mithen

Posted by Erin Ptah

https://erinptah.wordpress.com/2026/02/11/erin-reads-the-rose-field-part-2a-chapters-9-15/

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“Part 1” of The Rose Field was chapters 1-8. “Part 2” is twice as long (chapters 9-22), and I haven’t gotten any less chatty. So you’re getting a Post 2A and a Post 2B. Look forward to a 3A and a 3B to finish off the set.

As of this roundup, I’ve finished the whole book. Post will have light spoilers, in the notes I put in while editing. Comments are a free-for-all.

Still adding relevant BBC HDM screencaps to break up the text.

Sidenote: At some point in the middle of the original liveblog, I managed to injure my hand. Nowhere near as bad as Lyra’s — I kept an ice pack on it for the first several hours, and within two days, it only hurt if I touched/bent the injured part wrong. (The next week saw a steady decrease in which kinds of motion counted as “doing it wrong.”)

But every time I did, I remembered how Lyra’s spent this whole book with full-on broken fingers, and have an extra wince of sympathy. The only treatment she’s had is some (rose-scented) salve. She hasn’t even splinted them! Has to be a miserable, constant pain.

Chapter 9:

Lyra and Asta agree to pose as a paired set, and start planning to rescue Ionedes, the only person the authorities actually managed to grab.

Pan is with the same gryphons who got Mal, so they have a nice parallel reunion. Pan makes introductions. Notable that he talks Malcolm up, as a “learned scholar” and “master craftsman” and such, but it’s nothing like Lyra’s “I am a traveling witch queen” type of lies. Just a well-polished truth.

Because Mal has red-gold hair, the gryphons think he’s literally made of gold?

If it turns out the entire “terrifying Simurgh defending the fantastical rose gardens” legend was because “they think the Amber Roses are literal gold too”…that’s going to be SO stupid. Funny! But still dumb!

[Future editing note: This is never explicitly made canon…but we never get any reveal to indicate it’s not that, either.]

Good Lyra-Asta teamwork. With the first “daemon taking the lead on a cover story” incident I can remember all series (Asta scolds a guard’s daemon for obstructing Prince Edward’s daughter).

Stashing Lyra’s stuff on the street, oof. She keeps her stick, and the alethiometer needle, but I think she leaves the cash…?

[Futre note: It turns out fine.]

They collectively pose as a maid to sneak into the prison, and Lyra uses her Subtle Needle to slice up the lock on Ionedes’ cell. Nice little moment when Lyra works out that, to cut the hardest materials, she has to get into the same relaxed mindset Will used with the Knife.

Chapter 10:

A super short one this time.

The charming Leila interrupts the rescue, says she knows Ionedes (by a different name, maybe even his real one), and she’s here to help.

…I really appreciate Lyra not immediately believing her! For once, a reasonable level of suspicion.

Leila does help them sneak out. Ionedes is heavily injured, but they make it. Lyra successfully retrieves her stuff, they hop on a bus, and we’re off.

Plus a brief check-in with the shenanigans afoot at the research station. TBD what that’s building toward.

–

Chapter 11:

Talk between Mal and Pan. Lots of juicy stuff here.

Malcolm tries to soothe Pan, without crossing any boundaries. Later, Pan cuddles up to Mal in his sleep. Aw.

Reassuring Pan how Lyra is coming for him, wants to find him so badly…it comes off like Pan was snatchedvaway from Lyra against his will. Even though it’s Pan who ran off, saying he couldn’t be around Lyra anymore. Then chose to leave the Blue Hotel before she got there, instead of waiting.

Is Mal making bad assumptions? Or is this a flip of the usual human-daemon dynamic, where the daemon is the part that’s denying/repressing their true feelings?

Pan: What do you think the imagination is?
Mal: Didn’t you set off to find Lyra’s imagination? You must have had some idea of what you were looking for.

(No! No, he did not! At all!)

Pan does some recap. Admits he was unfair to Lyra, but still has some weird accusations. “It was as if the philosopher, Brande, as if he was her father and she was trying to please him.” Really? First time Pan’s mentioned it.

(It is A Thing that Lyra gravitates toward “dad-coded older men.” Coram, Lee, Iorek, Makepeace, the old Master of Jordan, even kinda Ionedes. Not really the vibe I got from her reading habits, though.)

[Image: young Lyra working on her dad collection.]

Mal reveals: when he struggled teaching teen Lyra, the old Master told him a bunch of stuff about Lyra’s trip North, and the “great betrayal” prophecy.

Ehhh. I feel like this is Pullman trying to shove that recap in somewhere, and it’s an awkward fit.

TSC already had Mal+Alice recap LBS, and Lyra’s very valid complaint of “it sucks how people are keeping all these secrets from me about my own life.”

That didn’t prompt Mal to go “uh, full disclosure, I know one more”?

Even if it didn’t occur to him in the moment, he hasn’t had an “oh snap, I should’ve told her about this too” realization since, either!

Won’t text-search TRF right now, because spoilers, but the word “betrayal” comes up 1x in TSC. From Lyra, thinking about the Final Shore. Yeahhh, I don’t buy that Pullman had decided “somebody already told Mal about the prophecy” while writing TSC. This is a retcon. One that makes Mal look worse, too.

[Future note: Text-searching TRF didn’t find anything that made this feel more plausible, either.]

Pan opens up about Will: how they’re always going to be partly in love with him, and never talked to anyone about him. (Serafina knew, but it’s not like they talked.) Sad and sweet.

Check-in with Alice, still successfully escaping. Good.

Arriving at Gryphon HQ, Pan declares he and Mal are “honored guests from the Kingdom of Gold.” I was all set to note a second “daemons telling imaginative lies” example…then he tells Mal his tiny-gryphon friend came up with it. Sigh.

Mal is reminded of “bluffing about his importance” to the Guardian of the Thames in LBS. Pan eventually remembers his own experience bluffing to the King of the Armored Bears…aaaand doesn’t give himself any credit for helping with the story-spinning part. It’s all Lyra’s plan.

[Image: young Lyra telling a good story.]

More details of Tiny Gryphon’s backstory. The sorcerer who did the spell gets named. I’ve been spoiled that this is the name of a Canon Sorcerer Character. So much for my “she’s a juvenile with a good imagination for cover stories” theory.

Gryphons have human servants, including one “with his tongue cut out.” His daemon hides her face and “refuses” to communicate. Is she also mute? If you want to punish someone by silencing them, in a world where Everyone Has Two Bodies, you would make sure to get both tongues, right?

…Except, hold on, daemons can talk even if they’re a species without the physical ability to produce the phonemes! Butterfly and spider daemons can carry on conversations! We’ve seen daemons affected by other disabilities (paralysis, blindness), but is it even possible to block a daemon’s ability to talk?

Will Pullman explore any of this at all, in the whole rest of the book? I’m guessing no. But it would be nice to be wrong.

[Future note: I was not wrong.]

Our heroes talked up Mal’s skill as an artificer, so the Queen Gryphon says they can leave once they fix a treasure for her. Dramatic, heartbreaking reveal of the smashed pieces of the alethiometer.

(Hey, I’ve written that fic.)

The narration says it’ll clearly never work again. A pointless, tragic demise for what was a precious, irreplaceable treasure of the whole human race.

(…Iorek fixed the Knife, though. Could Mal have a hope after all?)

–

Chapter 12:

Malcolm checks his lodestone. This world went from “no such thing as cell phones” to “angry message about why aren’t you available every minute?” in, like, a day. Love that for then.

His boss also writes out all the exposition about Magisterium Secret Plots We Just Discovered, on this rock with no passcode that, if Malcolm had been captured by his enemies, literally anyone could have right now. Classic Oakley Street level of opsec!

(I checked in TSC, telephones exist here…but they’re still at the level of “need a switchboard operator.” Not advanced enough for pay phones to be in every city, or for every business to have a contact number, let alone every household.)

Malcolm gives the alethiometer a detailed exploration. Chances of successful repair rising.

Tells Pan that one of the reasons he’s traveling is “Money is going bad.” Is it??

There’s the economic turmoil caused by the decimated rose supply, but that’s a specific problem, not a general money problem.

The word “money” is never used in TSC. But I can’t see any reason Mal would lie about this to Pan. So…???

[Future note: My post-book theory is, some editor got to the eventual reveal of the Problem With Money, and told Pullman “buddy, this comes out of nowhere, it needs more buildup.” Instead of adding/rewriting any scenes to show the supposed Problem With Money, Pullman added a few sentences in here of Malcolm telling us there’s a Problem With Money, and decided that covered it.]

Malcolm: “Well, we have to do what we must do where we are, because we certainly can’t do it where we aren’t.”

Feels like a callback to Lee Scoresby: “The place you fight cruelty is where you find it. And the place you give help is where you see it most needed.”

[Image: Lee doing his best Soulful Eyes.]

Cut to Pope Delamare, complaining that Gottfried Brande invited himself to a church conference. Other person says Brande has lots of followers, Delamare corrects: “He doesn’t have followers, he has fans.”

Wonder if Pullman is speaking from his own experience as a celebrated author, here.

Odd that Delamare is so against Brande, when the Magisterium is so chummy with Talbot. These two authors get paralleled by the narrative all the time: their outlooks, their effects on readers. What’s the difference that is so key for Delamare?

[Future note: We never find out.]

Cut to Lyra, Asta, and recovering Ionedes on the Nice Bus.

Stray mention of an “amber-shaded anbaric lamp.” Pullman, you remembered the electric/anbaric term swap, but forgot the amber/electrum one…in the same sentence? (And no editor caught it?) Dude.

Leila and Ionedes confirmed exes. Also: she’s a physicist! Studied Rusakov particles too well, Church ruined her with a manufactured scandal, her mathematician boyfriend/co-professor mostly just got hit as collateral. I’m into this.

–

Chapter 13:

Brande’s presentation at PopeCon, from the POV of an Oakley Street spy in the audience. I mostly haven’t commented on the audiobook voice acting, but the voice Michael Sheen uses for “the bland priest who does Brande’s intro” is extremely funny. Well done.

[Image: the ominous TV-series aesthetic of a Magisterium meeting.]

OS spy notices something off about Brande and “his” daemon, Cosima, but can’t tell what.

People keep guessing “that’s not your daemon, is it?” about the Lyra-Asta and Malcolm-Pan duos, pretty quickly. I feel like it shouldn’t be that obvious…and sure enough, with Brande, it isn’t. Observers just think they’re dysfunctional and unhappy.

…And then it gets hella obvious, as Brande just bites it in the middle of his opening remarks! Poor Cosima is still there, alone, and for once everyone reacts with setting-appropriate horror, “as if a headless corpse was walking around”! Somebody throws up! Cosima runs to the door, and someone else yells “Let it out!”

This is such convenient timing, my new theory is “Brande’s real daemon was a captive, some enemy was using her to control him, they knew he was about to step out of line, so they killed him via her.”

She tries to talk. It’s not a European language, nobody in the room seems to recognize it. Who bets Brande never bothered to learn whatever language she speaks?

CCD agents show up. Somebody brings a dogcatching net. Cosima runs face-first into a wall. Poor dear.

OS observer’s own mouse daemon starts sobbing. He joins in later, but she starts. More “emotion is expressed more honestly through the daemon part.”

Delamare shows up to the cell where they’re holding Cosima. He’s my prime suspect in Brande’s death, obvs, but doesn’t seem to know much about her.

Tries a couple languages, concludes she speaks Persian. Considers touching her, to check if she really reacts like a daemon! His owl tells him off.

“Daemon as conscience.” Or “daemon as the part of the self that considers other people’s feelings.”

Delamere thinking “well, damn, now I’m sorry I skipped the lecture.” Hah.

Tries to offer medical treatment. Worldbuilding: medications and surgery can work on daemons. Also mentions “the talking cure.” Therapy, huh?

Delamare: Is there anything you want to say?
Cosima (now in German): Nothing

And she dies.

While alone with Delamare, oof. He’ll be prime suspect in her murder now, even though we know he actually didn’t do this one.

[Future note: Delamare never becomes a suspect. None of the characters ever find out anything else about Brande’s death, either! This genuinely intriguing mystery is never addressed again!]

Delamare plans to release the text of Brande’s presentation, “in his memory,” with some convenient rewrites.

His owl says it’s an incoherent mess that wouldn’t be worth the time to edit. (Insert your own ChatGPT jokes here.) Not playing the conscience this time, but the voice of caution and practicality.

–

Chapter 14:

Lyra on the bus, still hasn’t bought a Useful Phrases For Tourists book, so she ponders philosophy. Connects “imagination” to “intuition” and/or “recognizing patterns that might be coincidence.”

Looks at the myriorama, chats about it with Asta, who also has experience watching Hannah Relf use the alethiometer. They talk about the symbol meanings being “fixed,” while the pictures on the cards are more “dynamic” and better for “telling a story”.

Ehhh. Doubt. The alethiometer has told plenty of stories, you just need enough symbols in a row to convey all the details. Our alphabet has 26 symbols, and you can tell any story with those (plus a handful of punctuation).

[Image: child Pan watching Lyra work the alethiometer.]

Words might be a closer parallel, though. Thread-eating nerd tangent ahoy:

Simple English Wikipedia uses about 2K-3K different words, from a “Basic English” vocab set. The goal is to be accessible to ESL learners, people with learning disabilities, etc. That’s not fine-grained enough to have a technical conversation in a specific field, but apparently it’s enough for a functional explanation of Everything On Wikipedia (as tested so far).

Wikipedia also has “a list of dictionaries considered authoritative or complete by approximate number of total words”! The smallest is a conlang deliberately engineered to have as few root words as possible (and then go absolutely ham with compound words): Toki Pona, at 181.

Esperanto, a conlang created with the intention of being speakable, has 16,780 words in its biggest dictionary.

The alethiometer has 36 symbols, each with “thousands” of meanings. Let’s be as limiting as possible, and call it 2K each. That’s a minimum of 72,000 total. 3K meanings each brings us up to 108,000.

Biggest dictionaries of some languages I recognize as currently-spoken, and not reconstructed:

Venetian: 36,000
Thai: 40,840
Punjabi: 64,263
Spanish: 93,000

Yeah, I know not every possible word will be covered in a dictionary. That said, Hannah’s research included “investigating the deeper levels of alethiometer symbol meanings.” So not all of those are officially documented, either!

And I’m not done! In this chapter Lyra cites the Beehive as an example: the top meaning is “productive work.” Meanings can map to multi-word phrases!

Obviously a nuanced word in a natural language could be expressed with multiple symbols strung together, too.

The idea that this is “too rigid” or “not dynamic” is absurd. Especially from a writer, who has surely thought about “how language works” once or twice in his life.

When Lyra+Asta talked more about the myriorama, I figured they would quickly come to the conclusion of “these pictures are also symbols with layers of meaning.”

The art is old. Probably predates the invention of the bus. So you need some interpretation, such as, “the carriage” stands for transportation more generally, so it encompasses the bus. (Or the mag-lev high-speed rail. Or the spacecraft.)

But no, they don’t have that insight at all. The conversation moves on.

Asta is confident Mal could “make another alethiometer” if he had the tools and materials. Chance of Malcolm repairing Lyra’s is now approaching 100%, isn’t it.

Lyra gets out her little book of names for the first time since TSC, shows it to Asta. Calls these “names of people who can separate.” Has Pullman just forgotten that Makepeace was in there?

Mutual recap time.

Ionedes reports a Magisterium agent spotted on the train. Asta is surprised, thought they were moving “out of reach” of the Magisterium, especially with hearing “the Angelus bells.”

I looked those up, with a faint hope they would be a Muslim thing. Some hint that we’re moving into lands where a non-Christian religion has held off Church control enough to have a presence. But nope, it’s a Catholic thing. It was just one of the things Pope Calvin banned when he canon-diverged the Church.

Chapter finally over.

It was 16 minutes long. I’m not trying to get this distracted, but…

–

Chapter 15:

Malcolm takes the alethiometer mechanism out of the crushed gold case, tucks it aside. Yeah, that’s getting re-cased.

[Future note: Never resolved. By the end of the book, he’s still planning to try, but hasn’t actually started.]

They’re outside the enclosed stronghold when a storm comes up, and Malcolm briefly catches Pan to keep him from getting blown away. It’s awkward. I like it.

That kind of “incidental daemon touch for safety needs” is a realistic in-universe thing to address. And the reaction of I’m Not Mad But Wow This Is Too Awkward To Talk About rings very true.

A witch flies in. Gryphons try to fight her off. During the storm! Good action sequence (and more convincing than the witches-vs-bears fight that happened at some point in HDM).

[Image: a different witch, Ruta Skadi, flying through an earlier storm.]

It’s the same witch who had a cameo in LBS. Mal recognizes her…and has to repress a “help, she’s hot” reaction.

She’s here to address the gryphons on a concern of “the air is bad, the winds are failing.” Sounds like another manifestation of whatever caused “money is going bad”, the retconned-in problem Mal is supposedly on.

Our heroes conclude that The Problem affects what gryphons call “the inner kingdom.” Witch-Queen says this is also what humans call “the Secret Commonwealth.” I’m sure this is true because it’s a theme of the trilogy, but I have no idea how the characters deduced it. Are “wind” and “money” supposed to be mystical non-scientific concepts now? (I guess you could make a case for “money” being a social construct, and therefore “imaginary”. Air, not so much.)

[Future note: Other way around. Wind is a metaphor for imagination. Money is an anti-imagination force of evil.]

Gryphon Queen calls in a (human) court scientist. And, look, I was getting a bit of a “climate change crisis” vibe already…now this guy suggests a link to the burning of certain fuels, and Mal infers it’s about the Church’s “using explosives to melt the portals” project. (His boss texted him that exposition.)

I was thinking “a few dozen explosions, even really toxic ones, doesn’t seem like enough to cause noticeable effects on the global atmosphere.”

Then Mal makes an inference: the windows themselves had airflow. Maybe the mass closure is cutting off the whole planet’s ventilation.

so is Pan going to mention how it also protects the world from losing something important (titular, even) or how the whole reason he and Lyra accepted they could never see their beloved Will again was because leaving even one window open was catastrophically dangerous for the multiverse or

Nnnnope

Plus: Mal makes a rousing speech that they should unite to oppose their enemies. Including TP, a company “whose only goal is to make money.”

This argument is to the gryphons. Whose established POV is “anything that gets us more gold is correct and okay.”

Hope nobody tells them gold is money!

–

Bonus note:

A bunch of characters have mentioned “the alkahest” in various contexts. Several are searching for it, or for info about it. Not a single one has said what it is. Or given any indication of where/how you would try to find it.

Finally looked it up. Wikipedia says it’s a theoretical material that alchemists tried to produce. Like the Philosopher’s Stone, but instead of transmuting one element to another, this can dissolve any element into its component parts. A universal solvent.

So far, there’s…no obvious way this would fit into the plot. Nobody’s given any indication what they want it for.

Now that all the hero-coded characters are lining up on the side of “closing inter-world windows is bad,” my best guess is “alkahest could be used to dissolve open the melted-closed windows.” (It makes at least as much sense as “using explosives to make openings smaller.”)

[Image: young Lyra in front of a portal Asriel just exploded open]

From the sound, I figured the term was Arabic. But Wiki also says “nobody knows where Paracelsus got this word, no theories have real Arabic words that match it, there’s a real chance he just made up Something Arabic-Sounding because it came off as serious and mystical.”

Serious and noble scholarship here, folks. Making up foreign-y words to sound cool: an ancient human tradition.

https://erinptah.wordpress.com/2026/02/11/erin-reads-the-rose-field-part-2a-chapters-9-15/

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