She didn't send a message, not for weeks. Fëanor had little time to dwell on it, though, because he was organising his next expedition to the North, and he was going to find a way to break the boundary between worlds.
He didn't need to do it to be able to travel himself: he had learnt, thousands of years ago, the way to travel between worlds without needing a door, but it was hard and dangerous and he didn't like to do it too often. Besides, he could not take an army with him that way, and he would need a thousand armies to fight the coming war.
So, he had to somehow find a way to break through to another world. And the witches, so he'd heard on his last expedition, had always said that the sky was thinnest in the North. All he'd need would be a vast amount of energy.
But where to find that energy? Lightning strikes couldn't be powerful enough, otherwise the fabric of the world would tear in two after every storm. Was there some way to store up the energy from each strike and release it on command? No; storing energy must be impossible. If it could be done, he would have found a way by now.
There had to be some other source of energy, then. Something stronger and more powerful than anything he'd encountered before in another world. Something unique to this world.
He immersed himself in the task of finding it, and the many smaller, less significant tasks which had to be done: the letter to the African king, Ogunwe, to ensure that he would honour his father's promise to join the army. The letter to the bear-king for permission to pass through Svalbard. The finding of equipment and a boat and men to sail it.
He had always immersed himself in his work, of course, because he was Fëanor and when he set his mind to something it became his entire world until it was done. But now he had a different motive to immerse himself: to distract him from thoughts of Marisa.
"She's doing it on purpose," guessed Stelmaria. "It's the sort of thing she'd do. She's trying to make you seek her out."
"I won't," said Fëanor decisively. "If she wants me badly enough, she'll have to come and find me herself. I don't need her."
"Good," Stelmaria replied. "We can end this now, before it properly gets started. It's so much easier, that way."
Fëanor should have felt comforted by that, but he didn't. He'd been alone, more or less, for thousands of years, but he'd never felt lonelier than he did in those two weeks.
He started going to the library, where they'd met twice before, at similar times to when she'd been there, but she was never there. Still, there were numbers to look up, and there was research to do, so it wasn't entirely wasted time. There had been one time, though, when he was sure he'd seen her: a beautiful woman with a golden monkey-dæmon, there was no-one else it could be.
He'd called out to her, almost instinctively: "Mrs Coulter!" He hadn't called her Marisa, because he remembered that being on first-name terms with another man's wife was not a good thing to make public, but it had been an effort to avoid it.
She was sitting in the mythology section, paging through a heavy book on ancient Brytain; he hadn't realised that she was interested in that sort of thing. Was she researching something?
"I'm sorry," she said, raising her head and giving him an icy stare, "have we met?"
Those cold words were the worst blow that had struck Fëanor's heart for millennia. He didn't know what to do, and stood frozen for a second before deciding it would be beneath his dignity to introduce himself to her again, as if their three meetings had never happened.
"No, I believe not," he replied, voice carefully level. "I'm afraid I must have mistaken you for someone else." He turned and walked away before he did something he would regret.
"Why is she doing this?" he asked Stelmaria.
"Maybe she's changed her mind," the dæmon replied. "Maybe she's decided it's too risky."
"But she would have at least let me know, she would have sent something. And I… I'm sure there was something between us. I'm sure she felt something. There must have been something genuine behind her deceit."
"Maybe it was what I said earlier. She's doing this to mess with you. And she's succeeding."
He hated to admit it, but it was right. No-one had dared to mess with Fëanor, no matter what persona he took on. Everyone had been too terrified to try.
Until Marisa Coulter.
"What has she done to us?" he asked. "How has she done it? She must be a witch or something, or have cast some kind of spell – "
"Never mind that," Stelmaria said. "She can't be a witch – witches only have bird-dæmons. But there's something about her. I don't see how we can find out what it is, but we need to decide what to do."
"I know," he said. "And I know what I should do: carry on and wait for her to get in touch with me, like she said she would."
"Where's the problem, then?" asked Stelmaria.
"You know where. I… you were right all along. I'm sorry. I should have known, and I should have seen this coming long before, and stayed away from her."
Stelmaria was pleased by this rare admission, but she didn't think her luck would stretch enough to get away with an I told you so. "It's too late now… what can we do?"
"I won't contact her again," he said. "I can't let her see what she's done to me. I'll hide it, any way I can."
"She'll come back," said Stelmaria, because it was what he wanted to hear, true or not.