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Will got them what he said was pizza, but didn't look anything like any pizza Lyra'd ever had in any of the Latin states. Well, other than there was some sort of bread, with cheese on top. That said, it tasted extremely good, except when she got a mouthful of something hot. And refused to believe Will when he said he actually liked those peppers. Nobody could enjoy that. He was clearly just showing off.
When she said that, Kirjava bit Pan on the ear and as they scruffled, Lyra ignored Will pointedly and went in search of another slice that didn't have unpleasant surprises on it.
She saw Mary's daemon more and more clearly with every moment, and when she came back to the living-room couch with her pizza and deigned to sit beside Will again, while they all pretended nothing had happened, she asked, "What's his name?"
"Hmm? Oh," and Mary sat up in her chair, where it looked like she'd been lost in thought. She reached over to the dark bird and he rubbed his head against her hand. "Caliban, though I don't think you'll get the reference."
Lyra didn't, and didn't particularly feel like learning about something she didn't know that Will obviously did. So instead she washed the pizza out of her mouth with a bit of Coke and said, "You were going to explain about grace," because Will hadn't understood that either.
It was at the same time both utterly childish and utterly familiar and comforting to let herself be in competition with Will, to want to impress him. It wasn't serious, not really, or Pan would have been at her about it. She was just out of practice at being in love close, instead of far away and gripping at memories. Not, she added to herself, with real resentment this time and not at Will in even the slightest bit, that they'd got much practice to begin with.
But just in case Will might mistake her for actual unhappiness, she leaned her head on his shoulder, and he rearranged his arm around hers. It was more difficult to eat pizza at this angle, but she'd eaten trickier foods on a mountain-side, so really, it was fine.
"Ah, yes," Mary said, leaning forward to put her plate and cup - both empty - on the coffee table. "First, though, I want tea. And tea will happen faster, I'm afraid, if one of you gets up and makes it. Young bodies, et cetera," and she waved a hand.
Lyra let Will get up: Mary's kitchen had looked full of machines and contraptions that were as alien to Lyra as the face of the moon. Which, Will told her, men had walked on, in this world. She wasn't sure she believed that, but it reminded her of something.
"I had a thought," she said, "and it was, you could come over to my world, too, for visits, couldn't you? You'd love talking to Toby - that's Brother Tobias, he's from Jordan of course - about Dust, once you two worked out how to understand each other."
Mary blinked at Lyra. She pushed her glasses up her nose, from where they had slid down. Caliban hopped down to the arm of her chair, and she stroked his head for a moment. "I suppose I could," she said. "I hadn't thought of that at all. Granted," she added, eyeing Lyra, "my bones might not like the trip to Alaska."
Lyra snorted, feeling much more on common ground again. "You en't that old," she replied, "s'don't try it as an excuse."
Will came back in with a proper tea-service, and out of habit Lyra poured: Mary first (and what would you like?) and then Will, and then herself. At the end, she noticed Will giving her a bit of an odd look.
"What?" she demanded, unsettled until she saw the smile that was lurking at his mouth.
"It's like you got civilized," he said.
Lyra stared at him, and then glared at him. Mary took a very quick drink of tea that must have been too hot, and Lyra thought she was laughing at her.
"Just for that," Lyra said darkly, glaring at Will, "when you do come to my world, I'm dragging you to a proper ball."
It was gratifying when he actually looked a little bit disturbed by that, but Lyra ignored him. She said to Mary, full of politeness, "About the grace."
Mary smiled at them both; for a moment, Lyra could see Mary Malone as a Sister, or even a Mother Superior, patiently looking on to the jibing and noise of her younger, more impatient fellows. That only made her long more for the meeting between Mary Malone and Brother Tobias.
If nothing else, Lyra supposed, they could commiserate on the difficulty of trying to direct she herself.
"Grace," Mary said, thoughtfully. "You know, it's an odd thing, Lyra, but I wonder if our Churches had that much to do with one another after all. If the theology of grace got lost, perhaps. At any rate. We certainly shared the belief in the Fall, yes?"
Lyra snorted. She still felt uncomfortable with the idea of second Eve. It remained with her. How could it not? But still. It itched. Mary gave her a knowing look.
"Did your Church have, well, Jesus Christ?" she asked.
"Yes," Lyra said, "though if you'd asked me when I was a kid, I couldn't've told you who he was. He seems to have got lost sometime before the Papacy moved to Geneva and dissolved into the Magisterium."
"I suspect the theology of grace went with him," Mary said, with a sigh.
Will shifted at Lyra's side. The hand that was at her shoulder was toying with one curl of her hair. He did that, she'd noticed, over the past few hours when they'd been sitting close. It was so strange and wonderful to have her Will touching her at all that she couldn't decide whether she liked it or not. She didn't ordinarily. In fact, one young man had been unceremoniously ejected from her life after he had a sulk when she told him to stop petting her. But that was him, and this was Will.
With Will, everything was different - at least, everything might be. She wasn't sure what the whole shape of that meant yet.
"The basic idea, or perhaps ideal, is quite simple," Mary said. "Man sinned against God by disobedience in the Garden, and fell. For a long time, we were in very dire straits, until God took it upon himself to incarnate, to take on life as a man, as a human being. The nitty gritty of the theology is the idea that by doing so, he would take on human Original Sin, and then by dying, he would expiate it, as he was still God. Don't dwell too much on that," Mary said, as Lyra felt her brow starting to wrinkle. "The point is that by doing so, he gave humanity grace for that Original Sin. If you were baptized into the Church and requested it, your own taint, in that extent, would be forgiven.
"The point is that this was something God did, something he chose to do: something that could not be compelled or bartered or paid for. A gift to humanity, granted freely and of his own will. No question of desert or justice or any other question. Of course," Mary finished, "knowing what we know of the Authority rather puts paid to the idea of Christ and knowing what we know of the so-called 'Fall', the entire question becomes irrelevant, but I've still always thought the idea of grace itself was rather nice."
"And the door is grace," Will mused, "because we didn't go looking for it, weren't working towards it, had given it up - "
Mary spread her hands. "And poof! here it is. Just in time for Christmas, which is either rather a grand coincidence or further evidence of a rather puckish sense of humour on your benefactor's part."
"Benefactrice, possibly," Lyra said, absent. Caliban croaked what sounded very much like laughter, which was a little disconcerting. Lyra fought the urge to stick her tongue out at him. Mary, she thought, would get along with at least some of the Jordan scholars, male and female, quite well.
She frowned at Will when he flicked her ear. "Correct Latin not required," he said, firmly.
"If you flick my ear again," she countered, "I shall have Pan bite your finger."
"No you shan't," said Pan immediately from her hip, where he was happily curled. "I am not involved." Kirjava, who had been grooming his tail, let out a sneeze that sounded like a laugh, at least from a cat.
"I suppose the question becomes," said Will, as if he hadn't just been threatened, "what do we do now?" He looked at Lyra. His hand on her shoulder tightened a bit, as if she was about to disappear. There were, Lyra supposed, a lot of things in Will's life that had - not that there hadn't been in her own, but still, she usually got them back again, even if she had to fight. "Who knows you're here?"
"Master of Jordan," Lyra promptly replied. "No one else. Everyone else thinks I've gone to the Kalahari, or possibly Kathmandu. I do that from time to time." At the amused looks that got her from Mary and Will both, she let her voice turn aloof and said, "It clears my head - and keeps me from running out of places to hide bodies."
"Lyra's building her world's first and only comprehensive program of social services aimed at children at risk," Will said, most of which sentence meant absolutely nothing to Lyra at all, but made Mary choke a little on her tea, with Caliban ruffling his feathers and cackling again.
"I can see how that might bring on the urge to homicide," Mary acknowledged. "So you've gone on an adventure."
"There's a pool on whether or not she'll come back alive this time," Pan said, with Kirjava sneezing her cat-laughter again. "There always is."
"It buys the staff decent tea," Lyra retorted dismissively, "and we always do. Come back alive, that is. At any rate, I'm not expected back for anywhere from a month to six - though six will make some people start making diplomatic enquiries."
This time, Mary and Will both blinked. Lyra couldn't think why she felt abashed to say this, but she did, and she said, "In the end - it was a very long case, and I wasn't paying attention at the time - I inherited my father's title. I can't vote in the House, but I can speak, though I think a lot of them wish I couldn't." Then she added at once, "Don't you dare say anything about my being a lady or not, Dr Parry."
"Can't think of anyone more suited," Will said at once and if Mary hadn't been there Lyra might have bit him herself. But the smile on his face was strange and wonderful. "Lady Explorer," he said. There was a great deal in it. Lyra wasn't sure all of it would be things she understood.
"Well that takes care of the grand scale," Mary said, taking up the thread of the actual conversation. "On the smaller - Will, does the clinic open tomorrow?"
"In the afternoon," Will said, "between one and four." He glanced at Lyra apologetically for some reason; she was already nodding.
"Everyone else has family for the holiday?" she asked. "And you go see your mother in the evening. Would we be able to send to the nurse, to see if she was feeling better before we arrived?"
"We can call, certainly," Will said - of course. 'Call'. The damned cell-phones.
"Then," she said, "if she is we can both go and see her, and if not you can go, and I can come and visit Mary again."
"Or still," Mary said. "As I was going to suggest that in the afternoon, we go and find you some other clothing, dear. While your own are lovely, they are not - "
"They stick out," Will said, with a sudden grin. "It's all right, I don't pay much attention, but I'm pretty sure skirts with decent length are back in style this year, for winter."
Lyra glared at him. He explained, unnecessarily, to Mary: "The last time, we had a huge fight over whether or not she'd wear jeans."
"It was not huge," Lyra protested. "It wasn't!" she insisted, when Mary looked like she might laugh. "Besides, it isn't such a thing anymore."
"Then it seems to me," Mary finished, "that the thing to do is you start by having a good visit now, and we can bother to think about later when it comes. And for now, you can tell us about what you've done for a decade or so, and we can tell you - since I somehow doubt," and Caliban cackled again, shifting his wings, "that that sort of conversation was on the agenda last night."
Will actually looked like he might go red. Lyra, inured by Dame Hannah long ago, merely said, "No," in as demure a fashion as she could muster. "It wasn't."
"Will, dear," Mary said, as she sat back once again, "if you get up above the microwave" (whatever in Hell that was) "there's a bottle of half-decent bourbon to go in the tea."
This time, Will parked in his own parking space. It happened to be underground, so getting it there led to a number of startled and suspicious looks from Lyra as he opened the gate with his key-card, punched in his code at the second gate and then drove under. She was even more dubious at the elevator up from parking.
"You must have at least some elevators in your world," Will protested.
"Yes, we have lifts," Lyra replied, darkly. "And they fall and people die. I take stairs."
"You'll go to the Himalayas, but you won't take a lift."
Pan chittered his version of a laugh. "Wear Arctic furs, can't be convinced to wear trousers - " then he squawked as Lyra pushed him down into the deep pocket of her coat - squawked, then hissed, righting himself and chittering.
Lyra refused to answer either of them and just stepped out of the elevator as quickly as possible. But she did take Will's hand again as they went the rest of the way by stairs.
With the apartment came small details of life: Lyra remarked that she really ought to wash her hair, which meant showing her the shower and how it worked. This, at least, of all the technology of his world she encountered, seemed to delight instead of annoy her. She took instruction about shampoo and conditioner easily enough, too.
Pan nosed around Will's bathroom and asked about things, while Will tried to think what sort of things a woman might like that he didn't have. Maybe he would let Mary work that out. He knew Lyra well enough about important things, central things, but he realized he had no idea what kind of questions might be offensive or not, to a grown woman from her world. (He had enough trouble with women from this world, for that.)
Kirjava was haunting the kitchen, when Will came out. "Food," she said. "For tomorrow morning." He would need that, wouldn't he? A quick hunt told him that he had eggs and bread (stale, but not mouldy, so it could make toast), breakfast cereal and mandarin oranges. Lunch might be harder, but breakfast could be made, and Lyra should be able to recognize most of it.
"You worry too much," Kirjava said, sitting on the counter beside him, tail curled around her feet.
"I didn't think I was worrying," Will retorted, and decided he wanted scotch - a desire, he realized as he was pouring it and dropping in his one cube of ice, that did not really do much to prove his daemon wrong.
"Of course you are," Kirjava replied. "You're just hiding it under thinking and planning and fussing. As usual. She isn't going to turn out to hate you, dearest." She groomed her shoulder, and added, "We're probably going to have a few bloody great fights, but we had that before, remember? And we fell in love with them anyway. Pantalaimon," she finished, in a way that wasn't fair, "will tell you exactly the same thing."
Will had bit the side of his tongue when she started talking. He made himself let it go and said, "I don't think it's entirely fair, you two talking without telling us at all."
"Too bad," Kirjava replied, indifferently. "We've done it since I was properly born, we aren't going to stop any time soon." She groomed her paw, in emphasis.
Will resisted the urge to call her any number of names. It never did anything, anyway: Kirjava remained Kirjava. Which, he supposed, was some kind of reflection on him, too. Maybe. So he relented and held out his arms for her to jump into, leaning on his shoulder and purring.
A clinic tomorrow: somehow, he would have to bring his mind back to his practice. The waiting-room would be full from the moment he opened to when he finally closed and locked the door (except, maybe, for the forlorn tapping of someone with a child). It always was, on Christmas, because there were illnesses and accidents and things that were called accidents that were really done very much on purpose.
He went back into the bedroom and put Kirjava down on the bed, where she lay down contented on her side, watching him as he found his wallet, work-clothes, his watch and his keys, from the various places they had ended up.
He had just pulled his shirt over his head when he heard the bathroom door open; Lyra came back to the room with her hair turned a dark honey by water, and his housecoat on.
"I'm not very good at being - involved with someone," she said, without any preamble. Pan trotted himself into the room and climbed onto the bed with Kirjava. "I'm really very selfish and not very good at sharing. And I snore when I've had anything to drink, and I get cross and horrid when I'm tired."
Will's heart did an anatomically impossible crushed, sideways beat. He didn't look at Kirjava; he knew what her I told you so face and posture were quite well enough. He said, "I had a girlfriend in medical school break up with me by a note because she said she was too intimidated to do it in person."
Lyra's lips twitched. "The last time I had an involvement, it ended up on broadsheets across Paris."
Will laughed, even if it was a little bit strained. "You win?" he offered. He crossed around the bed to her side of the room.
"We watched the Authority die," Lyra said. "We went into the world of the dead together. And I don't think we said anything kind to each other until - "
"Oh, hell, I think that was at least after your mother kidnapped you and I broke the knife."
He brushed her cheek; she stood up on tiptoe to kiss him, hair still wet.
Maybe Mary was right about grace.