London, Brytain:
It would happen like this.
A girl, about 12 years or so, was selling jewelry for her aunt. She was only a common girl, but what was uncommon was her beauty. She was careful to keep her face hidden by a hood so as to disguise her looks, and still, she attracted rather a lot of attention from the townie boys and college boys. When the gyptians came, hell, even some gyptian boys said they liked her. And she was willing to fight. She didn't like the attention.
As she was closing up shop with her aunt, her aunt asked, "Dear, Virgo, could you run to Mrs. Jameson's? I need to pick up my order of clasps and ear-bob posts."
Virgo nodded and picked up her skirts as she walked. She was named after the constellation Virgo.
She started to run, but stopped when she glanced at the setting sun. The sun had cast long shadows over her path; one side of the path was a brick wall, and it made an enormous shadow so that she could barely see her way forward.
"Hey, kitty, want to come play with me?" a rude boy yelled at her from behind the path.
She spun around in distraction. "You—Abel, God's gonna damn you to hell if you speak like that!" she screamed back and made an extremely rude gesture involving her middle finger. If her aunt knew she was doing stuff like that, she'd have Virgo's guts for garters, she was sure. She stuck out her tongue at the boy and kept walking on.
She bumped into something. At first she didn't see, since the object was so tall, but it was a man. Virgo backed up and saw a distinguished, slick-looking man in a very formal gray suit. "Sorry, sir. I never meant to bump into you, sir." She looked down to the ground and found that the man wore very glossy black shoes.
"No offense taken, little girl." The man smiled kindly.
Virgo knew that, living on the streets, not all men were kind, even though they looked kind. Her aunt always had a saying: "Looks are deceptive." She immediately recalled that saying, remembering the meaning of the word deceptive, and tried to push her way around the man.
"Where are you going, little girl?" he asked.
Something wasn't right. Her gut feeling told Virgo to run away. She stomped on the man's foot hard and ran the other direction, towards safety, towards people, towards light, while he was yelling in pain. But before she could disappear into the crowd of people haggling for the last wares of the day, the man grabbed her arms. She bit his hand, but he had something far more superior than tooth or nail: a mechanical pistol.
"Oh!" Virgo sucked in a breath before she heard a bang that resounded loudly in her ears. She expected pain, but not this much pain: it drowned out the astonished cries of the onlookers and replaced the drumming in her ears with silence. There was a burning sensation on her leg; it was like fire ripping across her flesh.
Up North:
The roar of an open flame was audible as Erik Olinedar and his group landed. It was getting bitterly cold; they were in the tundra by now, and decided to indulge in the comfort of a fire before heading into numbing, chilling temperatures. The wood crackled and snapped as the flames spread and heightened to a blaze.
"Ah, that's comfortable now," Mary sighed and put her arms over the fire. "My hands were frozen, I tell you that." She was cold, colder than she'd ever been in her life. "I should've worn my furs."
Lyra shook her head. "Nah—I'm wearing mine, and they're too damn hot."
"Don't curse—London's bad enough already as it is, without your London involving cursing."
Lyra stuck out her tongue. "You sound like Mrs. Lonsdale. I mean, she's not so bad now, but when she was mean, she was really mean."
"She can't be as bad as my secondary school teachers," Mary replied matter-of-factly. "One of them used corporal punishment, if I'm correct. If we misbehaved, each person got ten hard whacks to the hand or the neck with the ruler." She shuddered. "I'd never like to go back to that school again, thank you."
"I just ran around and sat bored through the lessons."
"Lucky you. You didn't need to get ten hard raps to the hand with the ruler. It hurt so much, I couldn't write for three hours."
"So what was your schooling like, Erik?" Lyra asked; she was eager to divert the attention to their newest member. "I just ran around Oxford. It's nice there, though it isn't half as fun as going to the North."
"Well, my mother was rather strict, you need to understand that. She kept me studying about Norroway, Brytain, America, High Brazil, Corea, that sort of studies. My father had gone to those places, and I think she was still very much in love with my father, even though he left." Erik fiddled around with the fire, adding sticks every once in a while to make the flame jump higher. "Witches are odd creatures," he commented, glancing behind his shoulder to the view of the witches conversing. "They are at once serene and temperamental. You see they are beautiful, but in the beauty there is a type of...roughness."
Lyra could already see that Erik was the learned type, with an ability to quickly regain composure and seem very intelligent. She liked him in a kind of affectionate way. Lyra sat closer to Will, their heads together in a gesture of love. Maybe Mary and Erik could be together just as Lyra and Will were together as lovers...
Erik's mother came over to them. "Quick," she whispered, "put out the fire. There is something wrong. I cannot name what, but there is something that doesn't feel right."
The group hastily threw snow over the fire, being sure to not make a sound as they lay down on the ground, trying to be inconspicuous. Their necks were tense, every hair on their neck stood up.
There was a vibration passing through the air that chilled their very core; the vibration seeped into their veins. Lyra couldn't help shivering, and then she froze. She must lie absolutely still.
Gradually, like sound waves, the vibration lost its intensity and everyone knew it was all right to get back up again. But they remained silent for the rest of the day, and even Pantalaimon knew it wasn't the time to talk.
