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By the time Lord Asriel’s train pulled into Paddington Station, the clock was just striking eleven and the pleasant thrum of caffeine was quickly wearing off. Already, he was regretting his decision to stop in London before flying back to the North with ferocity. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have bothered, but he’d deemed the polarising microscope that the Royal Arctic Institute had agreed to give him – well, they’d agreed to lend it to him; only he knew just how unlikely it was that they’d ever get it back – worth the detour, and that, in turn, had made meeting with Brytain’s Minister of Foreign Affairs at Whitehall the following morning seem like a fairly painless addition to his calendar. Wallace was curious about the King of Lapland’s thoughts on Brytain’s latest trade proposal, thoughts that Asriel should have been privy to, given that he’d ostensibly just spent a year fostering good diplomatic relations between Brytain and Fennoscandia. In the past, he might have simply skirted the meeting, let Wallace figure out the deception for himself and stayed abroad until any consequences had passed him by. But the last thing he needed right now was any additional scrutiny of the true purpose of his upcoming expedition, certainly not from Parliament. It would be more prudent to redirect Wallace’s attention himself, in the direction that Asriel deemed most useful, however tedious that might be.
Stelmaria reminded him of this several times during the hour-long journey from Oxford to London, though this didn’t stop Asriel grumbling about the indignities of petty politics from the moment the train pulled out of Oxford station until Paddington’s grimy fourteenth platform came into view. He sent Thorold onto their lodgings for the night, with stern orders not to let Asriel’s new bounty of heavy gold dollars out of his sight for even a moment, and to give their cases a final peruse, to check that all was in order before they were loaded onto the zeppelin the following morning. Then Asriel hailed a cab to the Institute.
The microscope was a thing of beauty: reinforced glass for the lenses, should it be used in an outdoor camp; a polariser with a full 360 degrees of rotation; a silver dial to increase or decrease the illuminating intensity as he wished. The fact that it spent most of its life in a seldom-used laboratory in London was criminal. He gave the bleary-eyed technician the go-ahead to bolt the top of the equipment’s crate down, then gave him the address of the aërodock and signed the research proposal that had granted him use of the gear. Every word of it was fraudulent, of course, and Stelmaria had to hide her twitching whiskers behind his calf as he inked his signature with a flourish.
If he’d decided to leave through the Institute’s back entrance, that might have been it. He’d have returned to his hotel, slept, met briefly with Wallace and flown back to the frozen wastes none the wiser. But fate had never seen much sense in keeping them apart for long. Instead, he went to leave through the Institute’s front entrance, and that was when he saw the butter-yellow light of a lamp by the library’s door, and George, the Institute’s long-suffering librarian, yawning behind the desk.
“Still here, George?” Asriel said, as he rooted around in his pocket for some cash to use for another cab.
George sighed. “The sign says that we’re open all hours. I can’t leave until she does.”
Stelmaria’s head snapped up. She began to sniff the air in earnest, looking for a familiar scent bleeding through the library’s wood-and-pressed-paper musk. Asriel put his hand on her crown.
It could have been a different ‘she,’ of course. It should have been a different ‘she’: after so many years of corroding her soul beneath the Magisterial thumb, surely Marisa had scammed enough money from the Church to buy her own books. But no, clearly one attempt on his life wasn’t enough for a single evening: as soon as he stepped foot inside the library, Stelmaria’s tail stood erect and her ears pricked up. She gave a low, sensuous growl. Then she began to weave between the library’s dimly-lit bookshelves, both her paws and Asriel’s shoes silent against the parquet flooring.
Marisa had installed herself in a small nook towards the back of the library, the only light the jade glow from the green-glass-shaded table lamp that was switched on beside her. The desk was strewn with books and papers and she was scribbling furiously in a notebook, her dæmon perched on her shoulder and peering down at her notes as she made them; he’d always been her most diligent proofreader. She’d kicked off her shoes too, and her sheer, coal-silk stockings flickered with a pretty sheen in the low light. Mercifully, she was facing away from them, so Asriel and Stelmaria hung back for a moment, watching her work, and then made their approach. The pair were deathly silent, stealthy as a sniper, a skill that Marisa had always despised.
He got close enough that he was able to read the last few lines she’d written – she was making notes from a medical textbook, considering several strategies used by battleground medics to temper shocks so severe that they alone might fell the infirm – and then said, “Don’t you usually hunt at night?”
She leapt up as if he’d jammed an anbaric rod into her spine, and her high, sharp gasp was almost comical. Her dæmon attacked at once, leaping towards Stelmaria with his teeth bared, though experience had taught the snow leopard to expect that; she caught him with ease and pounced, rolling him beneath her broad silver paw, so that he might see her face and settle. Marisa’s hand was still pressed to her surely-pounding heart, but any fear had already sloughed away. Now, she was glaring at him, eyes hard.
“You cretin,” she spat, and Asriel could only smirk. He found himself, suddenly, in a very buoyant mood. If only their impromptu altercations could always follow an evening of such triumph.
“You’ll recover, I’m sure. It seems that you know just what to do about shock,” he said, taking another peek at her notes. She closed her notebook with a slap, and then the textbook too.
“I’d more judicious with how plainly you make it clear that you’re using my research to inform your own, if I were you,” she said primly, turning over several more sheets of paper before he had a chance to even read the titles. “You’re already a heretic and a felon. Hardly seems wise to declare yourself a fraud too, does it?”
“I could say the same to you,” he replied. “I believe I saw an alloy mentioned there.” He raised an eyebrow. “Titanium and manganese?”
They stared coolly at each other. Marisa’s dæmon was still lying beneath Stelmaria’s firm paw, though his hands had started playing with the thick fur of the foreleg that was pinning him down. Stelmaria’s eyes drifted closed, and Asriel’s own thighs started to tingle. Marisa’s hand was still stroking lightly at her chest, where Stelmaria’s claws were pressing down on the monkey.
“I could put your name on my next paper, if you’d prefer,” he continued. “I could detail exactly how your years of rigorous brutality have been vital to my heresy, if that would please you. Surely your gang at the Magisterium would be very interested to hear – ”
“And I could do the same to you,” she hissed. “You know that I could. It would be the work of a minute to expose just how flimsy your objections to my projects really are!” She shook her head. “Do you really have nothing better to be doing with your time than coming here and threatening me?”
He scoffed. “I’m not threatening you.”
“No, you never are,” she said sweetly. “Why are you here? What do you want with me?”
“With you? Nothing,” Asriel said, and she gave him a slow, knowing nod in return. Her dæmon sunk his hands into the soft, white fur at Stelmaria’s throat, and she released a low rumble of pleasure, which Asriel did his best to ignore. “I had some equipment to collect before returning to the North tomorrow.”
“Ah, yes. Of course.” Marisa tilted her head. “How is the King of Lapland, by the way?”
She spoke sardonically, and Asriel couldn’t help but smile. “Oh, he’s very well indeed. I would know, wouldn’t I?” She shook her head at him again, though he could see mirth dancing in her eyes. Then she crossed her arms and leaned back against the desk.
“Don’t tell me you came all the way back to Brytain just to fetch a single piece of apparatus?”
The question was asked with a bland, absentminded curiosity that had Asriel immediately on edge. “No. I had some other business to attend to. Concluded now.”
“Grovelling for funds?” Marisa pressed, and he said nothing, even though that took some effort: he’d pulled off a fabulous coup, and she’d likely hear about it anyway, from whichever Magisterial gnat was currently posing as a Jordan scholar, as one often was. But no, he couldn’t. Stelmaria would never let him hear the end of it if he put the Magisterium on his own trail, before he’d even left Brytain again, no less.
Marisa was scrutinising his silence. “My, you’re being awfully coy this evening, aren’t you? It must be something truly blasphemous for you to forgo your usual preening.”
“I do not preen,” he said, and she raised her eyebrows pointedly. “Nor am I being coy. It’s simply no business of yours what my current research concerns.”
She chuckled. “Oh, Asriel, you do make me laugh. It’s not diplomatic – any fool could see that – and I distinctly remember receiving word that you’d been spotted landing in Longyearben, many months ago.” When she tilted her head, her dark hair swept sideways, revealing the delectable skin of her neck. “Now, what might you want from Svalbard, pray tell?”
“By the sound of it, you have my surveillance well in hand. No need to spoil the surprise.”
His tone was both confident and righteous, and he could see that it was irritating her. She shook her head and sat back down at the desk, opening her notebook to a different page and pretending that she’d finished with the conversation, which they both knew wasn’t true. He came up behind her and rested his hands on the back of her chair, peering down at the table she’d revealed, filled with various measurements, impossible to decipher without more information. She was muttering as she glanced over the figures.
“I can’t imagine what I’ve done to deserve this,” she was saying. “All I wanted to do this evening was get some work done – alone – but of course you have to appear, don’t you, after twelve months without a word, doing Authority knows what in Svalbard – ”
“If the Authority knew what I was doing, he’d have stopped me long ago.”
Marisa leaned back in the chair and looked up at him. “If the Authority knew what He was doing, He’d have had your mother swallow you instead, and saved us all the trouble.”
Asriel remained stoic, but Stelmaria’s chuckle from the floor was unmistakeable. Marisa looked pleased. Her hair had tumbled down behind her and was caressing his hands as they gripped the chair’s crest rail, soft as silk. He slid his fingers into her curls and gave her scalp a firm scratch, and another, and another. Her eyes fluttered closed. “I will find out, you know,” she said languorously, as his hands worked over her head. “One way or another, we’ll find out what you’re doing, and when we do, there’ll be a price put on your head.” Now her eyes snapped open. “A substantial one.”
“Your last attempt to send me to the gallows was an abject failure. What makes you think you’ll succeed now?”
A lazy smile unfurled across her face. “Practise.”
“Ah.”
She was breathing harder now. “I do so hope that they ferry you back from the North and do it at the tower, rather than shoot you on sight and simply leave the snow to swallow you. I could find the time for that in my schedule, I’m sure: to watch your eyes bulge out as your neck snaps against the force of the noose, and you soil yourself before the crowd.”
“Charming,” he said, tightening his grip on her hair and giving a sharp tug, pulling her head back even further. She gasped and gripped the sides of the chair, the whole column of her neck now exposed. If he’d had an appropriate weapon and the inclination to cut her throat this would have been his best opportunity yet to do it. But of course, he didn’t want that, never had, just as she’d never truly want to see him swinging from a rope, no matter what filth seeped from her pretty mouth.
“You’re quite vile, aren’t you?” he said. “Vicious. Indecent.”
She swallowed, and the undulation of her throat was very satisfying, as was the way she crossed one leg over the other and pressed her thighs together. He held her there for a moment longer, just long enough to draw out another muted gasp, then he let her go and stepped away. She sat forwards, gave the back of her head an absentminded stroke, and went back to her notebook. The room was quiet: just the faint hum of the anbaric lamp and the whispers from their dæmons beneath the desk.
Soon, though, another sound cut through the relative silence: the growl of his stomach, deep and meandering. He’d arrived at Jordan too late to dine, after all. Asriel glanced at Marisa’s workspace. By the number of books pulled from their shelves, the many piles of papers and the pot of hand cream sat beside her, he’d wager that she hadn’t left the library for hours either. “Have you eaten?”
She flipped to the next page of her book. “No.”
“Dinner?”
She paused, but her dæmon reached for her shoes at once and began to slip them on her feet. She shot the golden monkey a glare, then sighed. “Alright.”
The night was very dark and very cold, though Asriel only knew that from the way Marisa did up every button of her coat and wrapped her scarf thrice around her neck. He’d been in the North a mere day ago; London’s winter felt almost balmy by comparison. There were just a few stars pinpricking the sky and the moon was a slim crescent, like a hangnail. As they walked down the street in search of sustenance, each of their breaths became its own small, pale mist, and Marisa’s dæmon sat tucked into her coat, protected from the chill.
It was late, too, almost midnight, so it wasn’t until they’d reached near enough the West End that they found a few small restaurants with their lamps still lit. He’d wanted to go into the very first place they found that was open, but Marisa tsked at him and kept walking, until they came across a small parlour with a well-stocked bar and crisp white tablecloths, tinted rose by several red lampshades. A few of the tables were filled; likely theatre-goers, stopping by for their desserts after the show’s curtain had fallen. The main kitchen was closed, the waiter told them, but after just a minute of Marisa’s practised simpering they were being shown to a table at the back and given two small glasses of sloe-berry jenniver, a complimentary aperitif.
“Nicely done,” he said, perusing the menu.
“Thank you.”
They ordered a bottle of wine, uncorked with a triumphant pop minutes later, then he ordered the rib-eye and she ordered something meagre, mostly leaves, nothing of substance. “Have a proper meal,” he said crossly.
“Not everyone feels the need to indulge their every whim.”
“A pity,” he said, taking a swig of his wine. “You’d find yourself happier for it.” To that she said nothing, so he continued, “Well, you’re not having any of mine.”
He meant it too, but by the time the food arrived they’d each managed to work their way through several glasses of the red, and her outstretched hand demanding some of his meat and a forkful of potatoes no longer seemed quite so irksome. He passed it over and they agreed that the fat had been rendered excellently. Then they returned to their prior topic of conversation: his presentation to the Jordan scholars (he reasoned that as long as he didn’t let slip what the money was for, there was no harm in telling her about the ruse he’d used to get it).
“Surely they didn’t actually believe that you’d been cavorting with the King of Lapland for a year?” Marisa said, running a hand through her hair, her cheeks charmingly flushed.
Asriel shrugged. “They’ve learned not to question me.”
“So what did you bring them, to cause such a stir?”
That made him grin. “Stanislaus Grumman. Well, a part of him, anyway.”
Marisa leaned forwards. It had become rather warm in the restaurant, as tends to happen when hot-blooded bodies congregate indoors away from the cold, so she’d undone the top button of her blouse, and he’d done the same with his shirt. Her necklace had a diamond pendant that was now swinging gently above her breasts, the gems twinkling in the candlelight. “Which part?”
“His head,” Asriel said gleefully, and she smiled.
“And you’re quite certain it’s him?”
“They were certain, which is what mattered. But even if it’s not, it’s still a remarkable specimen. Scalping patterns preserved perfectly in the ice, and of course, evidence of trepanning.”
Marisa’s eyes were gleaming. She leaned further forwards still, the diamond pendant swaying like a metronome. “Do you still have it with you?”
He nodded. “And are your cases nearby?” she persisted. “Can I see it?”
Asriel was reminded that Lyra had asked him the same question just a few hours earlier, almost word for word, with the same delighted morbidity in her tone too. He laughed softly.
“Oh, what?” Marisa said, the corner of her lip quirking up, the hint of a smile.
He stared at her, as if for the first time in a long while. She looked beautiful, in the soft light – beautiful in any light, and he’d seen her in them all, by now – but his thoughts were more focused than that: the slope of her nose, the exact shade of her hair, those bright, curious, defiant eyes. Her propensity for elaborate, fanciful deceit; the way she delighted in it, too. Her charm, her will. It was suddenly quite impossible to ignore the fact that she wasn’t just his sometimes lover, his sworn adversary, his begrudging collaborator, his lost love, but that she was also, as they’d both tried very, very hard to forget, the mother of his child. Lyra’s mother. Looking at her now, he marvelled at his own capacity for self-deception, and couldn’t imagine the feat that had been hers.
He sighed, and perhaps because of the wine, or perhaps because of something else entirely, he said, “She’s just like you, you know.”
Marisa froze, and at once her playful smile was gone. “What did you say?”
There was a long pause. “Never mind,” Asriel said eventually, shaking his head and returning to his meal. With his eyes lowered, he heard the scrape of a chair and the sound of heels on the restaurant’s tile floor. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous – ”
He lifted his head to admonish her further, but the moment his gaze found hers he was cut off by the outrageous splash of wine against his face. At once, he was furious. “Marisa!” he bellowed, but she was already halfway towards the door. The golden monkey was sprinting after her, though he’d taken the time to give Stelmaria a vicious hiss before abandoning her beneath the dining table.
Asriel followed without a second thought, grabbing the napkin from another table as he stormed out of the restaurant, wiping the wine from his eyes to clear the sting. He ignored the shouts from their waiter, and Stelmaria’s snarl took care of another patron’s feeble protest. Then they were back out in the street, searching for Marisa’s outline amongst the late-night stragglers passing by.
There were several alleyways leading off the road’s main path, but fortunately, Marisa chose to slink into one that’s entrance was illuminated by a sodium-vapour streetlamp. He might have missed her – dark hair, dark coat, dark night – but in the orange glow the monkey’s fur shone like flame, and as soon as they’d spotted him Asriel and Stelmaria charged after Marisa and her dæmon with a growl.
She only made it halfway down the alley before he caught her, her stiletto heels no match for the cobblestones. “What the fuck was that?” he said, shoving her sideways so that she stood tall and vexed against the wall and couldn’t evade him any further.
“You tell me,” she said. “Really, I don’t – I can’t – I don’t see why you insist on being like this; why you’ll seek me out as if no time at all has passed, touch me, invite me out, just to provoke me – ”
“I wasn’t trying to provoke you!” he said. “For god’s sake, Marisa, you must be able to count on one hand the number of times I’ve mentioned the child in ten years!”
Marisa scoffed. “And tonight just had to be one of those times…”
“I saw her, and now I’ve seen you. It happens. I hardly think it’s an infraction over which one deserves to have a shirt ruined.”
“You saw her? Tonight?”
He hadn’t expected her to say that. “Yes,” he said. “At Jordan. Where she lives. Hardly front-page news.”
“And you thought of me.” She said it almost softly, which was unnerving.
He didn’t like where this was going at all. Wrangling the two of them independently was work enough; spending even a minute contemplating their entwined place in his life was sure to give him a headache of which he might never be rid. And that was to say nothing of Marisa attempting to lever open the boxes he’d locked up at the back of his mind a long time ago. The thought alone was enough to have him breaking out into a cold sweat, as was the look she was giving him now. There should have been more malice there, more distaste, more ire. Instead, her eyes were wide and shining, swirling with something else, something that he’d never seen in there before. He didn’t trust it at all.
“Momentarily,” he sneered. “But you needn’t worry: you haven’t infected all of her, even from afar. She could have let me die tonight, you know – ”
Marisa blinked. “Excuse me?”
“The Master poisoned a decanter of Tokay,” Asriel said dismissively. It already felt like ancient history. “It seems you and your cronies aren’t the only people who’d like to see me laid out on a coroner’s slab.”
“The ’98?” Marisa said, and he nodded. “Well, that would do the trick, wouldn’t it?”
“Indeed, it would have, if Lyra hadn’t been disobeying the rules – I suppose that could be either of us – and skulking in a wardrobe in the retiring room, of all the damn places in the college she might have been spending her evening. She saved my life without hesitation.” He fixed Marisa with a fierce stare. “So you see: she’s not all you.”
“You think that I’d have let you drink it?”
He pressed her a little harder into the wall. Her breath hitched. “I think you’d have poisoned the wine yourself before the Master had a chance.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but he hardly noticed, more words tumbling off his own tongue instead. “And she asked me – for perhaps the thousandth time – to bring her north with me, something that you have never once done. You know, perhaps I should have said yes. Perhaps the next time I go, I should bundle her up in some comically small furs – you have a set spare, I presume – and drag her with me to Svalbard; up a mountain on my sled. It’s probably a damn sight safer for her than Oxford is now! She’s the kind of child your goons would adore: hardly supervised; barely educated; innocent.” He looked Marisa straight in the eye. “Orphaned.”
These were just words, of course. He had no plans to ever step foot in Jordan again, nor was there likely to be another expedition on which he might grant Lyra her most earnest wish and make her his miniature assistant. He’d forgotten what he’d said almost as soon as he’d uttered it. It would be many months before he realised the cogs he’d just set whirring in Marisa’s brain, and months more still before he realised the real, endless depths of what they’d set in motion here tonight; no, what they’d set in motion twelve years prior, Marisa light and soft in his arms, before everything went to hell.
Incredibly, he could tell that he had more to say, but always his better half, Stelmaria stopped him by lashing her tail against his ankle, even though she had to unsheathe the golden monkey from her breast to do it. Asriel stepped back from Marisa, panting, and it was then that he saw the little pools gathering in her eyes, a thin, silvery sheen in the otherwise shadowed street. He felt so damn furious with her – inexplicably, intractably – that he felt he had to leave at once, lest he do or say or feel something for which he’d no doubt chastise himself come dawn.
He took a few steps away from her, ignoring the sound of her wet sniffs and feeling, for the first time that evening, the cold. He’d left his coat at the restaurant in the scuffle. The ice in the air animated him, as it always did, and with that shock of clarity came the unsettling realisation that this might well be the last time he ever saw her, should his machinations succeed, as he believed wholeheartedly that they would. That this odd altercation – a bitter fight in the middle of an alley in the middle of the night – would be their final memory. The thought was too painful to dwell on for even a second, so he didn’t, but what he did do was spin on his heel, take her in his arms, and capture her lips in a powerful kiss.
At first, she was disconcerted – he could tell that from the monkey’s little swipes at Stelmaria, and his deep, uneasy growl – but it only took a moment for all that to melt away, and then their dæmons were tumbling into each other’s wild embrace, and his tongue was in Marisa’s mouth and his hands were in her hair and her hips were pressing urgently against his, where his erection was already straining against the fabric of his travelling trousers. Another night, he might have undone his belt right then and taken her as hard and fast as possible, to maximise the chance that he left with his dignity intact. But tonight, he let himself indulge, tracing the contours of her mouth with his tongue, biting at her lips, kissing every inch of her jaw until he found himself sucking on her earlobes. He kissed and licked her face until the faint acridity of her finishing powder had been swirled away, and all that was left was the taste of her skin, sweat and milk and honey. He groaned against her, shunting her harder into the coarse, dark bricks of the alleyway’s wall. Then he raked his hands through her curls a few more times for good measure, before pulling her blouse roughly from her skirt so that he might press his palms to the warm skin of her stomach and touch her breasts through the silk of her brassiere.
She hissed at the contact; his fingertips were frozen. “Asriel – !”
“Marisa,” he replied, oblivious to her tone. “Marisa, Marisa.” Then his face was buried in the crook of her neck, committing her scent, her texture, each sinew to memory, should that be all he had left to take with him.
“You are impossible,” she said, though her hands were already working at his belt, pulling his own shirt free, sliding into his undergarment and squeezing him, which drew a low, animal moan from his throat. “Coming here – needling me – and now – !”
He cut her off by dipping his hand into her drawers and sinking his fingers into her. Her rebuke at once became a gasp. She was obscenely, beautifully wet, like her cunt was a peach dripping fresh sweet juice. “I can stop.”
She pulled his hair and he winced. “As I said,” she breathed. “Impossible.” Her eyes drifted closed and her head fell back to hit the bricks with a quiet thud. Every exhale became that same white fog, like she was exorcising a ghost from somewhere deep inside her. She moaned, rolling her hips against his hand, which was doing its best to stroke her at this unfortunate angle, encased by the cage of her underwear and skirt and stockings.
“Take these off,” he growled, plucking at the stockings with his other hand.
“Tear them,” she replied breathlessly, and he did so gladly.
It was a less than picturesque location for them to make love – make war – whatever they were doing – there was the faint stench of urine in the air, from the four public houses on this tiny street alone, there was refuse littering the cobbles at both ends, and if they’d been listening closely, which they weren’t, they might have heard the faint squeaks of the rats that were scampering through the shadows. But in that moment, the low, thick mist in the air seemed ethereal more than it did dreary, and the ice encrusting the grooves between the bricks might well have been twinkling little crystals, not unlike the diamond still shining at Marisa’s neck. From the moment he hoisted her into his arms, grateful for the wall to help support her, and eased himself inside her, there felt like nowhere else on this Earth they should or could have been. As always, it felt inevitable, like every minute since their last meeting had been leading them right here, to this, to each other, yet again.
“Marisa,” he said, kissing her, spearing her. “Marisa.”
“Asriel,” she said, clutching him. “You bastard – you bastard – oh, oh, Asriel, yes, right there, don’t stop – ”
It wasn’t long until they both broke – the foreplay had begun the moment he’d frightened her in the library, after all, and both the undergarments she was still wearing and slick silver of his belt buckle were stroking Marisa just where she needed to be stroked. He forced himself to savour every second of their climax: the uncontrollable spasms of his hips; her rapid, butterfly breaths warming the shell of his ear, her high, sweet whines; the way her hamstrings quivered in his hands as he held her at his waist.
After a minute or two, he put her down and tucked himself away. She smoothed down her skirt and pulled a few brick crumbs from her hair with a grimace. They stared at each other in the darkness, still panting, and when he stepped forwards one more time and took her cheek in his hand, he saw her mouth fall slightly open, as if she’d only just understood why he’d felt compelled to do that, what he had to do now, what they would both have to do in the coming weeks. “Oh,” she said.
There was a chance, however slim, that fate would put her back in his path when he wanted her there most – she’d been gifted to him tonight, hadn’t she? – but he couldn’t rely on that; he couldn’t rely on anything but himself; he’d learned that long ago. He leaned forwards to kiss her and she met him halfway, their lips moving together softly, almost silent. He stroked her cheek with his cold thumb and she put her hands around his neck, pulling him closer, so that he could feel the beat of her heart through his own breast. Then he stepped away, ignoring the sound of a dæmon’s cry behind him, though if it was his or hers, he couldn’t guess.
They stared at each other in the faint starlight. Marisa’s eyes were big and shining, imploring, almost, and he opened to his mouth to say goodbye, as perhaps she wanted. But somehow the word became caught in his throat, as if a stone was there, blocking its path. He swallowed, trying to dislodge it, but that was a failure too. So instead, with some urgency, he grabbed Stelmaria by the neck to be sure she joined him, turned on his heel and walked away, leaving Marisa and her dæmon alone in the cold.