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me, she was unlucky: years of inhaling the fumes in this cellar have given me some immunity to the drug she put in my wine, which is why I managed to wake in time.”
    “We nearly fell into her trap,” said Lyra. “But the swan—where did the swan come from?”
    “The swan is a mystery to me.”
    “All the birds,” said Pantalaimon, leaping to her shoulder. “From the beginning! The starlings and then the pigeons—and finally the swan—they were all attacking the daemon, Lyra—”
    “And we tried to save him from them,” she said.
    “They were protecting us!” said Pan.
    Lyra looked at the alchemist. He nodded.
    “But we thought it was just—I don't know—malice,” she said. “We didn't think it meant anything.”
    “Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it,” he said.
    Since that was exactly what she had said to Pan just a few hours before, she could hardly deny it now.
    “So what do you think it means?” she said, bewildered.
    “It means something about you, and something about the city. You'll find the meaning if you search for it. Now you had better go.”
    He stood up painfully, and glanced up at the little window. Lyra could hear excited voices in the street, cries of alarm; someone had found the witch's body.
    “You can slip out of the yard at the back of this house,” said Sebastian Makepeace, “and make your way along beside the ironworks. No one will see you.”
    “Thank you,” she said. “Mr. Makepeace, do you really turn lead into gold?”
    “No, of course not. No one can do that. But if people think you're foolish enough to try, they don't bother to look at what you're really doing. They leave you in peace.”
    “And what are you really doing?”
    “Not now. Perhaps another time. You must go.”
    He showed them out, and told them how to loosen the gate between the ironworks and the canal path, and then close it again from outside. On the path they could make their way along to Walton Well Road, and from there it was only ten minutes' walk back to the school, and the open pantry window, and their Latin.

    “Thank you,” she said to Mr. Makepeace. “I hope you feel better soon.”
    “Good night, Lyra,” he said.
    Five minutes later, in the University Park, Pan said: “Listen.”
    They stopped. Somewhere in the dark trees, a bird was singing.
    “A nightingale?” Lyra guessed, but they didn't know for certain.
    “Maybe,” Pan said, “the meaning—you know…”
    “Yeah. … As if the birds—and the whole city—”
    “Protecting us? Could it be that?”
    They stood still. Their city lay quietly around them, and the only voice was the bird's, and they couldn't understand what it said.
    “Things don't mean things as simply as that,” Lyra said, uncertainly. “Do they? Not like mensa means table. They mean all kinds of things, mixed up.”
    “But it feels like it,” Pan said. “It feels as if the whole city's looking after us. So what we feel is part of the meaning, isn't it?”
    “Yes! It is. It must be. Not the whole of it, and there's a lot more we don't even know is there, probably…. Like all those meanings in the alethiometer, the ones we have to go deep down to find. Things you never suspect. But that's part of it, no question.”
    The city, their city— belonging was one of the meanings of that, and protection , and home.
    Very shortly afterward, as they climbed in through the pantry window with the loose latch, they found the remains of an apple pie on the marble worktop.
    “We must be lucky, Pan,” Lyra said, as they carried it upstairs. “See, that's another thing it means.”
    And before they went to bed, they put the crumbs out on the windowsill, for the birds.











THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF
    This is a work of fiction Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is