Then the witch took her own knife and split an alder sapling along its whole length. The wounded whiteness gleamed open in the moon. She daubed some of the steaming liquid into the split, then closed up the wood, easing it together from the root to the tip. And the sapling was whole again.
Will heard Lyra gasp, and turned to see another witch holding a squirming, struggling hare in her tough hands. The animal was panting, wild-eyed, kicking furiously, but the witch's hands were merciless. In one she held its forelegs and with the other she grasped its hind legs and pulled the frenzied hare out straight, its heaving belly upward.
Serafina's knife swept across it. Will felt himself grow dizzy, and Lyra was restraining Pantalaimon, hare-formed himself in sympathy, who was bucking and snapping in her arms. The real hare fell still, eyes bulging, breast heaving, entrails glistening.
But Serafina took some more of the decoction and trickled it into the gaping wound, and then closed up the wound with her fingers, smoothing the wet fur over it until there was no wound at all.
The witch holding the animal relaxed her grip and let it gently to the ground, where it shook itself, turned to lick its flank, flicked its ears, and nibbled a blade of grass as if it were completely alone. Suddenly it seemed to become aware of the circle of witches around it, and like an arrow it shot away, whole again, bounding swiftly off into the dark.
Lyra, soothing Pantalaimon, glanced at Will and saw that he knew what it meant: the medicine was ready. He held out his hand, and as Serafina daubed the steaming mixture on the bleeding stumps of his fingers he looked away and breathed in sharply several times, but he didn't flinch.
Once his open flesh was thoroughly soaked, the witch pressed some of the sodden herbs onto the wounds and tied them tight around with a strip of silk. And that was it; the spell was done.
Will slept deeply through the rest of the night. It was cold, but the witches piled leaves over him, and Lyra slept huddled close behind his back. In the morning Serafina dressed his wound again, and he tried to see from her expression whether it was healing, but her face was calm and impassive.
Once they'd eaten, Serafina told the children that the witches had agreed that since they'd come into this world to find Lyra and be her guardians, they'd help Lyra do what she now knew her task to be: namely, to guide Will to his father.
So they all set off; and it was quiet going for the most part. Lyra consulted the alethiometer to begin with, but warily, and learned that they should travel in the direction of the distant mountains they could see across the great bay. Never having been this high above the city, they weren't aware of how the coastline curved, and the mountains had been below the horizon; but now when the trees thinned, or when a slope fell away below them, they could look out to the empty blue sea and to the high blue mountains beyond, which were their destination. It seemed a long way to go.
They spoke little. Lyra was busy looking at all the life in the forest, from woodpeckers to squirrels to little green moss snakes with diamonds down their backs, and Will needed all his energy simply to keep going. Lyra and Pantalaimon discussed him endlessly.
"We could look at the alethiometer," Pantalaimon said at one point when they'd dawdled on the path to see how close they could get to a browsing fawn before it saw them. "We never promised not to. And we could find out all kinds of things for him. We'd be doing it for him, not for us."
"Don't be stupid," Lyra said. "It would be us we'd be doing it for, 'cause he'd never ask. You're just greedy and nosy, Pan."
"That makes a change. It's normally you who's greedy and nosy, and me who has to warn you not to do things. Like in the retiring room at Jordan. I never wanted to go in there."
"If we hadn't, Pan, d'you think all this would have happened?"
"No. 'Cause the Master would have poisoned Lord Asriel, and that would've been the end of it."
"Yeah, I suppose… Who d'you think Will's father is, though? And why's he important?"
"That's what I mean! We could find out in a moment!"
And she looked wistful. "I might have done once," she said, "but I'm changing, I think, Pan."
"No you're not."
"You might not be… Hey, Pan, when I change, you'll stop changing. What're you going to be?"
"A flea, I hope."
"No, but don't you get any feelings about what you might be?"
"No. I don't want to, either."
"You're sulking because I won't do what you want."
He changed into a pig and grunted and squealed and snorted till she laughed at him, and then he changed into a squirrel and darted through the branches beside her.
"Who do you think his father is?" Pantalaimon said. "D'you think he could be anyone we met?"
"Could be. But he's bound to be someone important, almost as important as Lord Asriel. Bound to be. We know what we're doing is important, after all."
"We don't know it," Pantalaimon pointed out. "We think it is, but we don't know. We just decided to look for Dust because Roger died."
"We know it's important!" Lyra said hotly, and she even stamped her foot. "And so do the witches. They come all this way to look for us just to be my guardians and help me! And we got to help Will find his father. That's important. You know it is, too, else you wouldn't have licked him when he was wounded. Why'd you do that, anyway? You never asked me if you could. I couldn't believe it when you did that."
"I did it because he didn't have a daemon, and he needed one. And if you were half as good at seeing things as you think you are, you'd've known that."
"I did know it, really," she said.
They stopped then, because they had caught up with Will, who was sitting on a rock beside the path. Pantalaimon became a flycatcher, and as he flew among the branches, Lyra said, "Will, what d'you think those kids'll do now?"
"They won't be following us. They were too frightened of the witches. Maybe they'll just go back to drifting about."
"Yeah, probably. They might want to use the knife, though. They might come after us for that."
"Let them. They're not having it, not now. I didn't want it at first. But if it can kill the Specters…"
"I never trusted Angelica, not from the beginning," Lyra said virtuously.
"Yes, you did," he said.
"Yeah. I did, really… I hated it in the end, that city."
"I thought it was heaven when I first found it. I couldn't imagine anything better than that. And all the time it was full of Specters, and we never knew…"
"Well, I won't trust kids again," said Lyra. "I thought back at Bolvangar that whatever grownups did, however bad it was, kids were different. They wouldn't do cruel things like that. But I en't sure now. I never seen kids like that before, and that's a fact."
"I have," said Will.
"When? In your world?"
"Yeah," he said, awkwardly. Lyra waited and sat still, and presently he went on. "It was when my mother was having one of her bad times. She and me, we lived on our own, see, because obviously my father wasn't there. And every so often she'd start thinking things that weren't true. And having to do things that didn't make sense—not to me, anyway. I mean she had to do them or else she'd get upset and afraid, and so I used to help her. Like touching all the railings in the park, or counting the leaves on a bush—that kind of thing. She used to get better after a while. But I was afraid of anyone finding out she was like that, because I thought they'd take her away, so I used to look after her and hide it. I never told anyone."
"And once she got afraid when I wasn't there to help her. I was at school. And she went out and she wasn't wearing very much, only she didn't know. And some boys from my school, they found her, and they started…"