“Sit up, dear, and drink this,” said Mrs. Coulter, and her gentle arm slipped around Lyra's back and lifted her.
Lyra clenched herself, but relaxed almost at once as Pantalaimon thought to her: We're only safe as long as we pretend. She opened her eyes and found that they'd been containing tears, and to her surprise and shame she sobbed and sobbed.
Mrs. Coulter made sympathetic sounds and put the drink into the monkey's hands while she mopped Lyra's eyes with a scented handkerchief.
“Cry as much as you need to, darling,” said that soft voice, and Lyra determined to stop as soon as she possibly could. She struggled to hold back the tears, she pressed her lips together, she choked down the sobs that still shook her chest.
Pantalaimon played the same game: fool them, fool them. He became a mouse and crept away from Lyra's hand to sniff
timidly at the drink in the monkey's clutch. It was innocuous: an infusion of chamomile, nothing more. He crept back to Lyra's shoulder and whispered, “Drink it.”
She sat up and took the hot cup in both hands, alternately sipping and blowing to cool it. She kept her eyes down. She must pretend harder than she'd ever done in her life.
“Lyra, darling,” Mrs. Coulter murmured, stroking her hair. “I thought we'd lost you forever! What happened? Did you get lost? Did someone take you out of the flat?”
“Yeah,” Lyra whispered.
“Who was it, dear?”
“A man and a woman.”
“Guests at the party?”
“I think so. They said you needed something that was downstairs and I went to get it and they grabbed hold of me and took me in a car somewhere. But when they stopped, I ran out quick and dodged away and they never caught me. But I didn't know where I was….”
Another sob shook her briefly, but they were weaker now, and she could pretend this one was caused by her story.
“And I just wandered about trying to find my way back, only these Gobblers caught me….And they put me in a van with some other kids and took me somewhere, a big building, I dunno where it was.”
With every second that went past, with every sentence she spoke, she felt a little strength flowing back. And now that she was doing something difficult and familiar and never quite predictable, namely lying, she felt a sort of mastery again, the same sense of complexity and control that the alethiometer gave her. She had to be careful not to say anything obviously impossible; she had to be vague in some places and invent plausible details in others; she had to be an artist, in short.
“How long did they keep you in this building?” said Mrs. Coulter.
Lyra's journey along the canals and her time with the gyp-tians had taken weeks: she'd have to account for that time. She invented a voyage with the Gobblers to Trollesund, and then an escape, lavish with details from her observation of the town; and a time as maid-of-all-work at Einarsson's Bar, and then a spell working for a family of farmers inland, and then being caught by the Samoyeds and brought to Bolvangar.
“And they were going to—going to cut—”
“Hush, dear, hush. I'm going to find out what's been going on.”
“But why were they going to do that? I never done anything wrong! All the kids are afraid of what happens in there, and no one knows. But it's horrible. It's worse than anything….Why are they doing that, Mrs. Coulter? Why are they so cruel?”
“There, there…You're safe, my dear. They won't ever do it to you. Now I know you're here, and you're safe, you'll never be in danger again. No one's going to harm you, Lyra darling; no one's ever going to hurt you….”
“But they do it to other children! Why?”
“Ah, my love—”
“It's Dust, isn't it?”
“Did they tell you that? Did the doctors say that?”
“The kids know it. All the kids talk about it, but no one knows! And they nearly done it to me—you got to tell me! You got no right to keep it secret, not anymore!”
“Lyra…Lyra, Lyra. Darling, these are big difficult ideas, Dust and so on. It's not something for children to worry about. But the doctors do it for the children's own good, my love. Dust is something bad, something wrong, something evil and wicked.
Grownups and their daemons are infected with Dust so deeply that it's too late for them. They can't be helped….But a quick operation on children means they're safe from it. Dust just won't stick to them ever again. They're safe and happy and—”
Lyra thought of little Tony Makarios. She leaned forward suddenly and retched. Mrs. Coulter moved back and let go.
“Are you all right, dear? Go to the bathroom—”
Lyra swallowed hard and brushed her eyes.
“You don't have to do that to us,” she said. “You could just leave us. I bet Lord Asriel wouldn't let anyone do that if he knew what was going on. If he's got Dust and you've got Dust, and the Master of Jordan and every other grownup's got Dust, it must be all right. When I get out I'm going to tell all the kids in the world about this. Anyway, if it was so good, why'd you stop them doing it to me? If it was good, you should've let them do it. You should have been glad.”
Mrs. Coulter was shaking her head and smiling a sad wise smile.
“Darling,” she said, “some of what's good has to hurt us a little, and naturally it's upsetting for others if you're upset…. But it doesn't mean your daemon is taken away from you. He's still there! Goodness me, a lot of the grownups here have had the operation. The nurses seem happy enough, don't they?”
Lyra blinked. Suddenly she understood their strange blank incuriosity, the way their little trotting daemons seemed to be sleepwalking.