Lyra. Chapter 3. The Scholar

It turned out the grim knight could not stop talking once you gave him a book. He read to her from his battered psalter — Latin, the bridge between them — and explained each line with the earnest delight of a man who had not had a real listener in years. Lyra mended his gambeson and pretended to be unimpressed. She was not unimpressed. The steel had a boy hidden inside it, and she had found him. The needle went still in her hands more than once.