Hermione flopped down onto her bed, running her hands through her tangled hair to offset the steady throb in her temples. She'd had another row with her father, who was deeply against her decision to head North with her new Mistress. But Hermione had made her choice and she was stubbornly sticking to it. The arguments, though, were taking it out of her.

Papageno flowed up as an ermine onto the pillow next to Hermione, his cool button-nose brushing against her aching forehead. Hermione closed her eyes and turned into his soothing little sniffs.

"Why is Dad being so difficult?" Hermione grumbled. "Why cant he just see? Mum does, so why cant he?"

"He's just worried about us, that's all," Papageno replied. "I'd be concerned if he wasn't. And, to be honest, I'm worried, too."

Hermione pulled herself onto her elbows. "You agree with us going, don't you? We have to try and find ... whatever-his-name-might-be Potter. And then help him if we can. And then find a way to make him fall in love with us."

Hermione wore a cross little frown as she said that last part. It was this aspect, above any other, which seemed to be the biggest challenge of all, despite the myriad of more immediate ones facing them.

"I know, I know," Papageno breathed back. "But it just seems such a long way to go, so far off. And there are bound to be all kinds of dangers out there. And it will be dark, and cold, and we might go hungry, and we'll be breaking about fifty international laws, and it could land us in prison, or worse ... expelled from Jericho Prep. Doesn't any of that worry you?"

"You seem to have it all covered," Hermione quirked in reply. "I think I'll just leave all our worrying to you."

"There's the other thing," Papageno went on. "If we ever find your Mr Potter, how will you know when you're in love with him?"

"I just will," Hermione chirruped dreamily. "I'm already in love with him a little bit. And I haven't even met him yet."

"No, you aren't in love with him, you're in love with an idea of him," Papageno pointed out reasonably. "They are two very different things."

"I don't see how."

"Well what if he turns out to be spiteful and horrible?" Papageno asked sternly. "What then?"

"He wont be," Hermione sang confidently. "You're forgetting that I have to fall in love with him. Which must mean he's the sort of boy worth falling in love with in the first place. Or, at least, the sort of boy I'd be able to love ... and you know I don't like anyone who's mean and nasty, the kind who would make fun of me. I cant imagine Mother Nature pairing me up with that sort, can you? Why would she?"

Hermione's mind was more than made up on the subject, and she fancied she wouldn't tolerate any other opinion on the matter. Not even from her own daemon.

"It would be awfully cruel of her," Papageno nodded in sage agreement. "So, that's settled then - we're going?"

"We are," Hermione returned staunchly. "I just wish Dad would stop giving us a hard time about it. I'd hate to leave on such bad terms."

Just then, there was a knock on the bedroom door and Hermione's mother, Catherine, walked in without waiting for an invite. She leaned back against the door and considered her daughter carefully. Catherine's dæmon was a prim little fox, whose name was Rampula. He began busily preening himself in the heavy silence, but never once took his swarthy, cunning eyes from Hermione, who had sat fully upright now, gearing for a fight.

"Is Daddy still very upset?" she began cautiously.

Catherine closed her eyes and heaved in a weighty breath. "He isn't happy about this at all, Hermione. You cant expect him to be."

"But I thought he'd be proud!" Hermione argued hotly. "I thought you both would be."

"And we are," said Catherine, crossing to sit on the end of the bed. "To be so singled out by someone as prestigious as Lyra Silvertongue ... it's wonderful news. But we were already so proud of you before. It's just this ... other thing that you seem so intent on doing. Your father doesn't understand it at all."

"And do you?"

Catherine smiled benignly. "I know the raging pull of love, yes sweetheart. I moved from my home, left all my family behind, to marry your father. I even changed my first name to the Brytish version, just to fit in."

"Then you know why I have to do this, why I have to go," Hermione urged.

"I'd know it more if you were about five years older, or if you'd even met the boy in question," Catherine replied evenly. "Or even if he was from this world. Cant you see how much you are asking us to accept?"

"Of course I do!" Hermione cried, leaping up and clasping onto her mother's forearm. "Don't you think I'm just as scared and confused and as frightened as you? To be told I'm going to fall in a love with a boy who I know absolutely nothing about? It's terrifying, Mum. But it's also so wonderful, to know that the universe has such a plan for me. That I'm going to get to be in love. Not everyone can say that. It's worth taking a risk for. I think so, anyway."

Catherine smiled warmly at her daughter. She was on the cusp of turning eleven, but she was, in many ways, an old soul in a younger frame. Dissolution from her peers had made Hermione more comfortable in the company of adults than other children, and Catherine often worried that it was ageing her before her time. Her world view came from the array of books she buried herself in, rather than the experiences of her environment. It gave her the air of being far more worldly than she was and she constantly confounded the expectations of someone her age.

"I just need you and Daddy to come around to this," Hermione continued. "I need your support, not to be told off for going on an adventure."

"It sounds like a very dangerous adventure."

"The best ones always are ... that's what Miss Lyra told me. And she's been on quite a few."

"Indeed she has," Catherine chuckled. "Speaking of which, haven't you got a homework assignment to be working on for her? You told your father that's why you had to stomp all the way up here."

"I do not stomp," Hermione protested crossly. "I merely make my point with louder than necessary footsteps."

"Known to us mere mortals as stomping," Catherine laughed. "And don't pout, young lady. It doesn't suit you."

"I do not pout!" Hermione shrieked indignantly, pouting as she did so.

Catherine hooted a laugh at her. "You just get on with your assignment. What is it anyway, anything your old Mum can help with?"

Hermione cocked an eyebrow at her mother, as she picked up a brush to run through the tangled curtains of Hermione's dark brown hair. "Do you know anything about manipulating polarised anbaric ions to make Dust show up on a photoplate of silver nitrate solution?"

"Afraid not," Catherine sighed. "The only sort of iron I know about involves that stack of laundry you've left for me downstairs. Once you're done being cross with your father, you can come and help me fold it. Did I spy your school uniform amongst that mountain of clothes?"

"It's in there somewhere," Hermione answered off-handedly. "Mum ... do you think that Dad will ever forgive me for going on this trip with Miss Lyra?"

"Oh it isn't the trip that your father is so unhappy about," Catherine replied shrewdly. "It's the thought of losing your love to another man, before that person is even old enough to be called one."

Hermione gasped. "Is that what this is all about? Honestly! That's so silly. Daddy must know that I'll always love him, no matter what happens or who I meet. He's my Daddy, and nothing can change that."

"But a good father should be very protective of his daughter," Catherine explained. "Giving up her care to that of another man is never an easy thing, and you know how your father dotes on you. I think he always thought he'd have more time before this particular rite of passage occurred. I suppose he feels he's losing you before you've even become a teenager."

"Well ... that's just ... it's ... well, it's ridiculously silly, Mummy," Hermione flustered. "Come on, we are going to talk to him right now. Make him see how silly he's being. Then everything will be all cheery again and we can start looking forward to my trip. I only have a month or two before we are ready to go. I have so much to prepare ..."

Across Oxford, where the waterways narrowed after the canal basin, and where the rugged wilds of the green belt began to give way to the concrete and steel of organised civilisation, was where the great and the good of the academic circle came to drink, and to indulge in the latest exotic brands of smokeleaf, and to swap rumours about the most popular heretical theorems doing the rounds among the great Universities of Europe. It was also here, above this melting point of scholarly iniquity, that Lyra had chosen to make her home.

Tonight she was staying in, resisting the temptation to head downstairs and argue the toss about the most recent oppressive doctrine from Geneva, or posthumously absolve the latest of the Magisterium-made martyrs to sense and reason, or else flirt outrageously with whichever poor man decided to catch her eye that night. She had never mastered the art of letting them down gently. Truth was, Lyra enjoyed the game too much.

But the real truth was that there was only one man on her mind tonight.

And Pantalaimon knew it too, and told her so.

"I know what you're thinking."

"No you don't," she sniped back.

Lyra sipped deeply from her glass of Tokay. The '87 was a wonderful vintage. Pity that she had only stolen one bottle of it from the cellars at Jordan.

"You've thought of nothing else, ever since you read the alethiometer with little Hermione."

Lyra sighed as she gave in. She'd spent far too long estranged from Pan to ever have the heart to really argue with him these days. Which was a pity, for she did so love to tease him. Just as he did with her, of course.

"So what if I have?"

"Lyra, you have to be clear on this," Pantalaimon stated firmly. "If we go on this little adventure, it is to help tiny Hermione. It is not to go searching for Will ... or, heaven forbid, that other vagabond from another world that you were knocking around with last. You remember him? The one the witches found with the shaggy mongrel dæmon? Only Dust knows where he ended up after he left us."

Lyra felt her heart skip at the very mention of both her former lovers. It sent a scorching heat rushing up from her chest to her cheeks ... or maybe that was just the Tokay repeating on her.

"I don't see why we cant do both," Lyra whispered excitedly. "Oh, come on, Pan! Don't try telling me that you wouldn't give the entire world just to see Will again! And Kirjava, too! You're a dirty liar if you say otherwise."

"I would never say that, as well you know," Pantalaimon skittered, turning his bright pine-marten eyes inscrutably on Lyra. "But, as always, it falls to me to point out that you're a savage and greedy little creature, who thinks only of herself and her own selfish whims."

"Mostly," Lyra allowed, tilting her glass at her dæmon in salute. "I'm my mother's daughter in that way, what can I say?"

"With your father's stubborn arrogance and self-absorption. It's not the smoothest of blends, Lyra."

"You know, Pan, I'm starting to think you're the reason I never got married," Lyra quirked thoughtfully. "I reckon you scared off all my potential suitors, if this was the way you swooned to their dæmons!"

"You did a fine enough job of that yourself," Pantalaimon replied grimly. "You being eternally single is a service to the rest of humankind."

"Perhaps I should apply for a medal, or a spot on the King's New Years Honours list then," Lyra laughed. "I think that counts as being worthy, don't you?"

"Dont get off topic," Pantalaimon admonished. "Be honest, not just with yourself, or even with me ... but be honest for her. If you can stretch your gluttonous little mind that far. Be honest for the sake of that poor girl you are piggy-backing a ride across worlds with. Are you doing this for her ... or for you?"

"Oh Pan, darling dearest, why does everything have to be so black and white, so polarised?" Lyra exclaimed. "Hermione needs to go to another world, so we can help her to get there and do what she needs to do. And, if we happen to see a little tangent along the way to, well ... somewhere else ... then why shouldn't we go? You accuse me of having no imagination, I think you might have lost yours, too."

"It isn't imagination that I'm worried about ... it's reality," Pantalaimon bristled. "Hermione is just a girl. I really hope you aren't using her for your own purposes. That's a very Mrs Coulter thing to do ... and I don't like it when I see her behind your eyes. Be careful to remember your promise, Lyra Belacqua ... that you'd never become your mother."

Lyra huffed and went back to her drink, looking out over the balmy night, as the spires of Oxford twinkled and Dust loftily scrutinised her from afar.

And that irked her. Why shouldn't she do something for herself? She'd been just twelve years old when, for the purposes of saving Dust, Lyra had cut out her own heart and stomped all over it, as she said goodbye to Will Parry, her first and deepest love, as he closed the last of the windows between the worlds behind him, when they parted for the final, heart-wrenching time. Twenty times Lyra had returned to the spot where it had happened, to that little bench in the Botanical Garden in Oxford. She always arrived at three minutes to midday, on Midsummer's Day each year, knowing that Will would already be there waiting for her ... albeit it a whole universe away, in another Oxford, but on a similar bench in exactly the same spot.

Then Lyra would complain about how unfair it was, that their love should be separated by such an uncrossable distance. She'd say that they could have left one, tiny window open, or else cut one, just once a year, so that they could see each other again and kiss until they fell down breathless, as they had when they had first discovered each other in that way. Then she'd smile as she imagined Will telling her off for being so selfish, before reminding her that their sacrifice had been for everyone in the world, and that they'd be together again when they eventually died and returned to Dust.

It was all so cruel ... so Lyra's anger at finding out that other portals had been opened can perhaps be well imagined. And when she learned that Malcolm had actually helped to construct one of these gateways she vowed never to speak to him again. But then the idea of possibility crept into the corners of her mind ... Mal knew where this portal was, could take Lyra to it, even if she had to manipulate his lifelong obsession with her to get her there.

All she needed was a reason to start out ... though she hadn't expected it to manifest in the form of a weeping little girl in the gardens of Jordan College. It was a justification fraught with moral conundrums, but Lyra satisfied her conscience by telling herself that Dust had brought Hermione into her path, that it had a plan for the girl that involved travelling to another world, and that Lyra was perhaps the only suitable guide for such a treacherous journey.

And if Lyra indulged her selfishness a bit along the way, surely Dust wouldn't begrudge her that little reward? After all that Lyra had done, perhaps the dæmons of the Universe would agree that she had earned a little something for herself.