As the moon rose, the witches began their spell to heal Wills wound.
They woke him and asked him to lay the knife on the ground where it caught a glitter of starlight.
Lyra sat nearby stirring some herbs in a pot of boiling water over a fire, and while her panions clapped and stamped and cried in rhythm, Serafina crouched over the knife and sang in a high, fierce tone:
"Little khey tore your iron out of Mother Earths entrails, built afire and boiled the ore, made it weep and bleed and flood, hammered it and tempered it, plunging it in icy water, heating it ihe fe till your blade was blood-red, scorg!
Then they made you wound the water once again, a again, till the steam was boiling fog and the water cried for mercy.
And when you sliced a single shade into thirty thousand shadows, then they khat you were ready, then they called you subtle one.
"But little knife, what have you done?
Unlocked blood-gates, left them wide!
Little knife, your mother calls you, from the entrails of the earth, from her deepest mines and caverns, from her secret iron womb.
Listen!"
And Serafina stamped again and clapped her hands with the other witches, and they shook their throats to make a wild ulu-lation that tore at the air like claws. Will, seated in the middle of them, felt a chill at the core of his spine.
Then Serafina Pekkala turo Will himself, and took his wounded hand in both of hers. When she sang this time, he nearly flinched, so fierce was her high, clear voice, so glittering her eyes; but he sat without moving, ahe spell goon.
"Blood! Obey me! Turn around, be a lake and not a river.
When you reach the open air, stop! And build a clotted wall, build it firm to hold the flood back.
Blood, your sky is the skull-dome, your sun is the open eye, your wind the breath ihe lungs, blood, your world is bounded. Stay there!"
Will thought he could feel all the atoms of his body responding to her and, and he joined in, urging his leaking blood to listen and obey.
She put his hand down and turo the little iron pot over the fire. A bitter steam was rising from it, and Will heard the liquid bubbling fiercely.
Serafina sang:
"Oak bark, spider silk, ground moss, saltweed— grip close, bind tight, holdfast, close up, bar the door, lock the gate, stiffen the blood-wall, dry the gore-flood."
Thech took her own knife and split an alder sapling along its whole length. The wounded whiteness gleamed open in the moon. She daubed some of the steaming liquid into the split, then closed up the wood, easing it together from the root to the tip. And the sapling was whole again.
Will heard Lyra gasp, and turo see another witch holding a squirming, struggling hare iough hands. The animal anting, wild-eyed, kig furiously, but the witchs hands were merciless. In one she held its fs and with the other she grasped its hind legs and pulled the frenzied hare out straight, its heaving belly upward.
Serafinas knife swept across it. Will felt himself grow dizzy, and Lyra was restraining Pantalaimon, hare-formed himself in sympathy, who was bug and snapping in her arms. The real hare fell still, eyes bulging, breast heavirails glistening.
But Serafina took some more of the deco and trickled it into the gaping wound, and then closed up the wound with her fingers, smoothing the wet fur over it until there was no wound at all.
The witch holding the anim