Chapter 7: Witch
Insatiable
Author: Rachel Roth (Nimfalas)
Rated T (for later chapters)
Fandom: His Dark Materials (Golden Compass/Northern Lights)
It was early in the morning, and Lyra wasn't about to waste any time.
Pantalaimon watched her dismally as she packed a rucksack with a roll of bread and some jam. He almost suggested throwing an apple in there, but he caught himself. He wasn't going to help her get on with this madness. From his perch on the wardrobe (a place that was quickly becoming his familiar spot), he could see his human working and still keep out of her reach. She glanced up at him and smiled, but he didn't return the favor.
"Pan, when will you come down?" she sighed.
"Not ever, Lyra," he said stubbornly, drawing himself closer to the polished wood. "I'm not going to the woods."
"Well I am," she said.
"Then you're going alone."
Lyra pretended not to care, but somewhere in her heart she felt a sharp kick.
"You're letting me go off alone?" she murmured at length.
Pan shifted, but he held onto his resolve. "Not letting you. It's your choice to go off there, but I'm not coming. So there. If you want to run off alone…"
The word "alone" hit her hard in the stomach, but she continued to tie her lunch. Human beings weren't meant to be alone, she knew painfully. That's why they were created with dæmons. To have her Pan leave her, or rather, for her to leave him…
"I've got to."
"No, you don't," he said. "You don't have to do anything. It's not our responsibility to help everyone."
"But if we can—"
"We can't!" he moaned. "What if you do find the murderer out there? What're you going to do? He'll probably just kill you right there without a thought, and that's not going to help us!"
Lyra stood hotly and stomped toward the door. "Bye, Pan," she grunted, pushing herself into the hall. Pantalaimon nearly stood and scrambled after her right then, but he stopped himself. He was as stubborn as she, after all.
Lyra slunk down the stairs and peered around the corner. Not a scholar was in sight, so the girl ran out of the main entrance and made a run for the woods. She felt utterly naked without her dæmon, and she didn't look back until she was sheltered beneath the shade of the boughs. She glanced over the windows and sidewalks, but she was almost certain she hadn't been spotted. With that assurance, she turned toward the shadowy trunks and crept into the forest.
Beyond the edge of the school grounds, Lyra began to question her decision. Had Pan been right to stay behind? But she had to warn James. She had to try and save him.
The clearing came to mind; that had been her original plan. She tore off toward that direction, past twisted trees and over mossy rocks. The trees blocked the sun almost entirely, and as she crunched through the leaf litter in the twilight, she felt a shiver run through her. A twig snapped behind her, and she bravely turned to face the noise.
"James?" she asked the half-light. Not a sound responded.
The further she came into the woods, the more she realized how still it was. She hadn't seen a squirrel or chipmunk since she'd left the grounds. No birds sang in the trees. The alethiometer had said it was supernatural, and Lyra began to feel edgy. But she was the daughter of Lord Asriel. She was Lyra Silvertongue. So she didn't head back while she had a chance, but continued on. If anything, this lack of life meant that finding James was an even more pressing matter. There really was something horrible out here, and she had to save him.
But she was alone, without her Pan to help her. She missed Pan's reassurance even more than she missed the sunlight.
Deeper in the woods, she realized that she had missed the clearing. She spun around, widening her eyes through the darkness. "James?" she shouted, and thought how her Pan would tell her to keep quiet. "James?" she whispered this time, and turned to the left.
Crunch crunch sang her feet, and her mind turned like clockwork. The bird and the bread. The serpent. Sacrifice evil, evil soul, evil spirit, spirit nourishment, soul sacrifice… Dame Hannah said that's what the symbols meant: soul, nourishment or sacrifice, and evil. What did it mean? What was traipsing about in these woods alongside her? What had taken Samantha out of her room?
What was the alethiometer trying to say?
Sunlight flooded her eyes, and in her blindness she heard a sharp crackle nearby. "James?" she asked, but it was not him, and blindly she scrambled to run, tripping over her boots, falling into the grass. The rumbling drew nearer, and she screamed.
"Lyra, it's only me!"
Her heart fluttered into her chest.
"Pantalaimon, what on earth," she panted angrily. "You gave me such a turn!! I—" Lyra sat upright and seized Pan, holding her dear dæmon against her chest. "I thought you didn't care…"
"Oh Lyra, how could I ever not care about you?" he whispered, shaking. "I love you, you know that…"
"What happened to staying out of the woods?"
"I couldn't let you come out here alone…" Lyra beamed at him, he beamed at her, and the two took a moment to glance around them. They were in their clearing, and James was nowhere to be found.
"Shall we break open our lunch now?" she asked, plucking up her rucksack from the grass.
"Can we go back to our room first?" he pleaded with a nervous giggle. "He must be gone already, so let's go…"
"Yeah, okay," Lyra murmured, standing up. "This place gives me the creeps anyway."
The bird, the bread, and the serpent.
"What does it mean, Pan?" Lyra wondered aloud for what might have been the thousandth time.
"I don't know," Pantalaimon grunted (for the thousandth time). They were lying on the hardwood floor of their dorm room, locked safely inside. Lyra was scribbling out an essay while her dæmon (what help he was!) slept with his head on her paper. "You spelt that wrong," he murmured, opening one eye sleepily. "It's anbarometric, not anbarometeric."
"Oh, hush," she sighed, nudging him playfully. "I'm distracted."
A trumpet at their window ripped away their concentration. Lyra scrambled to the window, abandoning her assignment without hesitation, and there on the shingles waited a patient goose with pale purple rings circling his intense eyes. But it was no goose, she knew immediately. It was a dæmon. Lyra swung open the window, and out bounded Pantalaimon.
"Kaisa!" he shouted gleefully. The dæmon nodded his head, and Lyra stood back respectfully to allow the dæmon to enter. The goose dæmon would have unnerved any other human at the college; to see a dæmon without his human was like seeing a person's mind flying naked without a body—worse than seeing a headless person. But Kaisa was the dæmon of a witch—and not just any witch, but Serafina Pekkala, the clan queen of the Lake Enara witches and dear friend of Lyra and Pantalaimon.
The goose gracefully waddled through the open window and swooped to the middle of Lyra's floor with a mighty flap of his broad wings. Lyra would not touch the dæmon of course—the code for human-dæmon etiquette still ran deep through her veins, and a witch's dæmon was no exception to that deep-set rule—so she stood back politely out of the way as Pantalaimon rushed to his side.
"It is a great honor to see you again, Lyra," the goose said, turning his coal-black eyes to her. "I was not expecting to meet you as I set out on this journey, but I am glad our paths have crossed again."
"Oh Kaisa, I've missed you!" Lyra exclaimed, smiling uncontrollably. "How is the clan? Oh—where are my manners—"
"Why are you here, Kaisa?" Pantalaimon interrupted for her, bubbling over with curiosity. The goose waddled forward, looking keenly around at the small dorm room.
"I was sent here by my witch"—meaning Serafina Pekkala, of course. "The clan is greatly disturbed by a presence here. They have sensed a great evil in this area, Lyra, and it is a very powerful force of darkness that engulfs this college. I have come here so that I may return and report the source of this thing to my clan, who are only about a day's journey away as I speak. Serafina would have come herself, but she was needed elsewhere."
"Oh, Kaisa! I know what it is!" Lyra cried.
"Do you?" wondered Kaisa and Pantalaimon both.
"Well, not exactly," Lyra whispered, glancing down at her shoes. "Oh, you know, Pantalaimon. Whatever's out there has been taking our students! The alethiometer says they're dying." Kaisa ruffled his feathers in alarm.
"What else has the alethiometer said?" he asked fiercely.
"We're not sure," she admitted. "It mentioned the snake, which was evil—and then the bread and the bird. We don't know what the rest of it means. Oh! The alethiometer said witch to Pan and me! The hourglass must have said that a witch was coming. That's what it meant, Pan! It was talking about Kaisa…" Her voice fell to a whisper as she realized what this meant. The alethiometer had never mentioned James at all, only tried to forewarn her about the witch queen's visiting dæmon. What did that make James?
"I told you James en't a witch," Pantalaimon muttered smugly. Kaisa snapped his head at the marten dæmon.
"Who is James?" he asked.
"A stupid boy," Pantalaimon answered spitefully, without concealing his distaste. "We met him in the woods, and Lyra's been thinking about him ever since. Lyra thought he was a witch because he had no dæmon. I told her that was impossible, but she insisted anyway…"
"He had no dæmon?" Kaisa's eyes flashed red, and Lyra suddenly felt small and stupid.
"Not that we could see," Pantalaimon answered cautiously. "He behaved like a normal person, like a witch without her dæmon or Will whose dæmon was inside of him. But he was from this world—he must have been—and he couldn't have been a witch. He might have been a shaman—"
"How old was the boy?"
"About our age," Pantalaimon said. "Or a little older."
The goose nodded his head. "That is about the age when shaman boys undergo the separation—that journey which only the human body can make. It's similar to the one witch girls must undergo. The human body must journey through a special place and abandon their dæmons at the brink. But it only stretches their bond, as you well know, though it is a painful and frightening process. James would be able to separate from his dæmon, if he were a shaman boy." This news sent a trickle of relief through Lyra's spine—though why it mattered so much she could hardly tell. "But there is hardly a reason for a shaman to be wandering through the woods outside of an Oxford College."
"Not a whole lot of this actually makes sense," Lyra muttered, sitting on her bed. "The killer is supposed to be supernatural."
"Are you sure there is a murderer?" Kaisa wondered, his immense eyes boring into Lyra. Pantalaimon flowed into Lyra's lap and nudged her hand.
"It pointed to the Wildman, so it must be a person."
"Shaman are supernatural," the goose stated simply. "As are witches."
Lyra sat frozen for a full minute as her mind worked around Kaisa's words. All at once, James's pallid face captured Lyra's vision, and as it filled her mind's eye she recalled the small details: the shape of his nose, the gleaming white of his teeth, the bloody chocolatl irises of his strong eyes, and…
Lyra's human heart flipped anxiously as it confirmed what Pantalaimon's dæmon heart had always known.
"Kaisa," she gasped, "he had blood on his face! He was pale—deathly, like a witch only worse. And Kaisa, his eyes were... I think he is doing this..." But Kaisa cut her off; he needed no further description. Lyra was surprised to find that Kaisa's dæmon face was pulled taut with surprise and fear. He took a waddling step back as if to regain his balance, and he spread his wings at once. Pantalaimon jumped to the floor, his furry face lined with concern.
"Kaisa, what is it?" the marten wondered, speaking for himself and his human.
"Lyra, Pantalaimon, I'm afraid that I must leave you now," he answered. "Thank you for telling me so much—and thank the Authority that I came here first! Had I searched the woods instead…imagine!" Quite abruptly, the goose turned and leapt to the windowsill with a powerful flap.
"But why must you leave so soon?" Lyra begged.
"I must return to my body," he said, watching her face intently. Then, "Do not go into the woods," Kaisa warned severely, staring into Pantalaimon's eyes. "For all that you hold dear, do not go into the woods!"
"Kaisa, who is James? What is James?" But the dæmon was gone.
As Lyra and Pantalaimon watched his goose form vanish into the hazy purple of the dusky air, they felt a similar fear settle on their hearts. James was the cause of all this after all. He was a shaman, and he had murdered Clara. They had been so close to him—but why hadn't killed them right there when they'd first met him? They were practically witnesses.
Lyra and Pantalaimon were not the only ones to watch the bodiless dæmon fly through the sky. Alice Barclay's Ruby-Throated Hummingbird dæmon spotted him first, and shrieked the news at his human. According to Petri, the dæmon had come from Lyra's window! That traitor was convening with witches! By the next morning, the news had spread through most of the campus. Lyra herself was the last to hear.
But I'm getting ahead of myself... Much has yet to happen before morning approaches, and it begins as Lyra drifts off into sleep that very same night.
