He did not look like someone who had been waiting a hundred and twenty years.
That was the first thing Lyra noticed. He looked patient the way a person looked patient when they had done it so long it had stopped being something they practiced and become simply what they were. Calm.
Unhurried. Like he had nowhere else to be, which she supposed was technically true.
She kept looking at his hands.
The marks on them were rough in the way that self-taught things were always rough. Not wrong, not broken, they worked, clearly they worked because he was standing inside an active circle and the connection was holding. But they were not clean the way hers were.
They were the marks of someone who had taught himself from records and guesswork and patience rather than from someone who knew how to do it properly.
He had built a copy of something he had never actually held.
She filed that away and kept her face still.
