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may I speak with you? I lay my weapons down.”
    She placed her bow and arrows on the wet rock between them. Iorek looked at them briefly, and she knew that if his face could register any emotion, it would be surprise.
    “Speak, Serafina Pekkala,” he growled. “We have never fought, have we?”
    “King Iorek, I have failed your comrade, Lee Scoresby.”
    The bear’s small black eyes and bloodstained muzzle were very still. She could see the wind ruffling the tips of the creamy white hairs along his back. He said nothing.
    “Mr. Scoresby is dead,” Serafina went on. “Before I parted from him, I gave him a flower to summon me with, if he should need me. I heard his call and flew to him, but I arrived too late. He died fighting a force of Muscovites, but I know nothing of what brought them there, or why he was holding them off when he could easily have escaped. King Iorek, I am wretched with remorse.”
    “Where did this happen?” said Iorek Byrnison.
    “In another world. This will take me some time to tell.”
    “Then begin.”
    She told him what Lee Scoresby had set out to do: to find the man who had been known as Stanislaus Grumman. She told him about how the barrier between the worlds had been breached by Lord Asriel, and about some of the consequences—the melting of the ice, for example. She told of the witch Ruta Skadi’s flight after the angels, and she tried to describe those flying beings to the bear-king as Ruta had described them to her: the light that shone on them, the crystalline clarity of their appearance, the richness of their wisdom.
    Then she described what she had found when she answered Lee’s call.
    “I put a spell on his body to preserve it from corruption,” she told him. “It will last until you see him, if you wish to do that. But I am troubled by this, King Iorek. Troubled by everything, but mostly by this.”
    “Where is the child?”
    “I left her with my sisters, because I had to answer Lee’s call.”
    “In that same world?”
    “Yes, the same.”
    “How can I get there from here?”
    She explained. Iorek Byrnison listened expressionlessly, and then said, “I shall go to Lee Scoresby. And then I must go south.”
    “South?”
    “The ice has gone from these lands. I have been thinking about this, Serafina Pekkala. I have chartered a ship.”
    The three little foxes had been waiting patiently. Two of them were lying down, heads on their paws, watching, and the other was still sitting up, following the conversation. The foxes of the Arctic, scavengers that they were, had picked up some language, but their brains were so formed that they could only understand statements in the present tense. Most of what Iorek and Serafina said was meaningless noise to them. Furthermore, when they spoke, much of what they said was lies, so it didn’t matter if they repeated what they’d heard: no one could sort out which parts were true, though the credulous cliff-ghasts often believed most of it, and never learned from their disappointment. The bears and the witches alike were used to their conversations being scavenged as well as the meat they’d finished with.
    “And you, Serafina Pekkala?” Iorek went on. “What will you do now?”
    “I’m going to find the gyptians,” she said. “I think they will be needed.”
    “Lord Faa,” said the bear, “yes. Good fighters. Go well.”
    He turned away and slipped into the water without a splash, and began to swim in his steady, tireless paddle toward the new world.
    And some time later, Iorek Byrnison stepped through the blackened undergrowth and the heat-split rocks at the edge of a burned forest. The sun was glaring through the smoky haze, but he ignored the heat as he ignored the charcoal dust that blackened his white fur and the midges that searched in vain for skin to bite.
    He had come a long way, and at one point in his journey, he had found himself swimming into that other world. He noticed the change in the taste of the water