Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 51 - Chapitre 60

"Say his name.""No.""Girl, you are bleeding like a stuck pig, and the child is turned wrong in you. If I am to bring this boy into the world, I will not do it without knowing whose blood runs in him."Lyra turned her face into the straw mattress and bit down on the blanket until the wool tore between her teeth. The pain came again, a great iron hand closing around the base of her spine and wringing, and for a long moment there was no cottage, no storm, no old woman's lamp swinging from a roof beam. There was only the pain and the dark behind her eyelids and the rain hammering the thatch like a thousand small fists.When it passed, she lay gasping, drenched in sweat."He is dead to me," she said."That is not a name.""It is the only one he has."Maren did not argue. She sat back on her heels at the foot of the bed with her sleeves pushed to the elbow and her white hair tied up in a rag, an old woman with a face as brown and creased as a walnut shell, and she looked at Lyra with eyes

"A boy without a name is a boy anyone can give one to.""Then let no one."Lyra did not look up. She sat in the chair by the hearth with her son at her breast and her bare feet drawn up under her skirt, and she watched the small, fierce movement of his jaw, the dark lashes lying on his cheek, the fist closed around a fold of her blue smock. The morning light came through the shutters in thin gold bars. The kettle ticked on the hob. Outside, in the lane, somebody was driving a cart toward the mill, and the wheels went on and on over the frozen ruts like a slow, patient drum."Three weeks he has been in this world," said Maren. "Three weeks, and you will not call him anything but he.""If I name him, he is real.""He is real already, child.""Then if I name him, he is mine." Lyra's voice thinned. "And if he is mine, he is his."Maren did not need to ask whose.She stood at the table with a basin of wet linen, wringing it out in short, hard twists, and the cloth smoked in her hands. It w

"You are too late, Your Majesty."Maren said it from the floor, with her back against the shattered doorframe and one hand pressed to her side. The cottage door lay across the room in three pieces. Her white hair was matted dark. Between her fingers, under the blue wool of her apron, something wet was slowly spreading, and when she smiled, a thread of red ran from the corner of her mouth into the creases of her chin.Valerius stood in the ruined doorway with the dawn at his back.He had flown all night. The spark had come again after midnight, a great gold flare rising out of the hills below him like a beacon, bright enough to light the clouds from beneath, and then it had guttered and dropped to a cinder, and he had gone down into the storm like a stone. His wings still steamed in the cold. His boots left black prints in the snow. He looked at the room.A broken table. A smear of honey on the boards, thick as amber, with the print of a bare heel in it. A cradle scorched black on the

"You will marry Warlord Gorath at the new moon, or the boy goes into the river."The cart hit a rut, and the chain on Lyra's wrists bit down to the bone.She did not cry out. She lifted her head from the boards, slowly, the way a cat lifts its head when something moves in the grass, and she looked at the man riding beside the tailgate on his tall grey horse. He had not shaved in three days. There was blood on his sleeve, someone else's, from the river. He did not look at her. He looked straight down the road ahead with the leather strap swinging at his belt, as though he were speaking to the weather."Say that again," said Lyra, "and I will finish what the mill hook started."Nobody in the cart moved.There were four men with her in the back, riding on the benches with their spears across their knees, and not one of them was looking at her either. They had been looking at her for the first hour. They had looked at her chained wrists and her bound feet and the blood dried black on her

"You pointed at my window in front of everyone. You gave me to him."The kitchen knife shook in Brielle's hand.It was a small, ordinary knife, the kind used for peeling turnips, and she held it low and out in front of her like a girl who had never held a weapon in her life. Candle stub, cold cellar, the breath of both of them rising in thin white threads. Lyra stood on the bottom step with her chained wrists hanging in front of her and thirty armed men waiting above, and she looked at the stepsister she had not seen in nearly a year.She had changed. Brielle had been a round cheeked woman of twenty when Lyra left, with ribbons in her braids and a way of tilting her head when she wanted something. Now she was tall and pale, in a nightgown and a man's coat, with her hair hacked off at the shoulder, and her eyes were red and wide and brimming. She looked like the victim in a ballad. That was what Lyra noticed first.She had always looked like that when she wanted something."Give me my