As the moon rose, the witches began their spell to heal Will's wound.

They woke him and asked him to lie the knife on the ground where it caught a glitter of starlight. Lyra sat nearby stirring some herbs in a pot of boiling water over a fire, and while her companions clapped and stamped and cried in rhythm, Serafina crouched over the knife and sang in a high, fierce tone:

"Little knife!

They tore your iron out of Mother Earth's entrails,

built a fire and boiled the ore,

made it weep and bleed and flood,

hammered it and tempered it,

plunging it in icy water,

heating it inside the forge

till your blade was blood-red, scorching!

Then they made you wound the water

once again, and yet again,

till the steam was boiling fog

and the water cried for mercy.

And when you sliced a single shade

into thirty thousand shadows,

then they knew that you were ready,

then they called you subtle one.

But little knife, what have you done?

Unlocked blood-gates, left them wide!

Little knife, your mother calls you,

from the entrails of the earth,

from her deepest mines and caverns,

from her secret iron womb.

Listen!"

And Serafina stamped again and clapped her hands with the other witches, and they shook their throats to make a wild ululation that tore at the air like claws. Will, seated in the middle of them, felt a chill at the core of his spine.

Then Serafina Pekkala turned to Will himself, and took his wounded hand in both of hers. When she sang this time, he nearly flinched, so fierce was her high, clear voice, so glittering her eyes; but he sat without moving, and let the spell go on.

"Blood! Obey me! Turn around,

be a lake and not a river.

When you reach the open air,

stop! And build a clotted wall,

build it firm to hold the flood back.

Blood, your sky is the skull-dome,

your sun is the open eye,

your wind the breath inside the lungs,

blood, your world is bounded. Stay there!"

Will thought he could feel all the atoms of his body responding to her command, and he joined in, urging his leaking blood to listen and obey.

She put his hand down and turned to the little iron pot over the fire. A bitter steam was rising from it, and Will heard the liquid bubbling fiercely.

Serafina sang:

"Oak bark, spider silk,

ground moss, saltweed—

grip close, bind tight,

hold fast, close up,

bar the door, lock the gate,

stiffen the blood-wall,

dry the gore-flood."

Then the witch took her own knife and split an alder sapling along its whole length. The wounded whiteness gleamed open in the moon. She daubed some of the steaming liquid into the split, then closed up the wood, easing it together from the root to the tip. And the sapling was whole again.

Will heard Lyra gasp, and turned to see another witch holding a squirming, struggling hare in her tough hands. The animal was panting, wild-eyed, kicking furiously, but the witch's hands were merciless. In one she held its forelegs and with the other she grasped its hind legs and pulled the frenzied hare out straight, its heaving belly upward.

Serafina's knife swept across it. Will felt himself grow dizzy, and Lyra was restraining Pantalaimon, hare-formed himself in sympathy, who was bucking and snapping in her arms. The real hare fell still, eyes bulging, breast heaving, entrails glistening.

But Serafina took some more of the decoction and trickled it into the gaping wound, and then closed up the wound with her fingers, smoothing the wet fur over it until there was no wound at all.

The witch holding the animal relaxed her grip and let it gently to the ground, where it shook itself, turned to lick its flank, flicked its ears, and nibbled a blade of grass as if it were completely alone. Suddenly it seemed to become aware of the circle of witches around it, and like an arrow it shot away, whole again, bounding swiftly off into the dark.

Lyra, soothing Pantalaimon, glanced at Will and saw that he knew what it meant: the medicine was ready. He held out his hand, and as Serafina daubed the steaming mixture on the bleeding stumps of his fingers he looked away and breathed in sharply several times, but he didn't flinch.

Once his open flesh was thoroughly soaked, the witch pressed some of the sodden herbs onto the wounds and tied them tight around with a strip of silk. And that was it; the spell was done.

 

Will slept deeply through the rest of the night. It was cold, but the witches piled leaves over him, and Lyra slept huddled close behind his back. In the morning Serafina dressed his wound again, and he tried to see from her expression whether it was healing, but her face was calm and impassive.

Once they'd eaten, Serafina told the children that the witches had agreed that since they'd come into this world to find Lyra and be her guardians, they'd help Lyra do what she now knew her task to be: namely, to guide Will to his father.

So they all set off; and it was quiet going for the most part. Lyra consulted the alethiometer to begin with, but warily, and learned that they should travel in the direction of the distant mountains they could see across the great bay. Never having been this high above the city, they weren't aware of how the coastline curved, and the mountains had been below the horizon; but now when the trees thinned, or when a slope fell away below them, they could look out to the empty blue sea and to the high blue mountains beyond, which were their destination. It seemed a long way to go.

They spoke little. Lyra was busy looking at all the life in the forest, from woodpeckers to squirrels to little green moss snakes with diamonds down their backs, and Will needed all his energy simply to keep going. Lyra and Pantalaimon discussed him endlessly.

"We could look at the alethiometer," Pantalaimon said at one point when they'd dawdled on the path to see how close they could get to a browsing fawn before it saw them. "We never promised not to. And we could find out all kinds of things for him. We'd be doing it for him, not for us."

"Don't be stupid," Lyra said. "It would be us we'd be doing it for, 'cause he'd never ask. You're just greedy and nosy, Pan."

"That makes a change. It's normally you who's greedy and nosy, and me who has to warn you not to do things. Like in the retiring room at Jordan. I never wanted to go in there."

"If we hadn't, Pan, d'you think all this would have happened?"

"No. 'Cause the Master would have poisoned Lord Asriel, and that would've been the end of it."

"Yeah, I suppose… Who d'you think Will's father is, though? And why's he important?"

"That's what I mean! We could find out in a moment!"

And she looked wistful. "I might have done once," she said, "but I'm changing, I think, Pan."

"No you're not."

"You might not be… Hey, Pan, when I change, you'll stop changing. What're you going to be?"

"A flea, I hope."

"No, but don't you get any feelings about what you might be?"

"No. I don't want to, either."

"You're sulking because I won't do what you want."

He changed into a pig and grunted and squealed and snorted till she laughed at him, and then he changed into a squirrel and darted through the branches beside her.

"Who do you think his father is?" Pantalaimon said. "D'you think he could be anyone we met?"

"Could be. But he's bound to be someone important, almost as important as Lord Asriel. Bound to be. We know what we're doing is important, after all."

"We don't know it," Pantalaimon pointed out. "We think it is, but we don't know. We just decided to look for Dust because Roger died."

"We know it's important!" Lyra said hotly, and she even stamped her foot. "And so do the witches. They come all this way to look for us just to be my guardians and help me! And we got to help Will find his father. That's important. You know it is, too, else you wouldn't have licked him when he was wounded. Why'd you do that, anyway? You never asked me if you could. I couldn't believe it when you did that."

"I did it because he didn't have a daemon, and he needed one. And if you were half as good at seeing things as you think you are, you'd've known that."

"I did know it, really," she said.

They stopped then, because they had caught up with Will, who was sitting on a rock beside the path. Pantalaimon became a flycatcher, and as he flew among the branches, Lyra said, "Will, what d'you think those kids'll do now?"

"They won't be following us. They were too frightened of the witches. Maybe they'll just go back to drifting about."

"Yeah, probably. They might want to use the knife, though. They might come after us for that."

"Let them. They're not having it, not now. I didn't want it at first. But if it can kill the Specters…"

"I never trusted Angelica, not from the beginning," Lyra said virtuously.

"Yes, you did," he said.

"Yeah. I did, really… I hated it in the end, that city."

"I thought it was heaven when I first found it. I couldn't imagine anything better than that. And all the time it was full of Specters, and we never knew…"

"Well, I won't trust kids again," said Lyra. "I thought back at Bolvangar that whatever grownups did, however bad it was, kids were different. They wouldn't do cruel things like that. But I en't sure now. I never seen kids like that before, and that's a fact."

"I have," said Will.

"When? In your world?"

"Yeah," he said, awkwardly. Lyra waited and sat still, and presently he went on. "It was when my mother was having one of her bad times. She and me, we lived on our own, see, because obviously my father wasn't there. And every so often she'd start thinking things that weren't true. And having to do things that didn't make sense—not to me, anyway. I mean she had to do them or else she'd get upset and afraid, and so I used to help her. Like touching all the railings in the park, or counting the leaves on a bush—that kind of thing. She used to get better after a while. But I was afraid of anyone finding out she was like that, because I thought they'd take her away, so I used to look after her and hide it. I never told anyone."

"And once she got afraid when I wasn't there to help her. I was at school. And she went out and she wasn't wearing very much, only she didn't know. And some boys from my school, they found her, and they started…"

Will's face was hot. Without being able to help it he found himself walking up and down and looking away from Lyra because his voice was unsteady and his eyes were watering. He went on: "They were tormenting her just like those kids at the tower with the cat… They thought she was mad and they wanted to hurt her, maybe kill her, I wouldn't be surprised. She was just different and they hated her. Anyway, I found her and I got her home. And the next day in school I fought the boy who was leading them. I fought him and I broke his arm and I think I broke some of his teeth—I don't know. And I was going to fight the rest of them, too, but I got in trouble and I realized I better stop because they'd find out—I mean the teachers and the authorities. They'd go to my mother and complain about me, and then they'd find out about how she was and take her away. So I just pretended to be sorry and told the teachers I wouldn't do it again, and they punished me for fighting and I still said nothing. But I kept her safe, see. No one knew apart from those boys, and they knew what I'd do if they said anything; they knew I'd kill them another time. Not just hurt them. And a bit later she got better again. No one knew, ever."

"But after that I never trusted children any more than grownups. They're just as keen to do bad things. So I wasn't surprised when those kids in Ci'gazze did that."

"But I was glad when the witches came."

He sat down again with his back to Lyra and, still not looking at her, he wiped his hand across his eyes. She pretended not to see.

"Will," she said, "what you said about your mother… and Tullio, when the Specters got him… and when you said yesterday that you thought the Specters came from your world…"

"Yes. Because it doesn't make sense, what was happening to her. She wasn't mad. Those kids might think she was mad and laugh at her and try to hurt her, but they were wrong; she wasn't mad. Except that she was afraid of things I couldn't see. And she had to do things that looked crazy; you couldn't see the point of them, but obviously she could. Like her counting all the leaves, or Tullio yesterday touching the stones in the wall. Maybe that was a way of trying to put the Specters off. If they turned their back on something frightening behind them and tried to get really interested in the stones and how they fit together, or the leaves on the bush, like if only they could make themselves find that really important, they'd be safe. I don't know. It looks like that. There were real things for her to be frightened of, like those men who came and robbed us, but there was something else as well as them. So maybe we do have the Specters in my world, only we can't see them and we haven't got a name for them, but they're there, and they keep trying to attack my mother. So that's why I was glad yesterday when the alethiometer said she was all right."

He was breathing fast, and his right hand was gripping the handle of the knife in its sheath. Lyra said nothing, and Pantalaimon kept very still.

"When did you know you had to look for your father?" she said after a while.

"A long time ago," he told her. "I used to pretend he was a prisoner and I'd help him escape. I had long games by myself doing that; it used to go on for days. Or else he was on this desert island and I'd sail there and bring him home. And he'd know exactly what to do about everything—about my mother, especially—and she'd get better and he'd look after her and me and I could just go to school and have friends and I'd have a mother and a father, too. So I always said to myself that when I grew up I'd go and look for my father… And my mother used to tell me that I was going to take up my father's mantle. She used to say that to make me feel good. I didn't know what it meant, but it sounded important."

"Didn't you have friends?"

"How could I have friends?" he said, simply puzzled. "Friends… They come to your house and they know your parents and… Sometimes a boy might ask me around to his house, and I might go or I might not, but I could never ask him back. So I never had friends, really. I would have liked… I had my cat," he went on. "I hope she's all right now. I hope someone's looking after her."

"What about the man you killed?" Lyra said, her heart beating hard. "Who was he?"

"I don't know. If I killed him, I don't care. He deserved it. There were two of them. They kept coming to the house and pestering my mother till she was afraid again, and worse than ever. They wanted to know all about my father, and they wouldn't leave her alone. I'm not sure if they were police or what. I thought at first they were part of a gang or something, and they thought my father had robbed a bank, maybe, and hidden the money. But they didn't want money; they wanted papers. They wanted some letters that my father had sent. They broke into the house one day, and then I saw it would be safer if my mother was somewhere else. See, I couldn't go to the police and ask them for help, because they'd take my mother away. I didn't know what to do."

"So in the end I asked this old lady who used to teach me the piano. She was the only person I could think of. I asked her if my mother could stay with her, and I took her there. I think she'll look after her all right. Anyway, I went back to the house to look for these letters, because I knew where she kept them, and I got them, and the men came to look and broke into the house again. It was nighttime, or early morning. And I was hiding at the top of the stairs and Moxie—my cat, Moxie—she came out of the bedroom. And I didn't see her, nor did the man, and when I knocked into him she tripped him up, and he fell right to the bottom of the stairs…"

"And I ran away. That's all that happened. So I didn't mean to kill him, but I don't care if I did. I ran away and went to Oxford and then I found that window. And that only happened because I saw the other cat and stopped to watch her, and she found the window first. If I hadn't seen her… or if Moxie hadn't come out of the bedroom then…"

"Yeah," said Lyra, "that was lucky. And me and Pan were thinking just now, what if I'd never gone into the wardrobe in the retiring room at Jordan and seen the Master put poison in the wine? None of this would have happened either."

 Both of them sat silent on the moss-covered rock in the slant of sunlight through the old pines and thought how many tiny chances had conspired to bring them to this place. Each of those chances might have gone a different way. Perhaps in another world, another Will had not seen the window in Sunderland Avenue, and had wandered on tired and lost toward the Midlands until he was caught. And in another world another Pantalaimon had persuaded another Lyra not to stay in the retiring room, and another Lord Asriel had been poisoned, and another Roger had survived to play with that Lyra forever on the roofs and in the alleys of another unchanging Oxford.

Presently Will was strong enough to go on, and they moved together along the path, with the great forest quiet around them.

 

They traveled on through the day, resting, moving, resting again, as the trees grew thinner and the land more rocky. Lyra checked the alethiometer: Keep going, it said; this is the right direction. At noon they came to a village untroubled by Specters. Goats pastured on the hillside, a grove of lemon trees cast shade on the stony ground, and children playing in the stream called out and ran for their mothers at the sight of the girl in the tattered clothing, and the white-faced, fierce-eyed boy in the bloodstained shirt, and the elegant greyhound that walked beside them.

The grownups were wary but willing to sell some bread and cheese and fruit for one of Lyra's gold coins. The witches kept out of the way, though both children knew they'd be there in a second if any danger threatened. After another round of Lyra's bargaining, one old woman sold them two flasks of goatskin and a fine linen shirt, and Will renounced his filthy T-shirt with relief, washing himself in the icy stream and lying to dry in the hot sun afterward.

Refreshed, they moved on. The land was harsher now; for shade they had to rest in the shadow of rocks, not under wide-spreading trees, and the ground underfoot was hot through the soles of their shoes. The sun pounded at their eyes. They moved more and more slowly as they climbed, and when the sun touched the mountain rims and they saw a little valley open below them, they decided to go no farther.

They scrambled down the slope, nearly losing their footing more than once, and then had to shove their way through thickets of dwarf rhododendrons whose dark glossy leaves and crimson flower clusters were heavy with the hum of bees. They came out in the evening shade on a wild meadow bordering a stream. The grass was knee-high and thi............