Archive of Our Own ^beta

Will Parry walked slowly through the fading dusk light, along the path of weed-cracked cement blocks to his house’s back door. The kitchen light was on, casting a window-paned splash of light onto the grass. Emma, his mother’s nurse on Tuesdays, would be in the kitchen having a cup of tea, or in the front room with a novel or the television turned on low. 

Will stopped on the back step and leaned his forehead against the door. He was trembling from exhaustion. Now that he was home, among the scents of potting soil and cooked eggs and laundry soap, he could smell the antithetical scents of the hospital lingering on him: metal, disinfectant, anxious sweat.

He just needed one more moment. 

Kirjava nudged against his shin with her head, but said nothing. 

Slowly, Will mastered the shaking in his limbs and the fierce tears threatening to spill from his eyes. On an inhale he acknowledged them, on the exhale he let them go. He unlocked the door and stepped inside. 

Emma came to greet him. She was a few years older than Will, calm and focused. Once—only once—he had glimpsed her dæmon and had seen a rough and solid little tortoise, steps slow but very proud. 

He and Emma spoke cordially, but briefly. His mother was asleep. They had gardened in the lucky couple hours of sun that day. There was leftover lasagna in the oven kept warm for Will. He thanked her, she smiled, and she put on her coat and left. Will worked late hours on Tuesdays, and Emma knew he didn’t like to talk much when he got home. 

Will locked the door behind her. He first went quietly up the stairs to the attached apartment of his mother’s and listened at the door. Silence. So he went back downstairs, took a perfunctory shower, then sat down at the little kitchen table with some of the lasagna to eat. He kept only the small light over the stove on, and he had showered in the near-dark. Kirjava had no trouble seeing, and after hours spent in the scaldingly bright lights of the operating room, his eyes were as tired as his back.

Finally, as he set his plate in the sink and sat back down with the kettle warming up, he spoke to Kirjava for the first time since getting home.

“What happened today?”

She knew what he meant. It was all they had thought about since it happened. 

Kirjava hopped up onto the windowsill behind the sink and stared into the dark little garden, tail swishing back and forth. 

Finally, she said, “I don’t know, Will. I keep thinking it over. I knew something was wrong. But even now I don’t know what it was. Perhaps we read that latest cardiology journal again. I almost feel like it’s something I should know. It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

Will nodded. She hadn’t finished. But he didn’t expect her to say what she did:

“Or maybe I’m wrong.” Her small voice was uncharacteristically sour.

“I don’t think you are,” Will protested. He hated to hear her doubt herself. “You noticed something. That’s what you’re.... That’s why I need you. Two sets of eyes—”

“Oh, but we aren’t, Will,” Kirjava said, turning around to face him. “I’m you! I don’t know more than you know.”

“Yes, but you remember it differently,” Will said. “You remember what I forget. Forgetting isn’t the same as not knowing. You’re remembering something I don’t remember.”

They had had this argument many times: medications, dosages, procedures, obscurities of the ventricles down to the matter of millimeters. But they had never before had a patient die on their operating table, as they had today.

It had all been going perfectly.

Kirjava sat beneath the operating table beside the man’s dæmon, a round-bellied dachshund, watching her carefully, occasionally sniffing her or leaning close to listen to her heart. 

Will did not always see the dæmons of the people in his world, but he always did for his patients. He supposed it was about that way of seeing Mary had told him about, and also about the way he had once, so long ago, but never forgotten, used the subtle knife. The same calmness, the same steady observation of every detail: every bump or flutter or jump or pushback of the scalpel beneath his hand. Once, it had been the warp and weft of the fabric of the universes. Now it was the muscled throbbing redness of human hearts.

That calmness that he brought with him when performing surgery always brought his patients’ dæmons into focus. Sometimes the other surgeon team members’ dæmons would flicker into focus, too, but only momentarily: a finch on a shoulder, a frog in a scrub pocket. 

Their patient that day was a hopeful case. Symptoms a bit towards the extreme ends for some factors, but nothing to indicate the man’s family should prepare for the worst. His wife had kissed him, his adult daughter had wished him good luck over the phone, and then Will’s nurse had dripped liquid calm through his IV and rolled him down the hall into the lights.

But halfway through, with the man’s ribs spread wide like the scaffolding of a great red building being built, Kirjava had spoken.

“Will. Something’s wrong.”

He held very still and took a deep breath, so the others would only think he was gathering himself: a good and responsible thing for a surgeon to do. But really, his heart was pounding. No one else could hear Kirjava, of course, but they had a mutual agreement of not speaking to each other in the operating room, so that Will could maintain his focus completely. And he had never liked not replying to her when she did speak. It felt rude. But no one liked a surgeon who seemed to be talking to himself.

“She’s—something’s wrong,” Kirjava said again. “Something’s not right.”

Will looked at the monitors. Like Lyra had years ago with the esoteric symbols of the alethiometer, gathering up their complex meaning in a moment, so did Will read the multiple streams of information about the living man laid bare before him.

All normal here, he thought to Kirjava. What exactly are you—

But he stopped, because the numbers were suddenly not normal at all—these plummeting that should be rising, these dancing that should have coasted steady. Will and the other surgeon and the anesthesiologist and the nurse all began speaking at once: announcing, clarifying, demanding. And though they hurried and fought and plied the man’s blood and nerves with drugs this way and that, even though Kirjava was licking the dachshunds’ brow and purring as hard as she could in comfort, far too soon the machines howled their damning sustained squeals, and then Kirjava was standing over nothing but a vanishing swirl of golden dust. 

At his kitchen table Will took Kirjava into his lap, and the two of them wept together in the dim light for a long time. When their quiet sobs subsided, Will got up and restarted the kettle that had gone cold. This time he waited at the stove, standing and rubbing his arms. He wasn’t sure if he was cold or warm. He felt no particular temperature at all.

When he sat down again with his tea, he pulled out of his pocket the silver ring he had stolen from the dead man.

He set it on the tabletop as carefully as he could, but even with his surgeon’s hands, it rattled. Both he and Kirjava froze, looking up at the ceiling, but of course the sound was not loud enough to wake his mother. He always had to be quiet at night. The past few years had been good years for her. That’s how he thought of them. There were good years and bad years. Always the bad ones came back—appointments, medication adjustments, new therapies—but always the good ones did too. Even in the good years, though, being woken in the middle of the night frightened and confused her.

Will looked at the ring, then at Kirjava, who was standing on the tabletop, hackles raised but tail curled under in shame.

“Why did we take it?” She asked, voice still raw from crying.

He thought the “we” was immeasurably kind. It had been Will’s idea. Not even an idea really. An impulse. He’d been holding the plastic bag of the man’s possessions: clothes, belt, eyeglass case, ring. Before the thought was a full thought, he had ripped open the bottom corner and pulled the ring out. It would look like the bag had ripped.

“We know why,” he said. 

It was because the ring was from another world.

Several years ago, walking through the local park, Will had been deeply lost in thought, thinking about an upcoming complex surgery using a new technique. 

His eyes fell on a sprig of pine lying beside the path. It caught his eye as surely as if it had been glowing. Just as he had known his own world by touching it with the tiniest point of the knife and feeling it resonate, so did he know this branch at once to be from a world not-his-own. It was a talent Sebastian Makepeace knew about, but Will did not know that.

His heart pounded, and Kirjava’s fur all stood on end.

“Do you think there’s a—?” She dared not say it.

“Could be. Could not be.”

But even after they picked up the pine sprig and walked all through the park the rest of the afternoon—and the next day and the next—there was no window. Only the little twig, from another world, as if it had fallen out of the sky.

Which it probably had. Will still had the same sprig on a shelf in his bedroom, and it had never dried, never faded. He hadn’t known as much as Lyra had about the witches of her world, who flew with cloudpine, but he knew enough to recognize it.

And after that had come others. He took to wandering all the odd little flea markets of Oxford, of which there were many. Sometimes he took his mother with him, and they browsed the flower pots and serving spoons and rusty tools and half-used notebooks and uranium glassware and bought themselves little treasures that made them smile. Sometimes Will went by himself and walked very slowly, looking over the crowded shelves and tables, trying very hard to be calm and watchful and ready and unhurried. Through this way he had found a reddish leather watch strap with no timepiece, an amber-colored bead, a bundle of something that looked like horsehair for a violin bow, and a small grayish stone with one smooth side and one rough side which was heavier than it looked. Once in a museum in Munich, he had seen a teacup decorated with sunflowers, but that was behind bulletproof glass, and though he stared at it a nice long while, feeling a sort of heady peacefulness, there was nothing else he could do about it.

Never had he stolen to acquire an otherworldly object before, but now he was looking at this man’s silver ring, proof of the dissolution of his morals on the matter. 

The ring was a bit uneven, like something handmade, though still well crafted. The signet was a lion, or maybe a bear. It was very worn, the details smoothed, but the ring was not tarnished. 

“He kept it polished,” Kirjava said, sharing the path of Will’s thoughts.

He nodded. He picked up the ring again. He liked holding it. It felt like—like something resolving. He had recently taken his mother to an orchestra performance, and he’d marveled at the tingling rightness he’d felt hearing all the musicians come into tune just before beginning the show.

Maybe he was supposed to have this ring.

“Can’t think like that,” Kirjava said, though she too was sitting with her nose almost pressed against the ring. “It belongs to Mrs. Robertson now.”

“We ought to return it,” Will said, trying the ring on his thumb, which it was still too large for. “We won’t be caught—we can say we found it on the floor. They won’t think.”

“We shouldn’t have taken it,” Kirjava said again, shutting her eyes. “We can’t start doing this. Stealing? Where does that take us? Think about the consequences, Will. Think about the end of the path. What, will we end up in Munich breaking into the museum? Go into the vault? Maybe they have more!”

Maybe Mr. Robertson had more. At his house. Will could get his address from his patient record and—

Kirjava dug her claws into Will’s wrist hard enough for him to gasp and drop the ring. “Watch it!” he snapped, then instantly regretted it. What he was thinking was a crime! He could lose his license! And then who would pay for the house, and his mother’s care? 

She was what mattered. She didn’t have anyone else, and so he must walk the path that took best care of her. There were no other options. 

Kirjava leaned down and licked where her claws had pricked him in silent reparation. Will made himself sit still for a little while and focused on the rough, grounding texture of her tongue on his skin. Out of the depths of his memory came a similar image: young Pantalaimon licking him after his fight that had won him the subtle knife, before Will had understood the drastic significance of that one soft touch.

Kirjava stopped, for they both felt the electric shock of realization that had clicked together in their mind.

“It’s from their—”

“So that’s why we—”

Will swallowed hard. The ring was from Lyra and Pan’s world. He knew it as surely as he’d known the truth about the cloudpine when he saw it by the path. He had been able to recognize the feel of her world with the knife when looking for places to cut through. He hadn’t known he could see the specifics like that in these objects, too.

He took up the ring, carefully now, as if it might bite him, and went up to his room. He looked carefully at the objects on the shelf, but none of them gave him the same feeling as the ring. He knew Kirjava felt the little pang of disappointment in his heart, and he pressed his hand there, wishing, for the hundred thousandth time, that if only there had been another way, any possible chance—

“Oh!” Kirjava exclaimed so fiercely that Will jumped in alarm. “Oh, Will, I’ve remembered! Your father—his heart!”

Will looked down at her, fur all full of energy and that thrill he deeply shared: that thrill of figuring out a problem. Any moment now, her thoughts would come to him, and he would know it, too.

Ah. Yes.

“It was his dæmon’s heart,” Kirjava said. “They were from Lyra’s world—somehow—and got stuck here. She couldn’t live here, and her heart gave out. But it just looked like his heart having the trouble to us.”

“So there was nothing else we could have done,” Will said.

He set the ring down on the shelf beside the gray stone and lay back down on his bed, staring up at it. Tomorrow he would take it back to the hospital. He had the day off, but he would claim he’d forgotten something in the stress of the day, and would pretend to find the ring on the floor.

He turned off the lamp, but didn’t get under the covers. From outside, he heard the neighbor tossing trash into the bin with a metallic rattle. The radiator clanked several times, then stopped. He needed to get them serviced. He kept forgetting. 

The sun was fully set now, and the only light was the dull orange-white of the alley street lamp. It snuck through the gap in the curtains and landed on the silver ring with its faded creature carved so carefully so long ago. Beside it sat a locked rosewood box Will had found at a secondhand shop. That was the only thing on the shelf from his world, and inside were the pieces of the subtle knife. He’d thrown the key into the Thames the day he’d locked the box.

Kirjava curled up beside Will and looked at him with her beautiful shining eyes. “There was nothing else we could have done,” she said.

But she was no longer talking about the man, and they both knew it, and they both knew she was right.