An Opus Alchymicum Vol 1: The Experimental Theologian's Apprentice

A Person of Interest

Lyra blew on her coffee to cool it, frowning at herself as she puffed a little too hard and sent the golden liquid spilling over the edge and into her saucer. What was it that Malcolm liked to say about her? 'She had all the grace and delicacy of a blunt-bladed battleaxe'. Or something like that. She scowled as she tried to remember.

Then her ears pricked in alarm, as a crash sounded from the direction of Hermione's room.

Lyra went to leap up, but Pan leapt on her to keep her in place.

"What are you doing?!" Lyra shrieked, as quietly as she could manage while still staying angry with her dæmon.

"Stay where you are," Pantalaimon replied firmly.

"Hermione might need us!" Lyra hissed. "Didn't you hear -"

"That was just the bins being collected in the street," Pantalaimon dismissed, digging his claws painfully into Lyra's thigh. She grimaced, ground her teeth, but let out no sound.

"Let me just check ..."

"Stay where you are!" Pantalaimon ordered in his sharpest pine-marten voice. "Let the girl sleep. All the stress and excitement of leaving home left Hermione exhausted last night."

"Exactly," Lyra agreed. "She needs rest. And if the bins woke her, she might be frightened and not able to get back to sleep. I think I'd better go and see her, just in case she needs me to help."

"If you try and move from that chair I will bite your ankles until you bleed," Pantalaimon warned. "Sit still."

"What is the matter with you, Pan?" Lyra protested. "What's got you so riled up this morning?"

"There's nothing wrong with me," Pantalaimon retorted. "It's you. If I didn't know you better, I'd say you were broody."

Lyra froze in an instant. The problem was that no-one knew her better than Pan, her daemon, her love, her heart. She could hide nothing from him. More was the pity, for she was desperately keen to hide this.

So she tried anyway. "I ... I don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about."

"Rubbish!" Pantalaimon exclaimed derisorily. "You know full well what I mean."

"Full well what, then?" Lyra provoked back.

"The hair brushing, the running the bath, the barely sleeping in case Hermione needed something in the night," Pantalaimon returned triumphantly. "You're broody ... you think she can become the daughter you always wanted to have."

Lyra opened her mouth to argue, but the words got lost somewhere on the way. How could she argue against that? It was impossible. Not when there was truth in every syllable.

"Okay, so maybe I do," Lyra huffed, seeing that it was futile to deny it. "But you have to admit that she's remarkable. If I could have fabricated a daughter, picked up some peat from the claybeds at Jericho and fired it in my oven or something, I cant imagine it would have come out any more perfect than her. She is the daughter I always dreamed of having."

"Only she isn't your daughter," Pantalaimon pointed out. "She belongs to those dentists back in Abingdon. I thought I knew what this was all about, what your scheme was right from the very beginning. But now, I'm not so sure."

"What nonsense are you spouting now?"

"I thought that this was about Will, of crossing worlds to find the boy you loved and lost all that time ago," Pantalaimon explained. "But I see I was wrong now. This isn't about Will at all. It's about Hermione. Or, more specifically, about you kidnapping Hermione. Taking her to another world and pretending to be her mother there."