Lyra suddenly felt the magic slipping away from her. She tried to focus on it, tried to will it back, but it was no good. The tenuous thread of concentration that had been maintaining Starswirl’s spell all day long—such a minor effort, she hadn’t even really been consciously aware of it—finally broke, and she realized that she was about to be the center of a powerful magical backlash. And there was nothing she could do about it.