Chapter 135

I was awake when he knocked. It was past midnight, and I was always awake past midnight.

One knock, as the paper said. I sat on the window seat with my shawl round me and looked at the door. In all the weeks since we signed it he had never once used that knock after dark.

Lyra had come up on her elbow on the cot. “It’s him,” she said. “Bram would have said so if it weren’t.”

I opened the door.

He was standing well back on the landing, where the lamp did not quite reach him, his hands empty and no ring on either of them. Bram had gone a little way down the stair and turned his back. Caspian did not come forward, nor look past me into the room.

“Something about you,” he said. “I knew it an hour ago. Quill knows it. Nobody else yet.”

“Tell me.”

He told me there on the landing, in order, as Quill would have, and plainly. A boy called Joss, on the coal box. Larch Hollow, and a cart, and a sister called Tansy who was three. An orchard gate at nigh