cheek against his shins. She hasn’t said anything yet, but he knows instinctively that she’ll be coming home with him now, that she’s seen enough of this world for the moment. That she’s ready to be here, with him.
Will starts walking away from the bench then, his eyes on the stone wall and the world beyond it, Kirjava padding along beside him. And breathes in.
*
Lyra starts walking away from the bench, her head bowed, Pantalaimon pressed against her breast. And breathes out.