Chapter 41

I didn’t knock. I put my hand on Lyra’s door and pushed, and it swung inward on its hinges without a sound, as if it had been waiting for someone to stop asking.

The room was empty.

Not empty the way a room is when someone has stepped out. Empty the way the box room in Ashgrove had been, the morning I left it for good: everything that mattered was taken, everything else left exactly where it fell. The bed was made, hard and square, the way Lyra made it when she was angry. The wardrobe door stood open. Half the hangers were bare. On the wall above the bed, where her own bow had always hung—the black one, horn and yew, that she never let anyone else touch—there were two empty pegs and a pale shape on the paint.

Her grey riding cloak was gone from the back of the door. Her boots were gone. The window was open, and the curtain was moving a little in the hot breeze, and on the sill outside there was one long scuff in the moss, a boot-toe’s width, where someone had gone