Did it say what would happen if we didn't?" he asked. He moved his fingers experimentally. True, the wounds still hurt, but with a different quality of pain: not the deep life-sapping ache of the day before, but a smaller, duller sensation. It felt as if it were healing. His father had done that. The witches' spell had failed, but his father had healed him. "You don't mean, I thought you might help us," she said quite calmly, not pleading but questioning. "With the knife. I saw what you did at Sir Charles's house. You could make it safe for us, couldn't you? You could help us get away?" Will lay curled up fast asleep, with his head on the rucksack to protect the knife. The cloak had fallen off his shoulder, and she tucked it around him, pretending that she was taking care to avoid his daemon, and that she had the form of a cat, curled up just as he was. She must be here somewhere, Lyra thought. The village was a shabby place: a huddle of wooden buildings, with paddocks containing reindeer, and dogs that barked as he approached. Smoke crept out of the tin chimneys and hung low over the shingled roofs. The ground was heavy and dragged at his feet, and there had obviously been a recent flood: walls were marked with mud to halfway up the doors, and broken beams of wood and loose-hanging sheets of corrugated iron showed where sheds and verandas and outbuildings had been swept away. "Well," said the guard, "I'm sure you won't, ma'am, but I can't do what I en't been ordered to do. You see that, I'm sure. Please stand up, ma'am, and if you stumble, I'll catch hold of your arm." He disengaged her arms gently and made her sit down. At once Pantalaimon, frightened, flowed up onto her lap, and the cat daemon tentatively came close to Will. They hadn't touched yet, but now he put out a hand to her, and she moved her cat face against his fingers and then stepped delicately onto his lap. Will said quietly, "The knife's broken. I don't know how it happened. Mrs. Coulter did something, or said something, and I thought of my mother and that made the knife twist, or catch, or, I don't know what happened. But we're stuck till we can get it mended. I didn't want those two little people to know, because while they think I can still use it, I've got the upper hand. I thought you could ask the alethiometer, maybe, and...” "So what were you going to do?" said the President. Lyra sat up, excited at hearing the names of her old friends. But Iorek hadn't finished. He went on: Out of the little grove, away from the baffled Specters, out of the valley, past the mighty form of his old companion the armor-clad bear, the last little scrap of the consciousness that had been the aeronaut Lee Scoresby floated upward, just as his great balloon had done so many times. Untroubled by the flares and the bursting shells, deaf to the explosions and the shouts and cries of anger and warning and pain, conscious only of his movement upward, the last of Lee Scoresby passed through the heavy clouds and came out under the brilliant stars, where the atoms of his beloved daemon, Hester, were waiting for him. The mulefa had no term for climb, so Mary had to do a lot of gesturing and roundabout explaining. Atal was horrified. "But it's not fair on you to have to do that." "Good-bye, Mr. Scoresby!" Lyra cried, looking around for him. "I wish, oh, thank you, thank you, good-bye!" "Yes. To each of the hairs from which these ones were cut. That's right." But the poor girl was embarrassed and ashamed: she'd forgotten. She turned away, hiding her face, and a boy said: There was a light breeze, which lifted a faint scent out of the flowers and rustled the stiff leaves, and Mary imagined a huge, dim benevolence holding her up, like a pair of giant hands. As she lay in the fork of the great branches, she felt a kind of bliss she had only felt once before; and that was not when she made her vows as a nun. "But where are we going?" the child said. "I don't want to be dead, Mama!" TWENTY-ONE - THE HARPIES Mary watched Serafina Pekkala with a mixture of wariness and admiration: she had never seen a human form so slender and graceful. She seemed younger than Mary herself, though Lyra had said she was hundreds of years old; the only hint of age came in her expression, which was full of a complicated sadness. However, his arms encircled the angel's wings, cramping them to his side. And a moment later, Mrs. Coulter had leapt up between those pinioned wings and seized Metatron's hair. His strength was enormous: it was like holding the mane of a bolting horse. As he shook his head furiously, she was flung this way and that, and she felt the power in the great folded wings as they strained and heaved at the man's arms locked so tightly around them. "No," he said.