He turned to Serafina and said as steadily as he could, “Thank you, Serafina Pekkala, for rescuing us at the belvedere, and for everything else. Please be kind to Lyra for as long as she lives. I love her more than anyone has ever been loved.”
In answer the witch queen kissed him on both cheeks. Lyra had been whispering to Mary, and then they, too, embraced, and first Mary and then Will stepped through the last window, back into their own world, in the shade of the trees of the Botanic Garden.
Being cheerful starts now, Will thought as hard as he could, but it was like trying to hold a fighting wolf still in his arms when it wanted to claw at his face and tear out his throat; nevertheless, he did it, and he thought no one could see the effort it cost him.
And he knew that Lyra was doing the same, and that the tightness and strain in her smile were the signs of it.
Nevertheless, she smiled.
One last kiss, rushed and clumsy so that they banged cheekbones, and a tear from her eye was transferred to his face; their two dæmons kissed farewell, and Pantalaimon flowed over the threshold and up into Lyra’s arms; and then Will began to close the window, and then it was done, the way was closed, Lyra was gone.
“Now—” he said, trying to sound matter-of-fact, but having to turn away from Mary all the same, “I’ve got to break the knife.”
He searched the air in the familiar way until he found a gap, and tried to bring to mind just what had happened before. He had been about to cut a way out of the cave, and Mrs. Coulter had suddenly and unaccountably reminded him of his mother, and the knife had broken because, he thought, it had at last met something it couldn’t cut, and that was his love for her.
So he tried it now, summoning an image of his mother’s face as he’d last seen her, fearful and distracted in Mrs. Cooper’s little hallway.
But it didn’t work. The knife cut easily through the air and opened into a world where they were having a rainstorm: heavy drops hurtled through, startling them both. He closed it again quickly and stood puzzled for a moment.
His dæmon knew what he should do, and said simply, “Lyra.”
Of course. He nodded, and with the knife in his right hand, he pressed with his left the spot where her tear still lay on his cheek.
And this time, with a wrenching crack, the knife shattered and the blade fell in pieces to the ground, to glitter on the stones that were still wet with the rain of another universe.
Will knelt to pick them up carefully, Kirjava with her cat eyes helping to find them all.
Mary was shouldering her rucksack.
“Well,” she said, “well, listen now, Will. We’ve hardly spoken, you and I . . . So we’re still strangers, largely. But Serafina Pekkala and I made a promise to each other, and I made a promise to Lyra just now, and even if I hadn’t made any other promises, I’d make a promise to you about the same thing, which is that if you’ll let me, I’ll be your friend for the rest of our lives. We’re both on our own, and I reckon we could both do with that sort of . . . What I mean to say is, there isn’t anyone else we can talk to about all this, except each other . . . And we’ve both got to get used to living with our dæmons, too . . . And we’re both in trouble, and if that doesn’t give us something in common, I don’t know what will.”
“You’re in trouble?” said Will, looking at her. Her open, friendly, clever face looked back directly.
“Well, I smashed up some property in the lab before I left, and I forged an identity card, and . . . It’s nothing we can’t deal with. And your trouble—we can deal with that, too. We can find your mother and get her some proper treatment. And if you need somewhere to live, well, if you wouldn’t mind living with me, if we can arrange that, then you won’t have to go into, whatever they call it, into care. I mean, we’ll have to decide on a story and stick to it, but we could do that, couldn’t we?”
Mary was a friend. He had a friend. It was true. He’d never thought of that.
“Yes!” he said.
“Well, let’s do it. My flat’s about half a mile away, and you know what I’d like most of all in the world? I’d like a cup of tea. Come on, let’s go and put the kettle on.”
Three weeks after the moment Lyra had watched Will’s hand closing his world away forever, she found herself seated once more at that dinner table in Jordan College where she had first fallen under the spell of Mrs. Coulter.
This time it was a smaller party: just herself and the Master and Dame Hannah Relf, the head of St. Sophia’s, one of the women’s colleges. Dame Hannah had been at that first dinner, too, and if Lyra was surprised to see her here now, she greeted her politely, and found that her memory was at fault: for this Dame Hannah was much cleverer, and more interesting, and kindlier by far than the dim and frumpy person she remembered.
All kinds of things had happened while Lyra was away—to Jordan College, to England, to the whole world. It seemed that the power of the Church had increased greatly, and that many brutal laws had been passed, but that the power had waned as quickly as it had grown: upheavals in the Magisterium had toppled the zealots and brought more liberal factions into power. The General Oblation Board had been dissolved; the Consistorial Court of Discipline was confused and leaderless.
And the colleges of Oxford, after a brief and turbulent interlude, were settling back into the calm of scholarship and ritual. Some things had gone: the Master’s valuable collection of silver had been looted; some college servants had vanished. The Master’s manservant, Cousins, was still in place, however, and Lyra had been ready to meet his hostility with defiance, for they had been enemies as long as she could remember. She was quite taken aback when he greeted her so warmly and shook her hand with both of his: was that affection in his voice? Well, he had changed.