Chapter 40

Lyra wasn’t in the training yard. Her bow was in its rack and her targets were stacked against the wall, and the straw at the foot of the butts had been raked smooth, as if no one had shot there for days.

She wasn’t in the mews. The goshawk was on its perch with its hood on, and the boy who kept the birds said the Lady Lyra hadn’t been up since Wednesday, and he had flown the hawk himself that morning, and she had come back to the lure sulking.

She wasn’t in the kitchen, or the boot room, or the long gallery where she liked to sit on the window seat and throw things at Rhys when he walked past. Her door, when I knocked, gave me nothing back but the sound of my own knuckles.

I stood outside it and breathed in.

Soap. Leather. The hawk. All of it is hours old. Under it, very faint, something sweet I didn’t know—a woman’s scent, powdery, like crushed violets. Vivienne. They had come down to breakfast arm in arm.

And down at the end of the corridor, on a har