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“I don’t remember the North being this cold,” Lyra said brightly to Pantalaimon, fidgeting from foot to foot in a bid to keep her toes flush with warm blood. She was standing by the wrought-iron railing of the Ivalo zeppelin station, her battered leather trunk dumped beside her in the fresh powder, her rucksack already leaving plum striations on her shoulders from its weight. She glanced around: aside from the cool steel of the zeppelin, all she could see was endless forest, the pine boughs laden with snow, fresh flakes still swirling in the air and dusting the coarse wool of her hat like icing sugar. In the distance was a mountain range, jagged black peaks capped with white, and between two of the crests the sky was still ablaze with the last vestiges of the arctic sun, a great bonfire crackling on the horizon. She took a deep breath in, and her lungs filled with the scent of crisp pine and the clean, sharp tang of ice. Lyra grinned.

Pan, however, was not grinning. In fact, he was twitching inside her jacket, his auburn brow furrowed, the same uncertainty marring his face as was afflicting the conductor, a balding man with kind, anxious eyes.

“Someone’s coming for me,” Lyra called out cheerfully, and the conductor gave her a relieved nod before heading back inside, the rumble of the zeppelin’s engines booting up again soon after, ready to return the craft to the clouds. She blew out a slow breath as she watched the ship disappear skywards, marvelling at the fog that emerged from her lips. She could already feel frost crystallising on her eyelashes.

From the moment she’d opened the letter three days ago, her name and address handwritten on thick cream card, she’d felt an odd kind of peace, knowing that a winter break spent in the North was the best antidote to the malaise she’d been feeling all term – all year, in fact. The letter had been signed by a Professor Drummond, who was stationed at the Lappish Institute for Arctic Research in Saariselkä, and offered her a position as a research assistant on their current project for the duration of her winter vacation, mapping the historical trading routes used by the different factions of the North and merchants from the continent. One of her tutors had proposed her for the job, apparently, knowing that Lyra’s final year project was about this very subject, and that a good grade on this report was vital to ensure her place as an Oxford undergraduate next autumn.

Pan had been worried, as he always was: that they didn’t know enough about the project, that it was rash to disappear North for six weeks only three days after receiving a mysterious summons, that they should talk to Hannah or the Master or Dr Campbell, her economics tutor and project advisor, who must have been the person that suggested her for this internship, no doubt her urgent call back to Caledonia to care for her ailing brother the reason she’d forgotten to mention it to Lyra.  

Lyra had simply raised an eyebrow as Pan raised his objections – they both knew that in the Master’s current state, their plans would have drifted out of his mind before they’d even left his chamber – and kept reading.

“Oh, Pan, this is perfect,” she said, ignoring him. “They’ll pay for everything!” A ticket slid out onto her lap. “This is for the airship to Ivalo, and then someone will meet me there and take us to the Institute. Because I’ll be working, the room and board will be free.” She hugged the letter to her chest and beamed. “Pan, this is brilliant. It’s going to be so much better than standing behind the kitchenware counter at Boswell’s.”

Pan hadn’t come around though, and had burrowed beneath Lyra’s blankets and sulked as she’d packed her bags, stuffing her case with her warmest hats and scarves and woollen leggings, assuming that the Institute would be able to kit her out with proper arctic gear, as she’d long grown out of the furs and sealskin boots she’d worn the last time she’d explored the North and hadn’t had the funds nor the need to replace them since. Then she’d begrudgingly packed her schoolbooks, along with two novels for the airship journey, and slipped the alethiometer into her trunk, Pan’s sighs echoing beneath the goose down of her duvet all the while.

He’d perked up a little as they’d left the greyscale squares of bare Brytish fields behind, the craft soon floating over the churning blackness of the sea and onto endless expanses of sparkling white ground, pearls crushed to dust and sprayed liberally across the horizon. Lyra had wondered if this is what she’d been missing all these years, having spent the bulk of her adolescence pushing down her memories of her half-wild childhood, stuffed into a St Sophia’s uniform, trying hard to convince herself that the icy draft that spooled through the library’s thin windows was as intoxicating a sensation as the raucous winds of the glittering unknown, that illicit parties and chemistry tests and her friends’ first kisses were as stirring as the sweeping, endless novelty of new world after new world, as zeppelins and bears and harpies and angels. The sight of the North materialising in front of her made it feel like five years of hard work was being unravelled like a loose thread on a cheap skirt, leaving her bare and shivering, but freer nonetheless. The sight of Pan’s ears pricking had emboldened her, though, and she’d held him to her chest and whispered excitedly about the weeks ahead, rambling about learning to mountaineer and negotiating with Tartars and making new friends, people who understood the call of the ice.

His feeble enthusiasm was already dimming, however, as he scoured the remote airship station and came up empty. “There’s no one here,” Pan said, his voice strained. Lyra’s pulse quickened as she stared at the dark building that stood perhaps a hundred metres away, the only light the cold gleam of two anbaric bulbs attached to the outside. With remote stations like this, the stops weren’t even manned.

Even with her gloves, her fingertips were already starting to ache. She shivered. “Someone will come, Pan,” she said, as dismissively as she could manage.

He pressed himself against her neck. “They’d better. Otherwise we’ll freeze. We’ll freeze to death alone in the North all because you wanted another adventure – ”

“That’s enough,” she snapped. “We’re not going to freeze. Someone sent that letter, Pan, and we know the Institute’s nearby. Someone’s coming. Of course they are.”

At that moment, twin headlights appeared in the distance, two lingering spots of bright sunlight as the night descended, and the blessed whirr of a vehicle filled her ears. “See!”

The shape was hard to distinguish in the encroaching darkness; it looked like a sled, but motorised somehow, and two figures were perched on it, their faces obscured by dark balaclavas and the collars of fawn fur coats. The anbaric craft pulled up outside the small building, the engine dying with a low whine, and Lyra felt the anxiety melt out of Pan, his small form becoming more like an additional scarf than a choker around her neck. She considered rubbing it in, chastising him for his pessimism, but thought better of it; they’d been arguing more and more these days, and teasing him only served to poke her own bruises.

The two people appeared from behind the small building, scarves wrapped around their faces to ward off the cold, and Lyra beamed at them, keen to make a good impression on her new colleagues. She was about to take a step towards the pair when their dæmons appeared behind them, and then Lyra’s mouth could do nothing but fall open, her heart starting to rattle in her chest as her gaze swept over a snow leopard and a golden monkey.

She blinked a few times, her breaths becoming harsh rasps, but each close of her eyes only served to bring them closer to her, until she could see each black spot that dotted the snow leopard’s silver coat. “No,” she breathed, and Pan was as frozen in shock as she was. “No, no, no. It can’t be – it can’t – ”

Then one of the figures pulled down their scarf and slipped off their hood, the gently falling snowflakes clinging to her dark curls, and Lyra found herself meeting her mother’s eyes for the first time in years, their last shared memory an embittered struggle in a Himalayan cave.

She looked pale, and there were more lines on her face than Lyra remembered, but it was unmistakably her, Mrs Coulter, her own mother, who she’d hated and feared and run from, time and time again, never quite managing to escape her clutches for good, even now. She was crying, and Lyra found tears in her eyes too, though from shock or anger or fear or relief she wasn’t sure.

“Lyra,” her mother said, choked with sobs, and the sound of the awful, lyrical voice that she’d so often cursed jerked her into action.

“No!” she cried out, stepping backwards, pressing a hand to her mouth. “No. No.”

“Lyra, my darling,” her mother said. “Look at you. Look at you.”

Tears spilled down Lyra’s cheeks, freezing before they could drip from her chin to the collar of her coat. “No. You’re dead. You’re dead.”

“Evidently not,” a rich voice said, her father pulling down his own balaclava and meeting her eyes with the unwavering force that still so defined his expressions. She continued to back away from them, shaking her head, Pan trembling at her neck.

“My love,” her mother said, rushing towards her, but Lyra stopped her with a snarl.

“Get away from me!” she said. She looked up at the sky, the zeppelin long departed. “No. This can’t be happening. I’m – I’m supposed to be meeting a professor – for a project – ”

The look her parents gave her then was one of mild disappointment, as if they’d expected a child of theirs to fit the pieces together more adeptly. “It was you,” she said, the terrible truth dawning on her. “You sent the letter. You – you tricked me!”

“We had to, my love, you see that, don’t you?” Mrs Coulter said. “You wouldn’t have come otherwise, and we did so want you to come, darling. Lyra, I can’t tell you how happy I am – to see you again – ” And then her mother was weeping, and the sight of it, of them, after all this time, made Lyra weep too. Her father shared a faint look of alarm with his dæmon.

“I don’t understand,” Lyra said, her voice trembling. She blinked several times further, waiting for them to disappear, for their bodies and souls to pale into ghosts before dissipating altogether, their presence before her simply a cruel trick of the Northern spirits. “What happened to you? Where you have been? We all assumed you were dead.”

Her mother nodded. “Of course you did, darling. Well, we have quite the tale for you, as I’m sure you have for us too. Come, dear, our cabin’s not that far from here, and then we can talk – ”

“I’m not coming with you!”

Her mother smiled then, though Lyra knew that smug sweetness to be lethal. “You don’t have a choice, I’m afraid.”

“I do. You can’t make me. I’ll – I’ll just wait here until the next airship gets here, and – ”

“That’s four days from now,” her father said gruffly. “You’ll freeze long before it arrives.”

Lyra faltered. “Oh.” She looked around; she could only see snow and forest and mountains, no signs of civilisation at all. The blaze of the setting sun was just a cluster of embers now, and most of the landscape had been blanketed by the blue-black darkness of the Arctic. “Well. I’ll find someone to take me to the Institute, then, or perhaps a nearby town…”

“The Institute’s a day’s trek from here by sled, a journey for which you have neither the equipment nor the skill to complete safely. And there are no towns for miles.”

Rage coursed through her, a burning sun vaporising a glacier. She glared at her parents. Her legs were shaking. “You had no right to do this, to trick me into coming here and then give me no choice but to come with you or die. That’s cruel.”

“Would you have come, if we’d told you the truth?”

“No!”

“Then you can’t really blame us, can you?” Mrs Coulter said, wiping away the shards of ice that had been her tears just minutes before. “Lyra, darling, I know this is a terrible shock. I wish we could have told you more gently, I do, but there was no other way, not if we were to see you again. Let’s go home, you’ll feel better after some tea and dose of warm air.”

“You’re insane if you think – ”

Lord Asriel gave a deep sigh, loud and brusque enough to halt Lyra’s latest objection, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. His gloves were black leather, worn and dark. “I have no patience for this, Lyra. You’re not going to stay here and die in the cold. I know you have better instincts than that. You’re going to come home with us, because that’s all you can do.” He folded his arms over his broad chest. “Let’s go. Now. The temperature drops swiftly after the sun sets.”

He turned and began to walk away, though Stelmaria didn’t join him until Lyra had picked up her trunk and started to follow, her mother alongside her, her awful dæmon’s baleful, black eyes anchored to Lyra’s face like he was a sailor afraid to look away from a lighthouse. Her father switched on the anbaric sled, the rumble of the engine punctuating the otherwise soundless air, and climbed into the front seat. Lyra noticed a neat depression at his feet, in which Stelmaria settled herself gracefully, his thighs holding her in place.

“What is this?” she said, her voice laced with suspicion.

He’d pulled up his balaclava again, but the skin around his eyes wrinkled with pride. “We call it a motorsledge.”

“Where did you get it?”

“We built it,” her mother said, climbing onto the back of the vehicle and gesturing to the space between them, brushing the flakes of fresh snow from the leather seat. “Come now, Lyra. You’re shivering.”

She stared at the space between her parents, then looked over her shoulder at the shadowy pine forest stretching out behind her; she could still run for it. When she turned back, her mother had a single eyebrow raised. Lyra deflated, then hooked her leg over the sled and held her trunk on her lap, Pan still tucked into her coat. The motorsledge began to move, sliding through the fresh powder like a hot knife through butter, and Lyra watched the airship station melt away, until it was just her and her parents speeding through the darkness, the only sounds the hum of the motor and Lyra’s sniffs as the cold wind whipped against her cheeks.

She wasn’t sure how long they drove for, but it was long enough for the cold to permeate her bones, her simple winter jacket utterly inadequate for the arctic temperatures. As she shuddered on the seat, jagged black shapes shooting past her as they zipped through the trees, she felt her mother shift forwards, and gently place her arms around Lyra’s quivering frame.

“Don’t touch me,” she snapped. She heard the golden monkey hiss quietly behind her, and she felt such fury towards the nasty creature that she considered flinging him from the sled, imagining a gold blur shooting through the air before being extinguished forever, lost in the unending darkness of the forest. Pan stroked his muzzle across her pulse point, doing his best to soothe her. She patted him through the fur of her coat and shuffled forwards, widening the gap between her and her mother.

They forged on. The brilliant moon hung high in the sky, dousing the scene in a silver glow, so bright that only a few weak stars and the occasional seafoam wisp of the aurora were able to infiltrate its light above them. Stelmaria’s head sparkled under the moonbeams as she looked up to appreciate the view, her wet nose gleaming, her elegant profile beautiful and cold and brutal as she bared her teeth to imbibe the frigid air. Lyra hadn’t thought of her in a long time; now, she wondered how she’d ever forgotten the snow leopard’s grace, her father’s dæmon even more magnetic and commanding than he was.

“Not much further now,” Stelmaria said, as if she could hear Lyra’s thoughts. Pan poked his head out to look at her.

Her parents’ cabin truly was in the middle of nowhere, and that gave Lyra a sense of petty satisfaction. This is what they deserve, she thought, to be banished to an especially cold, especially cruel part of the coldest, cruellest region of the planet, forced to hide away and cower in obscurity, their beloved spotlights snuffed for good. She imagined a shack, a collection of derelict pine logs, the trunks infested with woodworms, leaving holes in the walls that let the glacial air fill their sparse rooms. She imagined them spending their days in silence, not enough possessions or purpose to detract from the memories of the terrible things they’d done, forced to reckon with themselves and each other in a place where nothing and no one with warm, whooshing blood and a vigorous beating heart could survive. These thoughts calmed her somewhat. It would be awful to spend even a few days in their hovel, of course, but then she could leave, sprint back to Jordan’s regal wood and soft furnishings and aroma of timeworn leather and limestone, and they’d be forced to remain here together, exiled and embittered, slowly turning to ice.

But Lyra was no stranger to all the ways that life could be woefully unfair, and as a looming structure appeared at the top of a snow-soaked hill, perched upon a gaunt, black crag, she realised that her visions of her parents’ righteous destitution were merely a fantasy. Their house was made of thick cedar logs, reddish-brown and robust, with sprawling glass windows that looked out over the arboreal valley beneath. There was a wide deck with an elaborate telescope perched on it, and smoke was curling towards the sky from a grand chimney. It reminded her of her father’s Svalbard laboratory, the last place she’d exchanged a word with him, half a decade ago. She swallowed, peering back behind her. She had no doubt that this spot between her parents was just as perilous as the frigid arctic wilderness.

Her mother ushered her inside while her father parked their sled beneath an awning and attached it to a buzzing generator. The cabin was lit by buttery naphtha lamps and full of dark wood furniture, a wide slab of a dining table, overflowing bookcases, and shelves dotted with various artefacts, compasses and a thick aluminium torch and celestial maps. The kitchen was dominated by a cast-iron stove, upon which her mother placed the kettle before she unwound her scarf and unbuttoned her coat. Lyra took a wary seat at the table, her rucksack still on her back.

“Why don’t you take off your coat, hmm?” her mother said. “It’s damp from the snow and I don’t want you to catch a chill. Here.” She picked up a blanket from the arm of the corduroy sofa and held it out to Lyra.

Lyra didn’t move. She merely fixed her mother with her most vacant glare, doing everything she could to tame her shivers through sheer stubbornness. Lyra had forgotten, though, that she’d learned that bland, imperious stare from her father, and therefore that her mother knew exactly what to do with it. She came over and leaned against the table, stroking Lyra’s frozen cheek with her soft fingers. Lyra forced herself to flinch, but it didn’t fool Mrs Coulter, Lyra’s skin far too cold to truly abhor the warm touch of another. Her mother smiled.

It had been one thing to meet her mother’s eyes at the barren airship station, but now, her layers shed and her hair and face and form revealed once more, Lyra felt like she was being blindsided by her parents’ inexplicable survival all over again. Her mother was wearing a rich, dark dress, the colour of red wine, that Lyra could swear she remembered from the London apartment all those years ago, though surely that was impossible, and her stockings were the same vivid black as her dæmon’s eyes. Her soft curls were unmistakeable, as was that disarmingly honeyed smile. Lyra could only blink as her mother pressed her palms to Lyra’s face, her resurrection still the most unsettling mirage, a polluted oasis after years spent parched in a desert.

“You’re so cold, my love. Please take off your coat.”

It sounded so reasonable that Lyra almost did so. Then her father barrelled into the cabin, Stelmaria shaking the snowflakes from her fur, and Lyra shook her head as if emerging from a trance, and brushed her mother’s hands away.

Mrs Coulter brewed three steaming mugs of tea while Lyra’s father removed his furs and lit a fire in the great stone fireplace. She placed one in front of Lyra, the wisps of steam curling up in front of Lyra like a spectre, and then sat opposite her daughter and wrapped her hands around her own cup. Her nails were bare. When Lord Asriel joined them, he stroked Mrs Coulter’s shoulder as he sat, and Lyra’s lip curled.

The last time she’d seen him, that fateful night in which he’d lured her into a cruel sense of kin with talk of Dust, killed Roger and walked into the stars, his hair had only sported a single stripe of grey and his face had looked positively adolescent compared to now. Five years later, his hair had no black left in it, his mane glittering as if Stelmaria had gifted him a swathe of her silver coat, and his face was marred with deep lines. There was a scar on his cheek, the length of her little finger.

They stared at each other, her father’s arms folded, Lyra’s gaze as fierce as she could muster. Her mother took a sip of her tea, then sighed. “Lyra – ”

“You’re supposed to be dead.”

Her mother didn’t stir, but her dæmon narrowed his eyes. “It’s nice to see you too, darling,” Mrs Coulter said dryly.

“What happened to you? Where have you been?”

Her parents shared a look, a brief, wordless exchange that was enough for them to decide who should speak, an unbearable sign of intimacy. Lyra wanted to scream at them. “Well…” Mrs Coulter said, taking another sip of her tea before continuing.

She told Lyra about arriving at Asriel’s fortress, travelling back to Geneva, almost losing her life in an attempt to stop the bomb hurtling towards Lyra’s jagged lock of hair. She told Lyra about Metatron and how they’d fought him together, how they’d snapped his wings and wrestled him into the abyss that Lyra herself had almost tumbled into, and how they’d wounded themselves terribly in the process. She told Lyra about how one of her father’s commanders had led them to a window and shepherded them into another world, where they’d spent months, perhaps years, recovering from their injuries. Even Lyra had to grimace at the description of her father’s head wound, and the months it had taken him to return to consciousness, let alone to walk and talk and forge a path home. Lord Asriel simply studied Lyra as Mrs Coulter spoke, though Stelmaria kept looking between Lyra and her mother.

Once they’d regained their strength, her mother explained, they decided to return, to continue the fight, to play their part in building the republic, and to find her again. She told Lyra about the worlds they’d stumbled into along the way, some Lyra recognised, many that she didn’t. Her father would interject occasionally, a correction here, a noteworthy detail there, but he mostly seemed content to listen to Mrs Coulter’s vicious tongue spin silk, the story of their great journey more epic than the long poems Lyra had been forced to analyse in her literature classes. After they’d travelled through many worlds and windows, picking up new friends and foes along the way, they’d walked together back through the tear Asriel had created in the sky, watching as the angels closed it behind them. Then, they’d spent the last two years settling in the North, calling for the materials needed to outfit this cabin for their needs, and gathering intelligence on how their own world had fared in their half-decade of absence. It didn’t sound like they’d spent a day apart since they’d reunited in her father’s fortress all those years ago.

“And we’ve had eyes on you too, sweetheart. We knew that it had to be the right time, that we had to be ready for you, that you had to be ready to come to us…”

“I wasn’t ready,” Lyra said. “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known you were waiting for me. I was glad to think you were dead. It’s what you deserved.”

They both bristled, but neither took the bait. “I want to hear your story,” her father said. “We know fragments, from what my alethiometrist was able to gather, and from what the Gallivespians told me through their resonator. But there were plenty of gaps even then, and everything from the past five years is a blank space. I want to know what you did, what you’ve been doing.”

Lyra picked up after the cave, after she and her mother had been separated for what she’d thought was the last time, and she and Will had ventured into the world of the dead. Her parents listened with rapt attention as she described meeting their deaths, her father even fetching a notebook and creating a sketch based on Lyra’s description. She didn’t explain that she’d had to leave Pan behind in order to cross over – she and Pan could still hardly speak of it, and truly the last thing she wanted was to discuss such awful pain with people for whom causing pain was a calling, and soothing it an impossibility – though she felt him curl up and tremble as she told the story of the voyage from which he’d been savagely barred from taking part. She tried to stroke him but he shuffled away, leaping down from her lap and perusing the rest of the room, careful not to stray conspicuously far from Lyra. Her mother’s dæmon padded over after him, as if to show him something, but the moment his black fingers touched Pan’s fur he scampered back to Lyra’s embrace with a hiss.

She found herself welling up as she described Will cutting the window that would allow centuries of tortured souls to leave the world of the dead. “And then Roger led the ghosts back out into the world, so that their atoms could return to the living universe again, so they could all be at peace. I – I still remember – the look on his face – ” Lyra broke off, sniffing, bowing her head until she’d forced her tears back down. When she raised her eyes, she expected to see her father looking wretched, or at least a single drop of remorse on the oceanic expanse that was his face. Instead, she found his nostrils flaring and his dark eyes blazing.

“That’s why you travelled to the world of the dead instead of bringing the knife to my fortress? To liberate the ghost of that boy?”

Lyra’s mouth fell open. “Yes. Of course. Of course. You – you didn’t know that?”

“Of course I didn’t know that!”

“Asriel,” her mother said, covering his hand with hers, but he shook her off.

“Lyra,” he said, his voice trembling with rage, “we were preparing for a war between worlds, a clash unlike anything seen before. We were preparing to vanquish the Authority himself. And we spent all that time chasing you because you wanted to visit the ghost of a kitchen boy?”

She hurled her empty mug at him, though missed, and Stelmaria growled. “I had to tell him I was sorry!” she cried, hot tears coming to her eyes. The cup shattered with a sharp crack. “Sorry for bringing him to you. Because,” she took a deep, shuddering breath, “because you murdered him! You murdered my friend!” She’d never forgotten the sight of him in that cage, begging for help, nor the feel of his cooling body in her arms, nor the champagne fizz of joy on his face as his ghost had stepped out of the world of the dead and melted back into the trees and the grass and the sky. She felt overwhelmed with melancholy, as she always did when she recalled these memories, and tears began to choke her throat.

Lord Asriel was silent, his jaw clenched; he wasn’t offering her a grain of penitence or regret or compassion. It was unbearable. She remembered once telling him that he wasn’t human. Five years had passed, they’d fought and won a war, they’d all escaped death, and they’d changed the course of history forever… and still, even at twelve, she’d known that humanity was not what had driven him to do those things, because he had none.

“Have you even thought of him once since you did what you did?” she said.

“Of course not,” he said, as if she were a simpleton for even asking, and she couldn’t stop herself from letting out a pained moan.  

“Lyra,” he continued, “there are casualties in war. You must know that by now. I have no doubt that you understand the meaning of sacrifice. How can you still think that the loss of one life isn’t worth the liberation of uncountable millions?”

“It wasn’t one life, though, was it? What about all the other kids that she killed?” She glared at her mother. “And what liberation?” she spat at him. “The Magisterium is as powerful as ever. You’re hiding away in the North as fugitives. No one is free, least of all us! As soon as you started your crusade, I ceased to be free at all. It was all for nothing. I wish I’d let the Master fucking poison you.”

“Lyra,” he growled, pounding his fist against the table. “You will not speak to me like that.”

She laughed in his face. “Or what? What are you going to do to me? Sever me?” She glowered at him. “What did you think would happen when you lured me here? Did you think I’d bow at your feet and ask you how you did it all? Why did you even summon me?”

“It was your mother’s idea,” he said. His words felt like a slap, even though that had been clear from the moment they’d appeared before her at the airship station.

“Asriel,” her mother hissed, her dæmon leaping to the arm of his chair and admonishing him with a growl, though the clear familiarity between her father and her mother’s evil monkey only made things worse, his little hand gripping Asriel’s shoulder for balance. Mrs Coulter gave Lyra a gentle smile. “Let’s all take a breath,” she said, her voice insufferably unruffled. “Lyra, you’ve had a long trip, and I’m sure you need to rest. Why don’t I run you a bath? And then – ”

“Oh, you can fuck off too!” she snarled, kicking the table like a toddler having a tantrum, glaring at the monkey when he snarled back. She hated them. She hated them both. She chastised herself for every night she’d looked up at the stars and wondered where they were, if they were dead or alive, if perhaps her memories had been unfairly poisoned over time. But no, that softening had been the poison: they were as cold and cruel as she remembered. She put her head in her hands.

The room was silent for a moment, the only sound Lyra’s shaky breaths and the crackles and snaps of the fire. “Lyra – ” her mother started, reaching out for her. 

Lyra stood, the chair scraping across the floor. “I’m going to the bathroom. Don’t follow me.”

“Well, that was a rousing success,” her father muttered as she left the room. Lyra slammed the bathroom door as hard as she could, then sunk to her knees. Pan crouched beside her, forlorn.

“Oh, Pan,” she sobbed. “You were right, we shouldn’t have come, of course it was too good to be true. They’re awful, still so awful. I hate them. I used to wish that they’d survived, that they’d come and find me, and now I wish I never had. A lifetime of not knowing would have been better than this.”

“It’s alright,” Pan said, rubbing his head against her knee. “We only have to get through a few days, and then we can leave them here. They can’t follow us. They’re hidden here for a reason.”

“I don’t know if I can bear even a few days…” She shook her head and pressed her hands to her face, stemming her tears. Then she blew out a slow breath. “I need some water,” she said, and Pan nodded.

Lyra ducked her head beneath the tap and slurped as much icy water as she could stand, wiping the stray droplets from her chin once she’d finished. She forced herself to take three deep breaths. After she’d calmed down a little, she found herself looking around the bathroom, noting the cool slate floor, the iron bathtub lined with porcelain, the razor perched beneath the mirror. Then her eyes landed on the cup beside the razor, which held two toothbrushes, one of which had been gnawed almost to pieces. Her lip quivered as she noted the two towels hanging on the rail, and the two robes on the back of the door.

Two. One for each of them. Because her parents, her awful dead parents, were alive, against the odds, and living here together, while she’d been tasked to remake earth as heaven alone, with nothing but a split soul and a broken heart to guide her.

She swallowed. “I’m not staying here for another moment. I can’t.” She began to jimmy open the window on the other side of the room. It was quite a drop down to the snowbank, but she was certain – well, certain enough – that the powder was sufficiently deep to break her fall. She swung her rucksack out of the window, hearing it settle in the snow with a thump. “Come on, Pan.”

“This is a terrible idea.”

“You want to stay here with them?”

“No, but it’s freezing out there, and dark as pitch, and the snow’s coming down even faster now. We don’t know where we’re going, we’re in the middle of nowhere, and even if we make it back to the zeppelin station a ship won’t arrive for days.”

“They might have been lying. We can’t trust a word they say, you know that.”

“Lyra, this is crazy. We could get really hurt.”

“Pan!” she said, one leg dangling out of the window. “We’ve done madder things in the North before. We fell out of a balloon once, remember? We went to that awful village, we trekked to Bolvangar, we went into another world completely alone. We can do this. All we have to do is find our way to a town. And then we’ll convince someone to let us stay with them, and then we’ll fly home as soon as possible. It’ll be fine.”

“I won’t do it. It’s so dangerous.”

“I’ll leave you here, then. Just you and that monkey. Do you want that?”

Pan narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t I?” She swung her other leg out of the window and started to lower herself down.

Pan began to skitter across the stone. “Oh, alright,” he sighed, scampering up and leaping out into the snow. She dropped down beside him with a grunt, then hissed as she felt the slush seep down the back of her trousers and soak the lining of her boots.

“Let’s go,” she said, slinging her bag onto her back and tucking Pan into her pocket. “Before she comes looking for us.”

Lyra trudged through the snow with the determination of a drowning woman kicking towards the bright light of the surface, except in this case, she was ploughing towards the blackest part of the horizon, plunging herself deeper and deeper into the forest even as her mind started to scream at her to turn back. She lumbered on, her trousers soaked, her boots crammed with snow, her teeth chattering like someone was typing an urgent message in Morse code.

When they’d started walking, the moon had lit their way beautifully, the snow glittering like it was studded with gems as they headed into the valley, reasoning that the station had to be downhill as they’d climbed a small mount in order to reach her parents’ abode. But now the snow was coming down in sheets, obscuring her vision, only the dark poles of the pine trees managing to pierce the haze of white that was surrounding her. She blinked a few times, the forest and the swirl of snowflakes merging into a pulsing mess of monochrome. “Lyra,” Pan whimpered. “We have to turn back. We don’t know where we are, and we’re already so cold…”

“No,” she said, her voice a harsh rasp. “I won’t go back to them. I refuse.” The words felt heavy on her tongue.

They kept walking, but soon every step forward became harder and clumsier. Lyra paused, one frozen hand pressed against a tree trunk, gasping for breath. “Lyra,” Pan whined.

“S’alright, Pan,” she mumbled. She was so cold. “Can’t be – much further – ”

“You don’t know that,” he said, his words slurred. 

She took another step forward, grunting as she did so. This next patch of snow was deeper than she expected, and she found herself embedded up to her thigh. She began to shudder. She felt tears appear on her cheeks, almost gluing her eyes shut as the icy wind whipped against her face. “Maybe we should turn back,” she said.

She spun around, her leg still stuck in the snow, looking for the tracks she’d just created. To her horror, it looked identical to the way forward, so much so that Lyra was already doubting if she’d turned at all. The heavy snowfall must have filled in the depressions of her footsteps within seconds of her making them. She blinked several times. “Oh no,” she said, sniffing. “Pan, I don’t know where we are…”

“I told you!” he said, shivering in the crook of her neck. “I told you this was a mistake. And now… and now we’re lost in a blizzard, and no one is coming for us. I knew this was a terrible idea. It might be the worst idea you’ve ever had.” 

“Do you have to gloat right now?” she moaned. She managed to free her leg from its bind and then limped over to a cluster of great pine trees, their entwined boughs enough to thin the snowfall. She settled herself in a nook between one tree’s great roots, pulling her scarf up over her face, blinking to keep the snowflakes from her eyes. Her vision was pulsating. She suddenly felt exhausted. “Oh, Pan, we’re in such trouble.”

“I know. What’s your plan now?”

“Stay – stay here until morning, I suppose,” she forced out. It sounded like she was listening to someone’s else voice, the syllables rolling around her head like great booms. “And then… and then…”

Pan climbed into her quivering lap so that he could look at her, swaying as he perched there, struggling for balance. “I’ll go for help.”

“No!” Lyra shook her head so fiercely that snow sprinkled his fur.

He looked pained. “Lyra, we could die here. We really could. I have to find someone to help us.”

“No,” she cried. “No, please, don’t go. Don’t leave me alone. You won’t have better luck than me in this snow, you know it’s true. Please, Pan. You have to stay.”

“Those sorts of pleas didn’t seem to work on you the last time I was begging you not to leave me…”

“Not now,” she whimpered, groaning as one of the branches swayed in the wind and dropped a clump of snow down her neck. She cuddled her dæmon to her chest. “I need you, Pan. Even worse than dying here would be dying here without you.”

He curled into her chest. “Lyra, I’m worried. This is bad. This is very, very bad.”

But she didn’t reply, and he didn’t realise she hadn’t replied, because only moments later the pair of them fell unconscious, sinking into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Seconds or minutes or hours could have passed by the time her eyes next fluttered open, noting not the forest or the blizzard or the boatman at the shores of a lake she truly wasn’t ready to revisit but the wide expanse of the sky, the stars just managing to peep through the clouds as the snowstorm settled. She groaned as the starlit panorama pulsed above her, because each thumping step gave her vision a fresh jolt. As she squirmed, she felt strong hands grasping her, and only then did she realise she was being carried, her head lolling back in the crook of her father’s arm.

She blinked, his face going in and out of focus. His mouth was turned down and his jaw was clenched. He looked wretched, and in her addled state she truly wondered why. She glanced down to see Stelmaria striding beside him, Pan between her teeth. She tried to call out to her dæmon, but his name died as a whisper on her tongue as her mind drifted back into darkness.

The next thing she recalled was disembodied hands cutting away her sodden clothes despite her protestations, soft, deft fingers accompanied by soft, sweet smells, rose and myrrh and orange blossom, and then she felt the warm weight of blankets being piled atop her shivering body, only her face peeking out as a blanket was draped over her head too. She groaned as she felt the cool rim of a cup being pressed against her lower lip, pushing it away, and then she felt a hand grip her chin like a vice. “Lyra,” a ragged voice echoed around her head. “Lyra, darling, you have to drink this. You have to.”

She continued to fight the voice, but once the first gulp of warm, rich milk slipped into her throat she found herself relenting, the feel of the hot drink thawing the ice blocks of her organs too soothing to push away.

For minutes, hours, days, she didn’t know, all she noted were flashes of sensations; blocks of colour and sound no more distinct than swatches of paint dashed on a wall: bursts of burnished silver and radiant gold, twin emerald globes flicking back and forth before her, gruff booms overlayed with distressed, dulcet notes, fleeting blooms of the same rose and myrrh, alongside sandalwood soap and the fecund, fresh scent of wild ice. Slender silk tendrils ran through her sweat-soaked hair, stroked her scraped cheeks, tipped hot liquid down her throat, suffusing her with warmth from the inside out. She began to make out words, pleas uttered with the reverence of a prayer, and she knew then that she was still dreaming. Her core oscillated from blazing to freezing, she sweated and she shivered, she pushed away the soft hands tending to her and then cried when they disappeared, being cared for and abandoned each unbearable in their own way. She felt drunk, drugged, delirious. She slept for days.

When she next woke, it was dark outside, but that told her little of the time. A naphtha lamp was lit on the other side of the room, giving her skin a flaxen hue, and as she blinked her head throbbed. She groaned, swiping a tired hand across her face, Pan squirming between her breasts. She was wrapped haphazardly in someone else’s robe, the slate-grey wool drowning her.

“Lyra?” a voice murmured from beside her. She rolled over in her blanket nest, wincing as she did so, and found herself almost nose to nose with her mother.

Mrs Coulter was lying next to her on the bed, atop the duvet but beneath a moss-coloured afghan, a book closed beside her. A little frown appeared on her forehead and her eyes fluttered as she too emerged from sleep. She looked pale, Lyra thought. As their eyes met, Lyra’s head still spinning, it felt for a moment like she was simply staring at herself in a mirror, the dark hair and arched brows achingly familiar. Her mother reached out and stroked her cheek. She jerked away with a wince. 

“What happened?” she croaked.

A ragged breath was torn from her mother’s throat. “You ran off into that blizzard dressed in nothing but a jacket and almost froze to death. We found you curled beneath a tree, hardly breathing.” She sighed, shaking her head. “You developed a terrible case of hypothermia. You’ve been sick for days.”  

Memories began to seep back into her mind. Being battered by snow and wind as she stormed away from her parents, her and Pan arguing, nestling in a thicket of trees, the cold in the very marrow of her bones. She pressed her face into the goose down of the pillow, unable to bear her mother’s concern; she didn’t want to owe them anything, least of all her life.

Her eyes were still heavy, and she supposed she must have fallen back to sleep, because when she next lifted her head her mother was perched on her other side, a mug in her hands. “Drink this,” she said. Lyra opened her mouth to protest, but her mother shushed her. “I know you don’t want it; you’ve made that perfectly clear. You haven’t wanted any of it, the drinks, food, medicine. But this is what you need to be kept alive, my sweet one. You need this. I only want you to be well.” She tipped the mug to Lyra’s mouth. “Drink.”

She sipped the warm, sweet milk, humming when she tasted chocolatl. Her mother simply watched her, her dæmon perched on the bed’s wooden baseboard, and then smiled when Lyra passed her an empty cup.

“Is there food?” Lyra mumbled, suddenly ravenous.

Her mother’s eyes brightened. “Of course, darling,” she said, and not a minute later she returned with a bowl of soup and a plate piled with dark rye bread. The soup was weak and sorely in need of more salt, but at least it helped the bread go down, and once the food hit her stomach she felt energy flowing back into her limbs.

“How long have I been asleep?” she said, propping herself up with a wince, her legs throbbing. Her eyebrows shot up. “Did I lose any toes?”

“You were asleep for five days,” her mother said. “And no, all your toes are intact. Just.”

Flashes of the past few days came to her, gentle hands soothing her aches, tending to her chilled extremities, washing and brushing her hair. “You took care of me,” Lyra said.

“Of course I did,” her mother said, taking Lyra’s face in her hands. “Oh, Lyra, you do have such a knack for giving me the worst frights. When your father brought you back to the sledge, blue and listless, it felt like someone was turning my own heart to ice. I thought – well, I thought the worst. My love,” she broke off and swallowed, “I was so afraid, that you’d died running from me, from us, when I all wanted was to see you again, to tell you that I love you, for you to know what we did for you…”

Lyra’s eyes stung. It was eerily reminiscent of another exchange they’d had, years ago in the mouth of a cave, her mother convulsing under the monstrous influence of Gallivespian venom, begging Lyra not to run from her, to stay with her, because she loved her. She’d been caring for Lyra then too, after she’d been rendered unconscious by another illness. She remembered the smell of ash and damp woodsmoke, the fluttering of rainbow flags in the breeze. 

“You’ve done this before,” Lyra said. “In the cave. The last time,” she swallowed, “the last time we saw each other. I was sick then too – I still don’t know how it happened – but you saved me and cared for me. I remember you washing me, feeding me, giving me drinks… just like now.”

A flicker of surprise flitted across her mother’s face, but it was replaced quickly with a disconcerting look of hope. “A witch’s spell, I assumed. I found you like that: unconscious, alone; you were so vulnerable, sweetheart. And I saved you then as we did now. Lyra, for so long now, all I’ve wanted is for you to be hale and whole. You have to believe me, my sweet girl.”

She didn’t want to, and Pan didn’t want her to either. No amount of hot chocolatl and kisses could erase the awful memories Mrs Coulter had thrust upon her, whether it was the golden monkey attacking Pan in London or Tony Makarios weeping over a dried fish or the vicious steel corridors of Bolvangar, the muffled screams, the horrible, brutal blade, an enterprise a thousand times more horrifying than the worst nightmares Lyra’s imagination had ever been able to conjure.

But it was hard, because she knew that there were grains of truth in her mother’s words. She had protected Lyra from being kidnapped by the Oblation Board and from the separator (granted, as Pan had always been quick to remind her, two threats that were entirely of her mother’s own creation), she’d saved Lyra from the Magisterium and the witch curse, and she’d almost died saving her – and everyone, Lyra supposed – from the tyranny of Metatron and his forces. And now, her parents had found her in the middle of snowstorm in the middle of the night and nursed her back to health. At this point, the Master’s mind addled beyond repair, her memories of Serafina Pekkala and Iorek and Farder Coram fraying at the edges, Will forever banished to another world, she thought perhaps they were the only people who’d do such a thing for her anymore, and she hated them more for that, somehow.

Mrs Coulter stroked her hair and then went to change into a nightgown. At first Lyra frowned, but soon her confusion became shock as she took in her mother’s bare back, the left side of her ribcage and her shoulder blade covered in a latticework of vicious scars. Her mother had been injured too, she recalled, and these expansive scarlet spiderwebs were stark proof of it.

Mrs Coulter slipped the silk nightdress over her head – it was dark blue, Oxford blue, in fact, and shimmering – and then began to comb through her curls. When she turned, she caught Lyra staring. “Your father’s been sleeping down the hall,” she said, climbing into bed beside her daughter. “I wasn’t going to leave you alone, not for a moment, not in that state.”

Lyra looked around the room then, realising that this wasn’t her mother’s bedroom or her father’s bedroom: it was their bedroom, of course. She glanced at the small table to her right and noted a stack of books, sheets of paper covered in her father’s unmistakeable scrawls, a penknife, a watch. She looked past her mother and saw more books, a notebook, a pot of cream and a slim steel torch. She could see two woollen dresses hanging over the door of the wardrobe next to two pairs of men’s slacks, and some shoes lined up by the door, in two different sizes. This was their room in their house, where they lived their life together, a life in which she had no part, not really; a life in which she couldn’t have a part, not ever, because of what they’d done to her, and what they’d done to others.

She started to cry then, deep, shuddering sobs wracking her exhausted body, harder than she’d cried in a very long time. She rolled away from her mother in shame, pressing her hands to her face, trying desperately to stem her tears, but the feel of her mother’s gentle fingers stroking up and down her back only made her cry harder. She sobbed until her nose ran and her head throbbed and her eyes ached, and when her mother shifted over and wrapped her arms around Lyra, pressing kisses to her hair and holding her tight, Lyra could only resist for a second before the fight left her body, and then she lay there and let her mother, the woman who’d taught Lyra the meaning of terror, soothe her while she wept.

She was alone in the bed when she woke, and she could see luminous blue light streaming through the slit in the curtains; it had to be around midday, then, for that was the only time that sunlight, if you could call it that, streamed down from the sky at this point of the Northern winter. Her head feeling vaguely clear for the first time in days, she rolled out of the bed, swamped by the woollen robe that had to be her father’s, slipped on a pair of her mother’s fur-lined houseboots, though they were a size too big, at least, and padded through the cabin. Pan sat perched in one of the robe’s pockets, sniffing the air and swaying. “Are we going to find them?”

Lyra nodded. “Can’t avoid it, can we?”

“Are we – are we going to stay here?”

“No!” He looked relieved. “No, of course not. I’d use all our savings to get on that airship, if that’s what it took.”

“Well, we missed the next one,” Pan grumbled. “Because we were asleep. So we’ll just have to hope there’s another soon.”

The kitchen was empty, but a door on the other side of the room had soft yellow light seeping from its edges, and Lyra could hear voices coming from behind it.

Their workshop was eerily reminiscent of her father’s Svalbard laboratory, and Lyra placed her hand on Pan’s head to halt the worst of her memories. The room contained several worn wooden benches dotted with devices and papers, wires tangled like thick black vines, pressure gauges and thermometers lining one wall. Lyra noted several astrolabes, brass and gleaming silver, an array of octants and two microscopes sat beside a grand telescope, the lens as long as her arm. Her parents had a great atlas spread between them on which several coloured pins were dotted. Her heartbeat quickening, Lyra looked for anything that resembled mesh cages and anbaric scalpels, but mercifully, her search came up empty. Her parents turned to look at her, her mother’s eyes brightening.

“Hello, darling,” Mrs Coulter said. “It’s good to see you out of bed. How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Lyra said shortly. She tightened the belt of the robe and rubbed her swollen eyes. Her mother was impeccably outfitted in a forest-green wrap dress and black leather boots, and her father was at least wearing clothes that fit his frame. Lyra felt terribly small, a child merely pretending to be grown, drowning in her parents’ garments.

“Would you like something to eat?” her mother pressed. “Coffee?”

Lyra shrugged. “In a minute, maybe,” she said, and her mother nodded.

She fidgeted from foot to foot. “Thank you for finding me,” she muttered. “I shouldn’t have run off like that. It was reckless.”

“Tremendously so,” her father said. “You could have died. You were almost dead when I found you.”

“I know.” She met her mother’s eyes, and she could see joy in them, at Lyra’s enduring vitality, at her presence, at her admission that her parents had saved her. Lyra wanted to crush it. “I still want to go back to Brytain,” she said, lifting her chin. “I don’t want to stay here. I know I missed the next airship, but when the one after that arrives – ”

“They’ve been cancelled for at least the next week,” her mother said smoothly. “Because of the snowstorms.”

She felt Pan’s resignation as he sunk into the pocket of the robe, out of sight. “You’re lying,” Lyra said, “to keep me here.” She resisted the urge to stamp her foot. “It’s not fair for you to – ”

“It’s not a lie,” Mrs Coulter said. “You can ask your alethiometer. It’ll prove that we’re telling the truth.”

They didn’t know she’d lost her power, then. She almost blurted out the tragic reality from sheer frustration, but stopped herself in time. Nevertheless, the fact that her mother had suggested using the alethiometer made a lie improbable, unless it was an elaborate double bluff, but Lyra’s mind was too frazzled to contemplate the likelihood of that right now. She sighed.

“When will the next one come, d’you think?”

“Impossible to say. We’ll just have to keep an eye on the weather, but in the meantime, we can – ”

“I don’t want to do anything in the meantime!” Lyra said. “Mrs Coulter, you can’t really expect me to – ”

She was cut off by a tortured moan, ripped from the golden monkey’s throat. “Please don’t call me that, Lyra,” her mother said, grimacing. Stelmaria placed a paw on the monkey’s back and pulled him to her soft breast, which Lyra tried hard not to look at.

“What should I call you, then?” She sneered. “I’m not calling you Mother.”

“Lyra, you may not like it, but the fact remains that I am your mother – ”

“You can call her Marisa,” her father interjected. He returned her mother’s glare with his unassailably cool expression. “What? My love, it’s your name.”

“And call you Asriel?” Lyra said, tentatively.

“If you wish.”

She nodded. “Alright.”

Neither her mother nor her mother’s dæmon looked pleased with this resolution, but they clearly had no better options to offer, because they said nothing, simply sitting there with matching scowls. Her lips still pursed, her mother picked up a large parcel from the other side of the table and placed it in Lyra’s hands. “For you. Proper furs, boots, and underlayers. And a few other things I picked out.”

Lyra blinked, and Pan popped his head back out of her pocket. “Thanks.”

“There’s porridge on the stove, tea in the kettle, and coffee in the French press. We’ll be here all day, if you’d like to join us.”

“I wouldn’t,” she said, though even she had to admit she was pushing it with the petulance. Her parents shared an exasperated look that made her feel like a child, but then again, she was their child, and she had no intention of allowing this hostage situation to become a pleasant experience for either of them.

She fetched herself a bowl of porridge, grimacing at its texture and rifling through the cabin’s bare cupboards until she unearthed some honey to drizzle on top, then poured herself some tea. Breakfast in hand, she retreated back to her parents’ bedroom for the afternoon, reading as many pages of her novel as she could manage before she got distracted by her lingering hypothermia headache or Pan’s grizzling or the intermittent reminders from her own mind that her parents were alive, tucked away in a remote corner of the North, and that she was stuck there with them, for the next week at least, perhaps longer.

That night, she moved her belongings to the second bedroom, much to her father’s relief, and made a pact with Pan to hole herself up in there for as many hours of each day as she could bear until the next airship was scheduled to arrive, appearing for mealtimes only, and even then saying as little as she could get away with as she chomped her way through her parents’ lacklustre food.

But of course, that was easier said than done. She was forced to admit that the conversations her parents had over dinner weren’t interminably dull, discussing the latest dispatch from their ears in Brytain or the blueprints they’d drawn up for the new contraption they were building or a letter they’d received from one of their allies in the North, witch queens and traders and other exiles. And even when they weren’t saying anything interesting, or anything at all, questions would pop into Lyra’s head like a sparkler fizzing to life, about the intricacies of her childhood or the war or Dust, because no matter how much it pained her that they could answer her questions, that didn’t stop it from being true.

If only she could bring herself to engage them in conversation, they might be able to solve mysteries that had plagued for her whole life, and offer insights about the trials she’d experienced that no one else in this world could provide. But then she’d remember Bolvangar, the mountaintop, her mother’s dæmon’s endless black eyes, Stelmaria’s sharp teeth squeezing Salcilia, and have no choice but to shut her mouth and the door to her bedroom equally tightly, ducking back beneath the blankets and refusing to surface.

This continued for several days, until her mother knocked tartly on her door, entered without waiting for an affirmative reply and told Lyra to put her coat on. “There’s a lull in the wind, and we need to collect firewood. You shouldn’t stay inside all day, it’s not good for you, and we could all do with the hour’s sunlight. We’re leaving in ten minutes. I expect you to join us.”

Lyra could have refused, she knew that. She could have kicked up a fuss and fought with her mother and antagonised her father and huddled beneath the duvet with her book. But she’d finished the two novels she’d brought, and she didn’t want to do her schoolwork, and she really, really wanted to taste the North’s fabulously fresh air and walk through the pine forest and feel the snow compress beneath her boots. And so she buttoned her new fur coat that fitted like a glove and pulled on the handmade sealskins her mother had selected for her and waited for them by the door, Pan already grizzling on her shoulder. Her mother beamed when she appeared from the workshop and saw Lyra standing there, and smiled even wider as she wound one of her own scarves around Lyra’s neck before they left, the cashmere uncomfortably soft against her skin.

The forest had a vivid cerulean glow, and Lyra’s eyes kept being drawn to the glinting points of the icicles hanging from the trees as she trudged through the snow. Her parents walked ahead, dragging a small sled behind them, an axe and a bow saw tied to it with ropes. They were deep in conversation, and the golden monkey was riding on Stelmaria’s back, the snow leopard prowling deftly through the unblemished fresh powder, her haunches glistening. Lyra and Pan meandered behind, in the midst of a spat.

“We’d be back in Jordan by now if you hadn’t run off,” he grumbled, perched on Lyra’s shoulder.

“I know, Pan. You don’t have to keep saying it.”

“And now we’re stuck with them. The zeppelins might not run again for weeks.”

“I know. You’ve said it a hundred times. You can be such a bore, you know that?”

“This bore is simply trying to keep us alive, which is made more difficult when you keep running off to the North or into snowstorms or into their clutches!”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry, Pan. It was stupid, I know. I know. But we’re here now, and we do love the snow and the ice – ”

“I don’t.”

She scowled at him. “That’s not true. You used to love being an arctic fox!”

“But I can’t be an arctic fox anymore. And pine martens don’t do well in the cold.”

“Not with that attitude, they don’t,” Lyra snapped, and Pan gave a little huff before he leapt from her shoulder and launched himself into the powder, a little plume of snowflakes marking his landing spot. Then he fought his way to a nearby tree and scampered up it.

“What are you doing?” Lyra hissed, glancing at her parents, who remained unaware of the argument taking place behind them. Her father was chuckling at something her mother had just said and rubbing his hand across her back. Lyra looked away.

“I’m going back to the cabin,” Pan said, slithering down a branch and jumping to the next tree. The bough that caught him bounced with his sudden weight, setting off a snowfall beneath it.

Lyra’s eyes widened. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous. You’re not listening to me, you never do, and one of the benefits of the separation you forced me through is that I don’t have to stay and listen when you’re being unreasonable.” Pan scurried down the branch and scrabbled around the trunk until he was on the other side of the pine, almost too far for her to speak to him without yelling. She hurried after her dæmon.

“You can’t do this,” she said, looking up at him, his fur almost mauve under the blue tinge of the encroaching arctic sunset. She felt her eyes prick with tears.

“Why not? You didn’t think about me when you ran out into that blizzard.”

“Because they don’t know,” she said, through gritted teeth. “If you leave, they’ll realise what happened… they can’t, Pan. I can’t bear to talk about it with them.”

“Well, you should have thought of that before you ran off without thinking and got us stranded here,” he said haughtily, then leapt to the next tree and forged onto the one after that.

She couldn’t stop herself. “Pan!” she called out. The sound rang out through the forest, disturbing a flock of horned larks in a nearby tree, and the bustle of the birds flying away caused several thick clumps of snow to smash into the ground. Marisa and Asriel both turned.

Pan was several trees away now, perched sheepishly on a high branch; any normal human-dæmon pair should have been writhing in agony. Lyra’s mouth hung open, and her eyes flitted between Pantalaimon and her parents, full of distress.

Her parents shared a look, and Lyra expected revulsion, shock, perhaps anger. While neither of her parents was a stranger to how humans and dæmons could be torn apart, obviously, both had spared her that pain in their own way, aghast at the thought that their own daughter would be anything less than whole. She winced, knowing they’d react poorly to finding out that she’d been mutilated anyway, despite their best efforts, and worse, that she’d done it to herself.

A few seconds passed. “Are you coming?” her mother said. “We’ll lose the light soon, and we still have a tree to fell.”

Lyra blinked. The sound of branches rustling drew all their eyes to the forest canopy, and then Pan was scuttling down a nearby trunk and lolloping through the thick snow towards Lyra, his eyes downcast. She took him in her arms. “Didn’t you see?” she said, almost a whisper.

“See what?”

“That we’re – that he and I – ” She swallowed. “That we’re separated.”

She bowed her head, as did Pan. Her cheeks burned with shame. She couldn’t look at him, or them.

“We know, Lyra.”

It took a moment for her mother’s words to sink in. “You – you know?”

“Yes,” Marisa said. “Why do you think we almost threw ourselves into that abyss? We were giving you time to find your dæmon, and time for you to,” she swallowed, as if there was a stone in her throat, “grow up. We were very glad to hear that you two had found each other again.”

Lyra’s heart was pounding. “You’ve known all this time?”

“Yes,” Asriel said, as if this conversation was completely banal, a discussion about dinner, a simple question about star charts. “Lyra, we must get on – ”

“And you aren’t disgusted? It’s so… wrong.”

Her parents both frowned, the same expression splayed across their faces. Then her mother nodded to her dæmon, who leapt from Stelmaria’s back to the nearest tree, scaling the pine’s trunk as if it were a simple ladder. He climbed higher and higher, until he was nothing more than a gold flash between the branches, past what should have been possible. Marisa stood there, unperturbed.

“We knew it,” Pan whispered to Lyra. She simply stared at the speck of gold at the top of the great pine, perched there like a star atop a Christmas tree, feeling the light flood into her mind. They knew, they’d always known, and were undisturbed by it; her mother had even experienced that pain herself. Lyra met her mother’s eyes, twin broken windows, a spark of tortured recognition between them. She swallowed.

The golden monkey returned gracefully to the ground and leapt to Marisa’s shoulder. Stelmaria’s ears were flat against her head as she pressed herself against Asriel’s thigh, looking between Pan and the monkey, her jaw clenched. Her father placed a hand on his dæmon’s head and swallowed, and if Lyra hadn’t known better, she’d have thought she saw some real emotion flash across his face. Then he coughed, as if to chase some sensation from his chest, and nodded towards the forest. “Let’s go,” he said, and Marisa waited for Lyra to reach her side before they started after him.

Lyra helped them fell an ash tree in a daze, sweating as she took her turn with the bow saw, her fingers red from rope burn as she and her parents dragged the log-laden sledge back towards the house. They piled the wood in the outhouse to dry, and then Lyra excused herself, locking herself in the bathroom and filling the tub to its brim, her eyes drifting to the fresh bolts across the window as steam began to mist the glass. She shook a generous helping of her mother’s bath salts into the water, oakmoss and lavender, sweet and calming, and let the water engulf her.

“This doesn’t change anything,” Pan said, warming himself on the towel rail.

Lyra said nothing, dragging her fingertips over the surface of the water like they were skipping stones.

“They’re the same as they always were. So what if they know about us, so what if she’s been through it too – ”

“What do you mean, ‘so what?’” Lyra snapped, reaching for her mother’s conditioner and lathering it into her hair. “Pan, we’ve never been able to talk about this with anyone. We’re always afraid of straying too far from each other, of someone overhearing us fight, of someone realising what happened to us. We don’t know anyone else who’s been through it. Except… her.”

“And Will.”

“But Will’s not here anymore!” she said, her eyes stinging. “And he never will be. We’ve worked so hard to accept that.”

Pan deflated, flattening himself against the chrome. “Do you really want to talk to her about it?” 

“I – I don’t know,” Lyra said. “I don’t think so. But even if I never do, with anyone, even if we can never find the words, just the fact that they know is a relief. You don’t think so?”

Now it was Pan’s turn to stay silent. “Exactly,” Lyra said, tugging a comb through her hair, wincing as the tortoiseshell teeth caught a tangle. “We’ve been hiding for so long. Here, maybe, with them… we don’t have to. Just for a little while.”

“You wanted to get away from them so badly that you almost killed us,” he said. “And now that I’m the one saying we should leave, you want to stay. You just don’t want to do what I want.”

“It’s not like that,” Lyra said, exhausted. The water sloshed as she stepped onto the tiles. “It’s not that I want to stay, exactly… but I’m not sure I want to go either anymore. I’m so confused. And given that we’re stuck here anyway, and no one’s waiting for us back in Oxford, it’s not as if an extra week or two will do any harm.”

Pan continued to disagree, and the spat reached such a crescendo that he bit her fingers when she tried to take him in her arms and return to the living room. But of course, their secret revealed, their dysfunction accepted, perhaps even understood, she could just leave him there to stew. Her parents didn’t even blink when she appeared dæmonless before them, wrapped in a thick fleece and wearing her new pair of fur-lined boots.

They were in the lounge, the sofa oriented towards the sprawling glass windows, giving a panoramic view of the sky above and the valley beneath. The aurora was whirling above them already, seafoam and magenta and indigo, the beams of pretty light dancing across her parents’ faces. Illuminated by the aurora on one side and the firelight on the other, Lyra could see that her father was pained, his face screwed up, one thumb kneading his temple. On the rug by the fire, the golden monkey had Stelmaria’s head in his lap, and he was rubbing his fingers over her skull, soothing whatever headache was afflicting both man and snow leopard. Lyra had seen her father rubbing his head often over the past few days; likely a hangover from his head injury, she now realised. Her mother was lying on the sofa with a book, her head on Asriel’s thigh, his fingers carding through her hair. She sat up when Lyra entered, smiling. 

“I was thinking,” Lyra said, perching gingerly on the arm of the sofa. “That I’d stay, maybe, for a few weeks. To do research for my project. I mean, I might change my mind when the zeppelins run again, but… I also might not. I’ll just have to see.”

The smug satisfaction in her mother’s smile almost made her reconsider. “That’s wonderful news,” Marisa said. She patted the spot beside her. “Would you like to sit?”

The rest of the evening passed without incident. Lyra selected a new book from the shelves – they had no fiction, much to her dismay, so she chose a history book about arctic geopolitics that was written like a story instead – and read by the fire for a little while, then they fixed plates of bread and goat’s cheese and the dried reindeer sausage that her parents had cured themselves, and each had a cup of mulled wine before heading to bed. Pan didn’t emerge at all, but when Lyra slid beneath the covers she found him shivering there, and they exchanged sullen apologies before he nestled into her breast and they fell asleep together, frost creeping across the window as the temperatures plummeted to their nightly low.

When Lyra rose the next morning, she padded into the workshop with her schoolbooks beneath her arm and bowl of gluey porridge in her hand, knowing that she couldn’t hide away anymore if she was going to stay here, and hoping that studying beside them while they worked wouldn’t be too painful. Pan trailed behind her, muttering beneath his breath, and Lyra did her best to ignore him.   

She was surprised to find only her mother awake, scanning a letter with bright eyes, the smell of black coffee perfusing the air. She shifted over, rubbing Lyra’s back gently as she perched on the adjacent stool, smiling at the sight of the textbooks. Pan sat resolutely on Lyra’s lap, eyeing the golden monkey warily, though he was happily distracted tearing the thick brown envelope into strips.

“Asriel?” Lyra said, flipping open her notebook.

“Asleep,” Marisa replied, sipping her coffee. Lyra nodded.

She managed to study for all of five minutes before her eyes slid over to the letter. “Who’s that from?”

“An old acquaintance in Geneva, updating us on the state of the Magisterial congress.”

Lyra blinked. “So other people know you’re here?”

“No, no,” Marisa said, shaking her head. “Certainly no one in Geneva. He thinks he’s writing to an agent in Paris, and the person who forwarded this to our Saariselkä letterbox thinks they’re sending a report on ice floes to a Finnish glaciologist. It’s an intricate system – it took us a long time to make it operational, which tried your father’s patience to no end, as I’m sure you can imagine – but now that it works, it’s very functional. And running complex, covert operations has always been a strength of mine.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Lyra said coldly. She looked to the door.

Her mother deftly sidestepped Lyra’s surliness. “My knowledge of the inane politics that govern the various entities that make up the Magisterium remains extensive, and of great use, but alliances are always shifting, and we had been gone a long time. These updates are invaluable. It’s part of their skill, really: creating a tangle of bloated initiatives, each one more obscure than the last – the Court of Faculties, the Temple Hospitallers, the Synod of Deacons, the Order of St Julian – ”

“The General Oblation Board,” Lyra sneered. The monkey bristled.

“Long disbanded,” her mother said smoothly, laying a gentle hand on his golden back. “I hear their chief executive disappeared, and is presumed dead.” She had the audacity to smirk into the rim of her mug before continuing. “Without insider knowledge, it’s an impossible system of which to make sense. Almost unassailable. But that same disorganisation and infighting is what makes them vulnerable. You just have to know which blocks to remove, and then the whole tower falls.”

“And that’s your plan?”

“In a nutshell.” She tilted her head. “Would you like to see?”

They spent the next hour sifting through the materials her parents had spent the past several years putting together, and Lyra was stunned by the expansive dossier of blueprints and charts and papers. She’d always known her parents could wield great power and intelligence – for a time, it was all she knew about them – but she’d only seen that power in action in the most brutal of ways, too young to understand or care about the years of diligent planning and research that underpinned the explosive conclusions of their exploits, both ruthless and laudable alike. Her eyes were wide as she scanned the pages and pages of notes they’d gathered from the war itself, testimonies of Metatron’s demise and the fall of the Clouded Mountain, hundreds of beings from their world and others attesting to the death of God.

“There’s so much here,” Lyra said breathlessly, picking up another file, a profile of the Magisterial Patriarch.

“It’s all in the preparation,” her mother replied. “Especially with matters as heretical as this, and especially when we’re so constricted. It would be easier if we could show our faces again, of course, but rushing that would be grave error. Lethal, most likely. We have to bide our time before launching another attack.”

Lyra shook her head, feeling perhaps like she was conversing with her mother’s righteous twin, this woman a pale imitation of the Magisterial zealot she’d once known.

“You wanted to stifle Dust for so long,” Lyra said. Marisa froze. “Your life’s work. You – you killed for it. And now… you want to extol its virtues? Tear down the Magisterium and have us all bask in it? You thought it was sin, that it needed to be cut out of us. You just… don’t believe that anymore?”

Her mother gave a weak smile. “I don’t suppose that I do, no.” She tried to take Lyra’s hand, but Lyra pulled away. “I saw Dust, Lyra. It’s beautiful, so beautiful. I understand, now, that we are richer for it.”

Lyra’s lip trembled. “But what about all those people, those children that you sacrificed? They died because you thought that Dust was a blight on our souls, that it was poison. How can you look at yourself – ”

If Lyra’s accusations rattled her, she didn’t show it. “At the risk of sounding like your father, those experiments gave us valuable insights into Dust that are still useful now, even those with lacklustre outcomes. Negative results are still important, after all. And without my work, Asriel wouldn’t have been able to open his window, and the Kingdom of Heaven might never have fallen. Transgressing what is thought to be possible always requires the few to offer themselves for the many. We were willing to sacrifice ourselves too, don’t you forget.”

“But – ”

“Lyra,” her mother continued, ignoring her, “it was the very acts you deplore that enabled me to bring Metatron to his death. He believed me when I said that I would betray Asriel, betray you, my darling girl, because every awful thing I’d done was hiding the love in my heart. Truly, my love, I wish I’d done worse. Then my deception would have been even more entire, and I’d have been even more convinced of your safety.”

Lyra stared at her. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

Her mother frowned. “It doesn’t?” 

“No!” Lyra said. “It makes me feel worse.”

“I can’t imagine why,” her mother said, affronted. “To know that you are loved so deeply should be a gift.”

Lyra’s eyes widened. “That’s not what this is about – ”

“You are no stranger to the value of sacrifice, Lyra. Separating from Pantalaimon, from Will, for the good of others, whether that kitchen boy or all sentient creatures – do you regret that? Is there no suffering that’s worthwhile if it’s for a greater good?”

“That was different,” she said, her voice harsh.  

“Was it? You put yourself through pain to benefit others, and they did the same for you, some willingly, some less so. It’s simply how things get done, my dear one.” She smiled. “You’ll understand this one day, I know you will. The realities of ruling can be hard to stomach, but I’m sure we’ll all get plenty of practise, once the Magisterium has been toppled and a new regime can finally reign. More coffee, darling?”

There was a glitter in her eyes as she spoke, animated by the prospect of power, as she always had been. It was almost a relief to see the woman she knew swirling in there; the version of her mother that seemed truly concerned with advancing the rights of all made Lyra wonder if she was still thrashing in a hypothermic fever dream. A hybrid of her mother’s past and present would perhaps smooth the transition, protect the delicate ligaments of her neck from whiplash. She supposed this woman was better, she had to be: she was using every cell of brainpower she possessed to depose the most egregious purveyors of religious tyranny, a revolution that Lyra also hoped for, and that her father had always wanted. But the hunger was still in her eyes, her sharp jaw, and Lyra wasn’t sure if the two could be reconciled. Not yet.

Her father must have thought so, though, for them to still be here together. She waited until they were alone before she began to press him.

“I thought you wanted to build a republic,” Lyra said, rubbing her hands together, her fingertips already smarting even inside her gloves. “No kings, no bishops, no priests. No lords.”

They were perched on the roof of the cabin, beside one of the photovoltaic panels her parents had bolted there, its circuitry fritzing and in need of repair. “Your mother’s design,” her father had explained when he’d roped her into helping. “Very clever. Ingenious, really, because it can harvest energy from the lowest of light levels. It works even in the deadest of winter.” His face glowed with admiration for her mother’s engineering, and Lyra frowned at his expression; this is what he looks like when someone else impresses him, she thought.

“I do,” he said, the air by his mouth misting up as he spoke. “Pass me that screwdriver.”

She gave him the tool. “She doesn’t. She used the words new regime. You’re just installing another dictator if you let her continue.”

“Leave your mother to me,” he said. “And hold these.” He placed the bolts in her hand and then removed the lid of the control panel.

She jiggled the bolts in her palm like she was carrying loose change, trying to get the blood flowing in her fingers again. “That’s quite the risk. What, she takes down the Magisterium for you – ”

“With me,” he grumbled. A spark whipped against his fingers. “Fuck,” he muttered, tearing off his singed glove and giving it to Lyra.

“ – and then you explain that she gets no more authority than anyone else? How’s that really going to go for you?”

“Thank you for your input, child,” he said. “She’s working tirelessly – here, clip that wire, the red one – to advance our cause, to finish what we all started in those other worlds. I understand your scepticism, but it’s a mistake to let old hypotheses outweigh new evidence.”

Lyra shook her head. She snipped another wire at her father’s instruction. “You can’t really believe that she’d still be doing all this if she didn’t think there was a worthy reward on the other side. A reward for her.”

He smirked. “You know what happens when your mother sinks her teeth into a project.”

“Yeah, I do. People end up dead.” That made him laugh, and Lyra scowled. “That’s not a joke! That is what happens.”

“I’d have expected your experiences to have better inured you to the realities of progress,” he said, slotting the fresh piece of copper wire into the circuit board.

“She said the same thing,” Lyra muttered. He smiled then, as he did often now at mentions of her mother, and the sight unnerved her. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get used to it.

“I don’t know why you look so jolly,” Lyra said. “You’ll be first in the firing line if the Magisterium tumbles and she doesn’t get what she wants out of it.”

He glared at her. “I can handle your mother.”

It was Lyra’s turn to laugh, short, sharp, incredulous. “If you say so. I’ll put my money on her taking out anyone who gets in her way, be it you, or me, or – ”

“Me, perhaps,” he conceded. He looked her straight in the eye. “But not you.”

The firm but gentle tone he spoke with stopped her. “What?”

“I am under no false illusions about your mother’s proclivities. There’s a version of events that sees me die by her hand, I have no doubt – several, in all likelihood.” He fixed Lyra with his gaze, and she found herself holding her breath. “But you have nothing to worry about from her. Not anymore. She’d let herself be torn in two before she let something awful befall you. That must be clear by now.”

He went back to the circuit board, applying a bonding agent to the sharp points of the new wire, Stelmaria blowing cool air on the fresh joins to help them solidify. The only sounds were the clicks and snaps of his tools and the eerie wind whipping through the trees. The frigid North seemed to be the only place he could bear to have a real conversation with her.

The question bubbled on her tongue, a volcano straining to erupt, regardless of the devastation it might cause. “Would you have used me?”

Asriel lifted his head. “What?”

“On the mountain that night. If I’d come without Roger. Would you have used me to open your window?”

The seconds he stared at her felt like hours. He swallowed. Lyra considered the lines on his face, the scar on his cheek. He’d removed his hat some minutes ago, and his grey hair reflected the cold shine of the moon. He looked every minute of his age.  

“I don’t know,” he said eventually.

She narrowed her eyes at him, and he looked away, back down at the circuit board. Her lip curled. “You’re a liar.”

He said nothing, continuing to tinker with the wiring, though Stelmaria had the decency to hold her gaze.

She shook her head, her eyes shining. She’d known the answer before she’d asked the question, but it was no less of a gut punch to have it confirmed. Pantalaimon was nestled in her coat, and he pressed himself into her chest. “I am your child, you know,” she said coldly. “Your only child. Most parents – ” She broke off, her throat thickening. “Most parents consider keeping their children alive to be their highest priority. Even she seems to have figured that out. But you – you – ”

“Some things are bigger than the individual,” he said, quietly but resolutely. “Bigger than any of us, Lyra. There’s nothing I wouldn’t have done, nothing I wouldn’t do. You must understand that by now. I was both willing and glad to sacrifice myself.”

“You can believe that and still be conflicted about ending your own child’s life!”

His eyes darkened. “I was conflicted. You remember arriving at my laboratory, don’t you? It was the most unpleasant shock of my life seeing you there.”

She did remember. She’d never seen him look so haggard, so horrified.

“I needed a child, a sacrifice, but the first child to arrive was my own daughter. Awful. Awful.”

“But you’d still have done it, wouldn’t you? If Roger hadn’t been there… Most people – normal people – wouldn’t have been able to go through with it, even if they’d thought it was right, even if they’d thought it was important.”

“And that’s why most people will never achieve a fraction of the things that we did.”

His surety infuriated her, and she chastised herself for even starting this conversation. She should know better than to prod him like this, for she would always be left wanting, each subsequent word widening the wound. She kicked at the roof, and a shingle came loose, as did a swathe of snow.

“What we did,” she sneered. “What we did sent so many people to their deaths. What we did has done nothing to weaken the Magisterium, not really. We have no idea if it changed other worlds for the better or not. It might have made things worse, so much worse. What we did left me alone, and – and damaged, and full of so much guilt. Are those the kind of achievements you’re talking about?” She let out a ragged sigh. “You know, some days, it feels like none of it even mattered.”

Her father looked stricken. He dropped the wire strippers with a clatter and grasped her cheek with his frigid fingers. She tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let her go. “Of course it mattered. Lyra, if you and that boy hadn’t fulfilled your prophecy then Dust would have continued to drain from the universe until not a speck of it remained. No consciousness, creativity, independent thought. We’d have had no capacity for free will, for love, for rebellion. Nothing worth living for. There is more to do to prove our stories, more than I’d hoped, I grant you, and that’s why the work continues for us all, but without what we did – what you did – any further efforts would have been fruitless.”

His grip was bruising. “Lyra, I said that death was going to die, but you are the one who made it happen. Every soul that walks this Earth – every Earth, in all the endless universes! – will spend eternity at peace. You did that, and it was a tremendous achievement to do so, with so little information about what lay on the other side, and at such great cost.” He looked briefly at Pantalaimon, whose head was peeking out of Lyra’s collar, listening intently. “It mattered, Lyra. Don’t ever doubt that.”

Even under the dark sky, the starlight drowned out by the bright gleam of the anbaric torches he’d set up to illuminate their workstation, she could see a faint glow coming from his face.

He stared at her, bold and unrelenting, until flakes of snow began to dust their crowns. “We need to finish this,” he said gruffly, turning back to the defunct solar panel, the spell broken. They completed the rest of the work in near-total silence, only exchanging words when her father needed a tool or Lyra needed to clarify an instruction, and then descended down the ladder, the spotlights slung over her father’s back and the toolbox in Lyra’s hand. Stelmaria leapt gracefully down to the snow, having been hoisted up on her father’s shoulders, and sniffed the air while Asriel flicked a switch on the control panel and nodded when the broken slab came back to life. “Good,” he said. “Let’s go back inside. You’re shivering.”

Lyra headed straight to the kettle once they’d returned to the house, her damp boots lined up beside her father’s beneath the heating rail, while Asriel went to dump the toolbox in the workshop. She’d settled herself on the sofa by the time he emerged, the same geopolitical tome open on her lap, though her eyes were anchored to the expansive sky, the moon high and round and brilliant, giving the distinct impression that the mountains across the valley were coated in liquid mercury. She gulped a mouthful of her camomile tea and pretended that she hadn’t heard him come in. He strode across the room as if heading to the bedroom, but as he passed by the sofa, he stopped and sighed. Lyra stayed rigid.

She heard the small smack of spit as he opened his mouth, as if to speak. Then she felt his broad hand come down on her shoulder and squeeze, hard, his thumb swiping briefly across her shoulder blade. It was perhaps the most affectionate touch he’d ever given her.

She stayed still for as long as she could bear, not wanting to spook him, but as soon as her neck twitched his touch disappeared, and before she could swivel her head he’d melted into the hallway, a blur of black and silver, the tip of Stelmaria’s glimmering tail the last thing she saw before she was left alone in the room.

As the days dripped on, the shock of walking into the kitchen or the workshop and seeing her parents looking back at her continued to lessen, and a tolerable rhythm emerged, one that had the permanent knot in Lyra’s stomach starting to loosen. She would complete her schoolwork at the dining table while they toiled away in the workshop, abandoning her textbooks on the dark wood whenever she heard the whirr of the belt saw or the sonicator, an indication that something more interesting than another afternoon of translation or cartography was on the horizon, and outside of that they would busy themselves with the endless tasks required to stay hale and whole in such harsh conditions.

Without servants and surrounded by unending darkness and harsh weather, hours had to be dedicated to ensuring the continued functioning of the cabin and those that dwelled within it: gathering firewood, refilling petroleum tanks, tending to the photovoltaic panels and the motorsledge and the various other anbaric contraptions her parents had designed and built. Lyra liked these tasks, she found. They often required focus and effort, enough that extensive conversation wasn’t possible, and enabled her to work alongside Marisa and Asriel without the risk of becoming another pawn in their political schemes. These were simple but necessary tasks to ensure their daily survival and wellbeing, and the lethal philosophy her parents were so fond of practising had little place in it.

But while her parents had many practical skills that were of great use in the Northern wilds, few of them related to what happened inside the cabin, most notably that they all needed to be fed several times a day, lest they starve to death, or stab each other from the particular kind of anger that accompanies a growling stomach. In this regard, the only thing her parents did well was prepare meat, hunting the reindeer themselves and then butchering it at the table, keeping the rump for steaks, the flank for soups and stews and the ribs for braising, creating chops from the loins and sausages from the shoulders. They’d save some for curing, the outhouse home to several terracotta pots filled with salt and chunks of meat wrapped in cheesecloths, and make gravy from the innards and stock from the bones, gutting their prey until there was scarcely an atom left.  

The first time Lyra had found them doing this, she’d screamed, the sight of both her parents spattered with blood and a dead creature laid out before them a cruel trigger for the worst of her memories. Her mother’s eyes had been glittering as she dug a great blade into the belly of the animal, her forearms soaked in bright scarlet, her dæmon perched on her shoulder, desperate to participate, while her father had been holding the reindeer’s heart to prepare it for smoking. She’d almost been sick there and then, and had barricaded herself in her bedroom for several hours afterwards, hurling her books at the door whenever her mother tried to enter. Her father then mocked her for her melodrama when she hungrily gulped down a steak later that evening, though that was a greater comment on their typical culinary skills than the sight of their butchery, as Lyra delighted in shooting back at them.

She put up with their disastrous attempts at cooking for almost two weeks, doing her best to improve the gloopy porridge and weak soups with drizzles of honey and sprinkles of salt, and squirrelling away extra servings of cheese and cured meat to her bedroom in case one of them made something truly abominable and she was forced to go without. But one morning, the jar of honey empty and faced with the prospect of gruel for breakfast, Lyra decided to take matters into her own hands.

She sauntered into the kitchen and placed the cast-iron skillet on the stove without greeting either Marisa or Asriel, who were sitting at the dining table drinking their coffee and writing in their notebooks. She fetched a carton of eggs from the cold pantry and began to whisk them with a little goat’s milk and generous lashings of salt and pepper. She chopped up a cured reindeer sausage too and added the chunks of meat to the pan. It was only once she was surveying the soon-to-be omelette that she realised the ambient background noise of pencil scratchings and mugs being picked up and set down had disappeared. She turned to find her parents staring at her.

“What are you doing?” her father said, a deep frown creasing his forehead.

“You eat terribly,” she said, turning back to the pan and flipping the omelette, smiling as the familiar smell filled her nose, buttery and rich. “I’m doing something about it. I can’t stomach another bowl of that sludge.” 

They both eyed their omelettes with suspicion after breakfast had been served. “Darling, what is this?” her mother said, wrinkling her nose and prodding it with a fork.

“It’s an omelette,” she said, slurping down a mouthful, and ignoring her mother’s tsk at her poor table manners. “Eggs, milk, a pinch of salt.”

Her father nodded and tucked in, though her mother still looked unsure, which Lyra thought was rich, given the plethora of questionable things she’d seen them eat just to avoid firing up the stove. “It won’t bite you,” Lyra said, rolling her eyes.

Her mother glared at her, but began to eat nonetheless. Not a minute later her father’s cutlery clattered onto the plate. “That was good. Very good,” he said, wiping an eggy smear from his beard with the heel of his hand. “Is there more?”

Lyra began to cook often after that, pleased to have something to do that wasn’t schoolwork and in which her parents deferred to her knowledge without resistance. Pan complained that they were treating her like a servant, which annoyed her to no end. “It’s not like that,” she snapped, stirring a stew stuffed with chunks of reindeer flank and a mix of mushrooms she’d found at the Saariselkä market, brittlegills and milkcaps and a bushel of false morels. “They’re bad at it, and I’m sick of terrible food. And we all eat together! It’s not like I’m just a kitchen girl.”

“You’re only getting defensive because you know I’m right,” Pan said haughtily, squealing as Lyra flicked hot stew at him. But even he couldn’t deny that it felt good to receive their praise, sitting down to their meals as a trio, Pantalaimon joining her parents’ dæmons across the room as Lyra chatted with her parents at the table.  

She liked accompanying them to Saariselkä too, which was the closest town, an hour’s drive on the motorsledge. They went once a week to buy food, fetch parcels from her parents’ various mailboxes, talk with travellers and merchants and purchase any other supplies they might need for the week ahead. Lyra selected fillets of fresh cod and char for grilling and soups, flatbreads and almond potatoes, and bags and bags of berries, cloudberries and lingonberries and bilberries, which were delicious on top of the sweet, milky porridge that Lyra showed her parents how to make or as a garnish on the jenniver cocktails they’d mix in the evenings.

As the trip continued and Lyra’s report began to take shape, she found herself at that market more and more, quizzing the vendors about their supply chains until she had every buyer and seller noted in her book (all while sneaking samples of their delicacies, of course). Soon they were pointing her in fascinating directions, to the ports near Koppelo or the wholesale warehouses in Ivalo, or the fisheries dotting the nearby provinces, adding new, much-appreciated verve to her days in the frozen wastes.

She’d been ready to go immediately, notebook, pencil and recorder stuffed into her rucksack, but her mother had protested, sure that she’d use the opportunity to run. They’d bickered about it for several days, until Lyra had the bright idea of giving her alethiometer to her mother to hold hostage; there was no way Lyra would leave for Brytain without it. Her mother’s temper subdued, Lyra spent cheerful days driving the motorsledge from warehouse to market to port, her eyelashes encrusted with frost and the delicate blood vessels in her cheeks cracking from the cold, though every shiver was worth it for the thrill she felt charging around the North and uncovering its secrets.

She’d return from her solo expeditions with reams of interviews to transcribe and reading to do, and had expected to simply work next to but not with her parents, them absorbed in their projects, and her making admirable progress on hers. But to her surprise, they’d taken a real interest in her research, reading over the early drafts of her paper, listening to snippets of the interviews and helping her mould her argument and tease out her conclusions. They were ruthless with their assistance, pushing her analysis further and further until she’d inevitably curse them and storm off, only to find herself springing out of bed in the middle of the night, a puzzle piece sliding into a place, the complex web of history and politics and power that governed the economics of the North suddenly another layer clearer, a smudge wiped from a window, the view bright and vivid at last. Then she’d show them her latest paragraph, and they would smile.

They were in the middle of the tense part of this process one afternoon, Lyra insisting that her map of the contemporary trading routes of Lappish salmon was complete, and her father shaking his head and arguing that her conception of how different trawlers sold their wares to the continental merchants was basic at best, sloppy at worst. The exchange became heated, the tips of Lyra’s ears reddening as he picked this section of her paper apart, as always happened when she knew that his criticisms were fair. She huffed, “Well, it’s no wonder this part isn’t that good – I wasn’t able to talk to any salmon farmers at all, even though I’ve been trying for weeks.”

“That’s because they’re out of season. You’d need to be here in the summer. May and June. That’s when the schools of salmon move northwards from the Bothnian Bay.”

“How do you just know that – ”

“I’ve been studying the North since I was your age. I know a great many things by now, as one would hope after all that time,” he said. Then his eyebrow twitched. “When is this project due for submission?”

“August twentieth. We’re supposed to work on it for the whole year.”

He nodded. “You know, during the summer, there’s an extensive trading festival in Inari. It’s not far from here, and it’s not just for the fishers but the ironmongers and the miners too, all sorts of industries. The biggest traders come from all over the North, and merchants from all over the world, to do deals, exchange wares, discuss manufacturing. You could always return and attend, if it would be useful. Your mother would certainly like that.”

She knew that he was trying to be encouraging, but his continued reminders that he was largely apathetic to her future plans still stung. She couldn’t tell if he was doing it on purpose or not. However, it did sound tempting: she’d never been to the North in the summer, this festival would greatly help her research, and in the absence of the harsh winter weather, she could camp in the forests and hitchhike around if returning to her parents felt untenable, as it still did most days. “When is it?” she asked.

Asriel thought for a moment. “End of June, I think. Starts around the nineteenth, twentieth, something like that, and runs for two weeks.”

“Oh, then I can’t,” she said smoothly. Midsummer’s day would be June twenty-fourth.

He frowned. “And why is that? I find it hard to believe that you already have plans six months from now.”

Pan gave the faintest shake of his head; he didn’t want to tell Asriel about their yearly visit with Will, and she agreed. “School,” she said. “Exams. We already have the timetable.”

Asriel’s eyebrow was raised. “Pantalaimon, I’d recommend making your private communications a little more subtle,” he said, with a smirk, and Pan leapt bashfully into Lyra’s lap. “What is it?”

“It’s sentimental,” she found herself saying. “You wouldn’t approve.”

He nodded, and Lyra was surprised to find herself deflated. Her father turned and began to fuss with a mug, cleaning it out in the sink and pouring himself a bracing black coffee. With his back still turned to her, he spoke again, his voice almost inaudible over the clink of his spoon and the whoosh of the drink flowing into the cup. “Tell me, Lyra.”

Her lip was trembling before she’d even uttered a single word. “Every midsummer’s day, I spend an hour at the botanical gardens with Will, on this bench, our bench. I can’t see him, of course, or hear him, nor him me, but I know he’s there, and he knows that I’m there. I couldn’t – ” She broke off, her eyes watering. “I couldn’t ever break that promise. The thought that I’d just be talking to no one, that he wasn’t there with me… I couldn’t bear it. I could never do that to him. I have to be there.” She wiped a few stray tears from her cheeks, sniffing as Pan nuzzled her hand.

She stared at her notebook for a while, breathing deeply to stem her tears. She couldn’t bring herself to meet her father’s eyes.

“How old are you now?”

Lyra knew it should sting that he didn’t know, but of the all ways he’d dismissed her throughout her life, this was one of the least potent. “Seventeen.”

He sighed. “Lyra, you’re so young. Still a child, in fact. You have no idea where the rest of your life will take you. And if this boy was a true friend of yours, then – ”

“He wasn’t just my friend,” she said, sniffing, remembering his sweet, loving smile, his soft hands, the feel of Kirjava’s fur sliding through her fingers. Her chest ached.

“Ah.” She raised her eyes then, her sorrow not quite expansive enough that she couldn’t enjoy the sight of her father looking so out of his depth. “I see. Well. If this boy – ”

“His name is Will.”

Asriel started again, with a huff. “If this Will truly cared for you, he wouldn’t want you to put your life on hold because of an agreement you made years ago, before you’d even entered adolescence. What if your work takes you outside of Oxford? What if you choose to live abroad?”

She lifted her chin. “I’ll come back.”

“That will become burdensome very quickly, I assure you.”

Her palms began to sweat. She got to her feet, hands gripping the edge of the table until her knuckles flashed white. “It couldn’t be a burden. Never. Never. And – and even if it does become a burden, that’s alright, that’s fine with me, because I made him a promise, and that’s the only reason I could bear to see that window closed, to see his face disappear forever.” She couldn’t stop a tear rolling down her cheek.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” she continued, her voice splintering, “because this is about love, and I know that you aren’t capable of that, not really. Not the love that I know, not love that’s real and kind and good. I knew that when I was a child and I know it now too. Of course keeping promises to people is a burden to you, but to me – to me it’s part of loving him, still, of keeping that love alive, in whatever way I can. And no work could be more important than that, no travels, no nothing. I wouldn’t want it to be.”

She stood there, legs shaking, willing him to speak, to respond, to feel something. But he merely stared her, arms folded, studying her as if she were a specimen he’d unearthed from the ground, rather than a living, breathing, suffering human whom he’d given a part of himself to create. She shook her head at him, her gaze hard, defiant even in her grief, and stormed towards the door. She had one hand on the doorjamb when he spoke, his voice low but resolute.

“If I had never loved,” he said quietly, “I would not have dedicated my life to preserving the substance that allows us to do so.”

She stood there, frozen, the wood rough against her fingertips. The wind whipped against the windows of the cabin, an eerie moan, like a soul lost in the forest, searching for warmth.

“I respect your loyalty,” he continued. “It will serve you well. But there will be other men, Lyra – or women, whoever compels you. You’re so young. You’re scarcely a woman yet yourself. You can’t let the past dictate your future in this way.”

She thought then of the only time she’d seen her parents together before these past few weeks: years ago now, on the mountaintop, in each other’s arms. She’d seen her father, her solitary, inexorable, unfeeling father, begging her mother to join him, and she’d seen her mother, she who was so cold and cruel and unforgiving, weeping as she declined, her dæmon’s arm reaching out for Stelmaria as Asriel pulled the snow leopard into the stars with him, afraid perhaps that she wouldn’t leave them behind if he didn’t force her. Her breath hitched.  

“Is that what you found?” she said. “Did you ever find someone else who compelled you like she does, all those years you were apart?”

She was met with silence. She hung on for as long as she could bear, and then a moment longer, before shaking her head and stalking towards her bedroom, doing her best to ignore the ache in her chest.

She knew that her parents must have tangled themselves up together at some point – it was a prerequisite of her existence, after all – and as a rambunctious child with a penchant for the dramatic she’d found the story of their torrid affair exciting, even the murder that had ended it. But even so, she’d never thought about them together, as a unit, as a pair, as two halves of a rotten whole. She’d never known them that way, never seen it, not really. Until now.

Nothing could have prepared her for hearing her impassive father refer to her mother as his love, his darling, his dear, words she hadn’t even realised were in his vocabulary. Lyra’s lip still curled every time he reached for her mother’s hand, stroked her neck, carded through her hair, every time she fetched a glass of water in the night and heard them laughing together in the workshop, heard the clink of glasses and the smack of lips, enthralled by each other still, after all this time. She’d even found them asleep together once, after a long afternoon of repair work on the roof and prowling through the snow, pink cheeked and pale and utterly at peace in each other’s arms, her father curled around her mother on the sofa, the aurora spattering their faces with exquisite light.

Perhaps the greatest gut punch had come in the form of a sketch, which she’d found shoved in a drawer one day, when she was searching for a fresh pencil after her own lead had snapped. She’d seen enough of her father’s philosophical diagrams and drawings to know that he was a competent artist, his impressive grasp of linework made more notable by his complete lack of interest in it as a skill, but she’d still not expected to find several sketches of her mother, her features unmistakeable in her father’s precise pencil strokes, a lump appearing in her throat as she sifted through the stack of drawings. She’d snuck back several days later and stolen one of the portraits, tucking it into the ripped lining of her rucksack before she could second-guess herself, and refused to interrogate why.

It should be a wonder, she knew, to have parents who adored each other so. As a child, it had been a great excitement to see them embracing, to think perhaps she’d been born of love and not a twisted mix of passion and loathing. But seeing it now, hearing it from his mouth, knowing that these awful people were capable of a love that resonated with her, that they might somehow share the same sort of love she had with Will, even though he was so good and kind and they were so bad and cruel, only left a vile taste on her tongue and an ache in her stomach. It made her ask questions that she didn’t want the answers to. It made her wonder if some of that love could be for her, as she supposed it should be: surely the overflow of her parents’ love was her birth right, after all? Isn’t that how it was supposed to be?

There were moments that made her think so, made her think that the unfathomable could become solid enough to rest on. One day, Lyra was wandering around the Saariselkä market with her mother, a migraine having confined a foul-tempered Asriel to the bedroom for the afternoon, when she spotted the date on a newspaper stacked outside the post office. Tucked away in the cabin, she’d largely lost track of time. “Look!” she said to Pan, who was rolling around in the snow. “It’s December twenty-third. It’s almost Christmas!”

They arrived home that afternoon with the usual spoils, along with a freshly plucked snow goose and a stack of root vegetables, ideal for roasting. They’d also found some sweet pears and fresh cream, which they could poach in red wine for dessert. Her mother had even let Lyra drive the motorsledge home, the wind whipping through their hair and flushing their cheeks the same bright pink as they charged over the white hills back to the cabin, both of them beaming, unbeknownst to the other.

Her father went off on a tirade when they explained what the purchases were for, of course, ranting and raving, saying that he hadn’t thrown God into an endless abyss to then celebrate his son’s birth like a sycophant. Marisa simply nodded along while she melted chocolatl into milk on the stove and spiked it with brandy, then guided Lyra to the sofa, mugs in hand, and whispered, “Let’s just wait for him to tire himself out,” which made Lyra laugh, and then she felt guilty for laughing, as she still did whenever they shared a shred of affection.

It was nothing like the Christmases she’d spent at classmates’ houses, nor the stories she’d heard from her friends about their traditions, but it hadn’t been anything like the lonely days in Jordan either, and for that Lyra felt an uneasy sense of gratitude. There’d been no tree, of course, no stocking, no waking up at the crack of dawn and rushing into her parents’ bedroom. But the meal had been delicious, Asriel grumbling as he peeled the potatoes but doing so nonetheless, and after they’d mopped up the last of the gravy with thick slices of bread and inhaled their desserts her mother had placed a box on the table, last week’s newspaper repurposed into chic wrapping paper and a snow-white ribbon tied expertly into a bow on top.

“Merry Christmas, darling,” her mother said as Lyra unwrapped a gleaming steel penknife, complete with several blades and a corkscrew and a pair of scissors, among other accoutrements. The lacquered casing was inlaid with spectrolite, the gem iridescent in the soft light, the streaks of teal and gentle fuchsia and deep midnight blue glittering as she turned the knife over in her hands.

“You shouldn’t be running around the North without one of those,” her father said, swigging his wine.

Lyra nodded. It was beautiful, slim and elegant, a little aurora to carry around in her pocket that might one day be her saving grace. She showed it to Pan, his little claws tapping along the casing, mesmerised by the swirling colours. “Thank you,” she said, and her parents nodded, her father placing his hand at the nape of her mother’s neck and squeezing. She felt warm. She wondered if this was what family felt like.

The little glow in her sternum persisted for the rest of the evening. Lyra fetched the pack of cards she’d brought in the hope of making new friends at the Institute while her parents poured out three whiskeys, Lyra’s diluted with water at her mother’s insistence. Then she perched on the floor and her parents sat beside each other on the sofa, her father’s arm draped lazily around her mother’s shoulders, the walnut coffee table between them, and she taught them how to play rummy. They played four games, of which her mother won all four, and her gloating was so insufferable that her father eventually stalked off in a sulk, searching for another bottle of spirits, only for their bickering to worsen after they’d each downed another two fingers of scotch.

While they were squabbling, however, Stelmaria began to nip her mother’s dæmon more intensely, her teeth digging into the scruff of his neck, and Lyra’s unimpressed glare had her parents bidding her goodnight only a minute later, the sight of her father already pawing at her mother’s waist and nuzzling her hair enough to make her shiver, and Stelmaria chuckle.

Before Marisa left, dragged away by Asriel, she bent down and pressed a kiss to Lyra’s crown, murmuring “Goodnight, my darling. Sleep well,” into her hair. If she’d been less pleasantly stuffed with rich food and alcohol, Lyra might have pulled away, but she was too drowsy to do anything but sigh. Then she crawled onto the sofa with Pan, basking in the warmth of the sizzling logs beside her, and the two of them stared out of the window at the light show above them in awe, the sight of those luminous arcs never not mesmerising, cocooned in the warmth of the cabin while the snow fell down outside. But as she lay there, just her and Pan and a pile of burning embers in the depths of the frigid wilderness, she felt the warmth beneath her ribs seep away, and leave a cold well behind. She considered the two, the fire and the ice, the heat and the cold, but she came no closer to deciding which perilous substance she preferred, with which element she’d rather take her chances. This question soon started to become more urgent by the day, her new semester creeping ever closer, because she had to decide on what terms she would leave them behind.

This was a constant source of strife between her and Pan, made more painful because they never seemed to want the same thing at the same time. On the nights that Lyra went to bed with that same warmth suffusing her chest, the intoxicating lilt of a hopeful future whispering in her ear, Pan scolded her for forgetting, reminding her of Roger and Tony until she wept; on the nights that Lyra cursed them, having stormed off from dinner or refused to eat at all, hating them with a righteous fury, he’d comment on the years that had passed, her mother’s tender care, her father’s unwavering pride in the things they’d done, excoriating her for her unforgiving heart until, again, she wept. To add another layer to her torment, it was the nights she and Pan were most at odds, when they couldn’t stand each other’s company and split from each other as a result, that she felt most glad to be there, most grateful that she’d stayed, her darkness allowed to unfurl and breathe for the first time since she’d returned to Oxford all those years ago.

She felt no more certain about her future with them by the time her last night in Lapland rolled around, the start of her new term only days away. She was perched on the sofa with her mother, checking her tickets and itinerary, her father reading a newspaper at the table across the room.

“And where’s your other ticket?” her mother said; Lyra was changing airships in Trollesund.

Lyra sifted through the papers until she found the sheet of card, purchased the last time they’d visited Saariselkä. “Here.”

Marisa frowned as she scanned the details. “And who, might I ask, is Lyra Silvertongue?”

“I haven’t used Belacqua for years,” Lyra said smoothly, glancing briefly at her father to see if he stirred. His eyebrow twitched, but his head remained bowed. “Iorek Byrnison gave it to me, and I felt it apt.”

Her mother looked unimpressed. “Isn’t Silvertongue a little gauche, darling?”

“No more gauche than Belacqua, back in Brytain where everyone knows that name,” she said, snatching the ticket back. Then she smirked at her mother. “You must understand. I mean, you never became a Belacqua either.”

Before her mother could respond, her father’s sardonic voice rang out across the room. “Yes, I never did manage to find a woman who was proud to bear my name,” he said, flipping to the next page of the paper.

“I wonder why that is,” her mother said dryly, and the glare her father sent over was so sullen that Lyra giggled.

They traded possible explanations back and forth for several minutes – his heresy, his arrogance, his ability to forget people existed when they wandered out of his line of sight – the pair of them peering over the back of the sofa at his stoic expression; he was pretending that he couldn’t hear them. It was only when her mother delivered the fatal blow – insinuating that he hadn’t wanted to marry her, anyway, so the point was moot – that his eyes snapped up. “Impossible woman,” he growled, and the smile on her mother’s face was almost endearing.

Lyra bowed her head to hide her snigger, her hair falling in front of her face like a waterfall, the gold undertones glistening in the firelight. Her mother tutted at the sight of Lyra’s scruffy curls. “Darling, I wish you’d let me do something about your hair,” she said, scraping her hand across Lyra’s crown. “I can’t send you back to your tutors like this. You look like a street urchin, all these split ends…”

“I was an urchin for most of my life,” she said, batting her mother’s hands away. “It’s fine. I’ll go to a barber when I get back.”

“A barber?” her mother said, horrified.

“Half the price of women’s hairdressers,” she said gleefully.

“My love, that just won’t do. You have such lovely hair, Lyra. It deserves to be treated well.” She could swear her mother was pouting. “Just let me cut it. It won’t take long, and it’ll be free, if you’re so determined to be frugal…” She settled herself behind Lyra and began to part her hair from behind, muttering to her dæmon as she did so, but before long she’d caught a knot and Lyra winced.

“Mum! Stop fussing,” she snapped, whipping her head around to glare at her mother.

It was only when the room went silent that she realised what she’d said. Her mother froze, her hands still entangled in her daughter’s hair, perched behind her on the sofa.

“Alright,” Marisa said, and Lyra could hear the smile in her voice, as if spun sugar was melting on her tongue as she spoke. She kissed Lyra’s hair and then sauntered into the kitchen, Asriel reaching out to graze her hip as she placed the kettle on the stove, her dæmon’s eyes soft and wide as he continued to watch Lyra from the counter.

Lyra sat there for a moment, eyes closed, and took a deep breath. “Fine. You can cut it.”

They dragged a chair before the fire and placed a towel underneath, and then her mother began to snip her curls, her deft fingers raking over Lyra’s scalp, small dark whorls appearing on the floor as the haircut continued. At some point, her father appeared with two cups in his hand, one for each of them, and before he’d sat down Lyra could smell the biting sweetness of the spiked chocolatl that her mother favoured.

He opened his book as her mother ruffled her forelock, Lyra grimacing as flecks of chopped hair fluttered into her eyes. “Don’t feel bad,” he murmured, running a hand through his own hair, better sculpted than Lyra had ever seen it as a child. “Everyone submits eventually.”

Later, much later, Lyra stood in front of the bathroom mirror, glowing a little as she admired her new haircut, a notable improvement on the shaggy mess she’d been sporting before. Pan was perched on the counter beside her, and as she placed her hand on the cool stone, he stroked his fur against her fingers. “Maybe – ” she said to Pan, swallowing, but she couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

“Maybe,” he said softly, and she smiled. She picked up her toothbrush from the pot, her parents’ brushes rattling against the porcelain as she disturbed them, and she was just about to start brushing when she felt a terrible, cold wave move through her, the sight of her father’s chin, his eyes, and her mother’s nose and hair looking back at her a sudden knife to the gut, her mind filled with memories of that awful, awful mountaintop, of the starched sheets of Bolvangar, of Tony Makarios clutching that dead fish and begging it to be his soul, to come to life and make him whole again, and then she’d dropped her toothbrush in the sink, fallen to her knees and thrown up in the toilet, the brandy from the chocolatl scorching her throat as it purged itself from her body.

When the knock came at her door hours later, in the middle of the night, Lyra pressed her eyes closed and pretended to be asleep. Her pillow was damp. “Lyra?” her mother said, lightly scratching her shoulder. “Lyra, my love. You have to come and see.”

“What is it?” she murmured, fluttering her eyelashes, committed to the ruse.

“Just come. It’s extraordinary.”

Lyra slipped on her robe and followed her mother back to the living room, and when the sky appeared before her through those vast windows, she gasped.

The room was soaked in red light, a rainbow of rouge, scarlet and ruby and rose. Her father was leaning against the window, beaming, his teeth gleaming crimson. He lifted his arm, as if to beckon them over. Her mother slipped into his embrace, her head resting on his shoulder, and she pulled Lyra into her arms, so the three of them were standing there together, stunned into silence by the sky.

“What is this?” Lyra said, mesmerised, staring at the shimmering red light.

“A blood aurora,” her father said. “Very rare. Spectacular.”

Lyra cradled Pan in her arms as she stared at the wheeling arcs of this new phenomenon, both like and unlike the light shows she’d come to know. They stood there, Lyra and her mother and her father, doused in the same bloody hue. She swallowed. Her stomach was still churning, but worse was the ache in her chest, as if her own heart was spilling enough blood to light up the sky.

Minutes passed, and Lyra found her eyes glistening. “You won’t stay here forever, will you?” she whispered.

“No,” her parents said softly, in unison. Their dæmons were clustered at the trio’s feet, the golden monkey tucked into Stelmaria’s breast. Lyra considered placing Pan with them, but then decided against it, holding him more securely in her own arms instead. She continued to stare at the blood aurora, glancing briefly at the way it was painting them all the same scorching shade. She felt her stomach begin to turn. But then she felt her mother’s grip tighten around her, and she squeezed her eyes closed, a single tear escaping and sliding down her face.

“Let me know,” she said, after a beat, her voice thick, despising and forgiving herself all at once. “Where you go.”

Her mother kissed her hair, and Lyra felt the softest brush of Stelmaria’s tail against her ankle, like the flutter of a butterfly’s wing. “Alright,” her mother said.

They drove her to the zeppelin station the next morning, back through the pine forests and the white dunes, Lyra tucked between her parents once again, a spot that now felt less perilous but no less painful than it had done six weeks ago. She’d resolved to be honest about her future plans if they asked, but of course, they didn’t ask, which felt like the cruellest kind of blessing, a fitting parting gift.

As they stood on the platform, the air clear and cold, the sky a piercing baby blue, her mother wrapped her arms around Lyra’s rigid shoulders and pressed kisses to her cheeks. “Goodbye, my darling, my love,” she said, tears sliding down to her chin and dangling there, little icicles threatening to fall. “You know that, if you need us, if you want to - ”

“I know,” Lyra said hoarsely.

Her father only nodded, but he did so gravely, showing his sincerity. “Be well, Lyra,” he said, one hand placed securely on Stelmaria’s head.

She nodded, staring at them both, her eyes darting from one to the other and back again. She opened her mouth, her lips floundering for a second, a thousand impassioned sentences dying on her tongue. “Goodbye,” she forced out, then spun on her heel and strode over to the zeppelin’s passenger door before they could see her lip tremble.  

The steel door swung open with a whoosh, and she found herself staring at the same conductor who’d dropped her in Ivalo six weeks prior. His face broke out into a smile.

“It’s you!” he said. “I thought about you, every time we docked here. I remembered you standing right there,” he pointed to a spot beside her parents, “looking so cold. I didn’t like to leave you there like that, by yourself.” He peered over her shoulder, and gave her parents a wave. They, of course, did not return the gesture. “But someone came for you. Like you said they would.”

Lyra forced herself to nod. “They did,” she said, her eyes watering.

The conductor’s eyes softened. “Those your parents?” he said.

She turned to look at them, her father’s fierce eyes, her mother’s enchanting smile. Their dæmons, silver and gold, brutal and absolutely spellbinding, impossible to ignore. Impossible to forget. “Yes,” she said. “They are my parents.”

Lyra took her seat in the cabin, the smell of the North replaced immediately with cordite and petroleum and sweat, the scent of civilisation. She blew out a slow breath and gave Pan a weak smile as the airship lurched forwards, the propellors lifting them gracefully skywards, away from the harsh, exhilarating wilderness, away from an experience that already felt like the most bittersweet of fever dreams. She fixed her eyes to her parents as they turned to walk away, her father slipping his arm around her mother’s waist as they padded through the snow, their dæmons ahead of them, proud and beautiful and deadly, as they’d always been. She stared at them until the prism of her tears blurred them into one being, and didn’t stop staring until the zeppelin had melted into the clouds, and they’d disappeared for good.