Lyra. Chapter 4. Men I Knew

He would not look at her while he said it. The men coming up the valley — the ones who burned the village down the road, who would come for this one's harvest when the moon was right — he knew them. Had ridden with them. Had eaten and bled and frozen beside them, in the war, before he chose the hard road of honest poverty and they chose the easy road of taking. The sword sat heavy in his hands, and the armor Garren had mended waited in the dark behind him. Lyra did not step back. In her world a man's past did not have to be his sentence. She only asked, quietly, what they would do now.