A/N: I have just one thing to say. If you don't like slash, don't read this. It's slash. Thus, if you do not like slash, you will not like this. And I don't own anything relating to His Dark Materials, considering that I am not Philip Pullman.
Serafina Pekkala understood more than she let on. She and her former lover had barely exchanged looks before Marisa had yelled at the surrounding clergy for Serafina's death. Their eyes locked; Serafina fought off the urge to plunge her knife deep into the woman's throat immediately, knowing that murdering the ringleader would only make her escape more difficult.
"Shoot her!" Marisa had called again, as Serafina slipped out of the ship's interior, grabbed her pine branch, and rejoined her daemon in the fog above the ship. Serafina fingered the arrow Marisa had christened, years ago, and swore that she wouldn't stop until Lyra's mother was dead.
Unbidded, memories flooded through her, blocking out the rage she felt at Marisa's betrayal. As much as she fought it back, the night when she had first found Marisa, young and cold, her daemon huddled beside her for warmth as she tried to seek shelter on the frigid tundra, flew into her thoughts. The pity she had felt for the lonely girl, hundreds of years younger than herself, was enough to make her drop to the ground.
The warmth of another body on her pine branch, carefully bundled so that the mortal woman wouldn't die of cold in the nipping air, almost made her think that Marisa was behind her again, clutching Serafina's waist to avoid slipping off. There was Kaisa, flying beside them, the golden monkey safe in his firm grasp.
But thinking of Marisa made her think back to Farder Coram, and the time they had shared together. Of her experiences with humans, those two reminded her of how short life really is. Farder Coram was now old, and Marisa so changed, so much less innocent…
Serafina had heard from Dr. Lanselius about Marisa's marriage. Only a few months after she arrived back from the Arctic, it seemed almost cruel to Serafina. But, of course, humans had so much less time than witches for their loves, so Serafina had let it go. Being rash and vengeful wouldn't accomplish anything; their love was so improbable, at any rate, that Marisa's preference for stability was understandable.
Still, when Serafina finally got away from her duties at Lake Enara to visit a friend of hers in Scotland, and she heard about Lord Asriel, the resulting child, and Edward Coulter's death, she couldn't help but feel slighted. She intentionally avoided the child, who was said to look incredibly like her mother, in addition to many comparisons made between the child and her father.
But the woman she heard about when Lyra herself came to the Arctic, the Mrs. Coulter who tore children away from their daemons for the sake of theology, was not the Marisa who Serafina had found, shivering, innocent, and alone, on the tundra. So Serafina would kill Mrs. Coulter. As far as the witch was concerned, Marisa was already dead.