AMONG THE WITCHES

This is work of 2005, excuse me that I have not translated it, I hope to draw again this page.

The original(The Subtle Knife.):
TWO
AMONG THE WITCHES


The witch Serafina Pekkala, who had rescued Lyra and the other children from the experimental station at Bolvangar and flown with her to the island of Svalbard, was deeply troubled.
In the atmospheric disturbances that followed Lord AsrieFs escape from his exile on Svalbard, she and her companions were blown far from the island and many miles out over the frozen sea. Some of them managed to stay with the damaged balloon of Lee Scoresby, the Texan aeronaut, but Serafina herself was tossed high into the banks of fog that soon came rolling in from the gap that Lord AsriePs experiment had torn in the sky.
When she found herself able to control her flight once more, her first thought was of Lyra; for she knew nothing of the fight between the false bear-king and the true one, lorek Byrnison, nor of what had happened to Lyra after that.
So she began to search for her, flying through the cloudy gold-tinged air on her branch of cloud-pine, accompanied by her daemon, Kaisa the snow goose. They moved back toward Svalbard and south a little, soaring for several hours under a sky turbulent with strange lights and shadows. Serafina Pekkala knew from the unsettling tingle of the light on her skin that it came from another world.
After some time had passed, Kaisa said, "Look! A witch's daemon, lost. . ."
Serafina Pekkala looked through the fog banks and saw a tern, circling and crying in the chasms of misty light. They wheeled and flew toward him. Seeing them come near, the tern darted up in alarm, but Serafina Pekkala signaled friendship, and he dropped down beside them.
Serafina Pekkala said, "What clan are you from?"
"Taymyr," he told her. "My witch is captured. Our companions have been driven away! am lost!"
"Who has captured your witch?"
"The woman with the monkey daemon, from Bolvangar. . . . Help me! Help us! I am so afraid!"
"Was your clan allied with the child cutters?"
"Yes, until we found out what they were doing. After the fight at Bolvangar they drove us off, but my witch was taken prisoner. They have her on a ship. . . . What can I do? She is calling to me and I can't find her! Oh, help, help me!"