“But they might still be after you,” she said. “Those men.”
“We’ve seen worse than them, after all.”
“Yes, I suppose… But I wanted to show you Jordan College, and the Fens. I wanted us to…”
“Yeah,” he said, “and I wanted… It would be good to go to Cittаgazze again, even. It was a beautiful place, and if the Specters are all gone… But there’s my mother. I’ve got to go back and look after her. I just left her with Mrs. Cooper, and it’s not fair on either of them.”
“But it’s not fair on you to have to do that.”
“No,” he said, “but that’s a different sort of not fair. That’s just like an earthquake or a rainstorm. It might not be fair, but no one’s to blame. But if I just leave my mother with an old lady who isn’t very well herself, then that’s a different kind of not fair. That would be wrong. I’ve just got to go home. But probably it’s going to be difficult to go back as we were. Probably the secret’s out now. I don’t suppose Mrs. Cooper will have been able to look after her, not if my mother’s in one of those times when she gets frightened of things. So she’s probably had to get help, and when I go back, I’ll be made to go into some kind of institution.”
“No! Like an orphanage?”
“I think that’s what they do. I just don’t know. I’ll hate it.”
“You could escape with the knife, Will! You could come to my world!”
“I still belong there, where I can be with her. When I’m grown up I’ll be able to look after her properly, in my own house. No one can interfere then.”
“D’you think you’ll get married?”
He was quiet for a long time. She knew he was thinking, though.
“I can’t see that far ahead,” he said. “It would have to be someone who understands about… I don’t think there’s anyone like that in my world. Would you get married?”
“Me too,” she said. “Not to anyone in my world, I shouldn’t think.”
They walked on steadily, wandering toward the horizon. They had all the time in the world: all the time the world had.
After a while Lyra said, “You will keep the knife, won’t you? So you could visit my world?”
“Of course. I certainly wouldn’t give it to anyone else, ever.”
“Don’t look – ” she said, not altering her pace. “There they are again. On the left.”
“They are following us,” said Will, delighted.
“Shh!”
“I thought they would. Okay, we’ll just pretend now, we’ll just wander along as if we’re looking for them, and we’ll look in all sorts of stupid places.”
It became a game. They found a pond and searched among the reeds and in the mud, saying loudly that the daemons were bound to be shaped like frogs or water beetles or slugs; they peeled off the bark of a long‑fallen tree at the edge of a string‑wood grove, pretending to have seen the two daemons creeping underneath it in the form of earwigs; Lyra made a great fuss of an ant she claimed to have trodden on, sympathizing with its bruises, saying its face was just like Pan’s, asking in mock sorrow why it was refusing to speak to her.
But when she thought they were genuinely out of earshot, she said earnestly to Will, leaning close to speak quietly:
“We had to leave them, didn’t we? We didn’t have a choice really?”
“Yes, we had to. It was worse for you than for me, but we didn’t have any choice at all. Because you made a promise to Roger, and you had to keep it.”
“And you had to speak to your father again…”
“And we had to let them all out.”
“Yes, we did. I’m so glad we did. Pan will be glad one day, too, when I die. We won’t be split up. It was a good thing we did.”
As the sun rose higher in the sky and the air became warmer, they began to look for shade. Toward noon they found themselves on the slope rising toward the summit of a ridge, and when they’d reached it, Lyra flopped down on the grass and said, “Well! If we don’t find somewhere shady soon…”
There was a valley leading down on the other side, and it was thick with bushes, so they guessed there might be a stream as well. They traversed the slope of the ridge till it dipped into the head of the valley, and there, sure enough, among ferns and reeds, a spring bubbled out of the rock.
They dipped their hot faces in the water and swallowed gratefully, and then they followed the stream downward, seeing it gather in miniature whirlpools and pour over tiny ledges of stone, and all the time get fuller and wider.
“How does it do that?” Lyra marveled. “There’s no more water coming into it from anywhere else, but there’s so much more of it here than up there.”
Will, watching the shadows out of the corner of his eye, saw them slip ahead, leaping over the ferns to disappear into the bushes farther down. He pointed silently.
“It just goes slower,” he said. “It doesn’t flow as fast as the spring comes out, so it gathers in these pools…They’ve gone in there,” he whispered, indicating a little group of trees at the foot of the slope.
They looked at each other, a curiously formal and serious look, before setting off to follow the stream. The undergrowth got thicker as they went down the valley; the stream went into tunnels of green and emerged in dappled clearings, only to tumble over a lip of stone and bury itself in the green again, and they had to follow it as much by hearing as by sight.
At the foot of the hill, it ran into the little wood of silver‑barked trees.
Father Gomez watched from the top of the ridge. It hadn’t been hard to follow them; despite Mary’s confidence in the open savanna, there was plenty of concealment in the grass and the occasional thickets of string‑wood and sap‑lacquer bushes. The two young people had spent a lot of time earlier looking all around as if they thought they were being followed. He had had to keep some distance away, but as the morning passed, they became more and more absorbed in each other and paid less attention to the landscape.
The one thing he didn’t want to do was hurt the boy. He had a horror of harming an innocent person. The only way to make sure of his target was to get close enough to see her clearly, which meant following them into the wood.
Quietly and cautiously he moved down the course of the stream. His daemon the green‑backed beetle flew overhead, tasting the air; her eyesight was less good than his, but her sense of smell was acute, and she caught the scent of the young people’s flesh very clearly. She would go a little ahead, perch on a stem of grass, and wait for him, then move on again; and as she caught the trail in the air that their bodies left behind, Father Gomez found himself praising God for his mission, because it was clearer than ever that the boy and the girl were walking into mortal sin.
He watched them go in among the trees. They hadn’t looked back once since coming over the top of the ridge, but he still kept low, moving down the stream at a crouch, holding the rifle in one hand, balancing with the other.
He was so close to success now that for the first time he found himself speculating on what he would do afterward, and whether he would please the Kingdom of Heaven more by going back to Geneva or staying to evangelize this world. The first thing to do here would be to convince the four‑legged creatures, who seemed to have the rudiments of reason, that their habit of riding on wheels was abominable and Satanic, and contrary to the will of God. Break them of that, and salvation would follow.
He reached the foot of the slope, where the trees began, and laid the rifle down silently.
He gazed into the silver‑green‑gold shadows, and listened, with both hands behind his ears to catch and focus any quiet voices through the insect chirping and the trickle of the stream. Yes: there they were. They’d stopped.
He bent to pick up the rifle –
And found himself uttering a hoarse and breathless gasp, as something clutched his daemon and pulled her away from him.