I must have sighed aloud, because there was a smallish explosion beside me that was Bad springing to his feet as if fired from a dog-sized cannon. He landed awkwardly on his bad leg, yipped, and contented himself with wriggling all over and burying his face in my neck.
I threw my arms around him, or tried to—only my right arm obeyed with any real enthusiasm. The left one just sort of flopped over, fishlike, and lay still. It was at that moment, as I stared in mild dismay at my disobedient arm, that the politely waiting pain cleared its throat, stepped forward, and introduced itself.
Damn, I thought, cogently. Then, after another few heartbeats, during which I could feel every fiber of torn muscle in my shoulder and every shuddering bone in my left hip, I revised it: “Shit.”
It actually helped a little; Mr. Locke had forbidden me to swear when I was thirteen and he’d caught me telling the new kitchen boy to keep his goddamned hands to himself. I wondered how long it would take before I stopped discovering these petty little laws that’d governed my life, and whether I would only reveal them by breaking them. It was a rather cheerful thought.
And then I wondered how long it would take before I stopped seeing Mr. Locke devoured by incarnate darkness, and sobered a little.
I pulled myself to my feet—slowly and painfully and with lots more swearing—and tucked The Ten Thousand Doors beneath my arm. The city lay below me. How did I describe it to you before? A world of salt water and stone. Buildings standing in whitewashed spirals, free of coal smoke and grit. A forest of masts and sails along the coast. It was all still there, and nearly unchanged. (I wonder, now, what the closing of the Doors has meant to the other worlds, not just my own familiar one.)
“Shall we?” I murmured to Bad. He led the way down the craggy hillside, away from the stone archway and raggedy curtain I’d come through, away from the sunbaked bloodstains flaking and cracking on the ground, and down into the City of Nin.
It was fully dusk by the time our feet hit cobbled city street. Honey-colored lamplight oozed from the windows and dinnertime conversations swooped swallowlike through the air above me. The language had a familiar rise-and-fall rhythm to it, a languorous roll that reminded me of my father’s voice. The few passersby sort of looked like him, too—reddish-dark, black-eyed, with spirals of ink winding up their forearms. I’d grown up thinking of my father as fundamentally foreign, eccentric, unlike anyone else; now I saw he was just a man very far from home.
Judging from the staring and muttering and hurrying-past people were doing, I was still out of place, not quite right. I wondered if I would always be wrong-colored and in-between, no matter where I went, before recalling that I was wearing foreign clothing in a state of considerable disrepair and that Bad I were both limping, dirty, and bleeding.
I wound vaguely north, watching new stars wink mischievously at me in their strange constellations. I didn’t, in fact, know where I was going—a stone house on the high northern hillside was imprecise, as addresses go—but this seemed a small, surmountable sort of obstacle.
I slumped against a white-stone wall and dug Mr. Ilvane’s coppery-green compass out of my sack. I held it tight in my palm and thought of my father. The needle whirled westward, pointing straight out into the calm gray sea. I tried again, picturing instead a golden evening seventeen years ago when I’d lain with my mother on a sun-soaked quilt, when I had a home and a future and parents who loved me. The needle hesitated, jittering beneath the glass, and pointed not-quite-north.
I followed it.
I found a dirt track that seemed to align well with my little copper needle and followed it toward the straw-colored sickle of the moon. It was a well-traveled path but steep, and I paused sometimes to let the pain stomp its feet and yell in my ears, before shushing it and continuing on.
More stars emerged, like shimmering loops of writing in the sky. And then the low, shadowed bulk of a house appeared ahead of us. My heart—and I don’t think any heart has ever been so exhausted and wrung-dry in the history of the world—stuttered to life in my chest.
The window lit with flickering light, and two figures stood illuminated: a man, tall but hunched with age, hair sprouting in white tufts around his skull, and an old woman with a kerchief around her hair and arms black to the shoulder with ink.
Neither of them was my father or my mother. Of course. You don’t really know how high your hopes have gotten until you watch them plummeting earthward.
A logical person would have turned around then, returned to the city proper and begged or mimed their way into a warm meal and a place to sleep and some medical attention. They certainly wouldn’t have staggered onward, tears sliding silently down their cheeks. They wouldn’t have stood before the door-that-wasn’t-theirs, a graying, salt-preserved slab of wood with an iron hook for a knob, and raised their good hand to knock.
And when an old woman answered, her seamed face tilted questioningly upward, eyes milky and squinting, they wouldn’t have burst into tear-slurred speech. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am, it’s just I was wondering if you know the man who used to live here. Only I’ve come a really long way and I wanted—I wanted to see him. Julian was his name. Yule Ian, I mean—”
I saw the old woman’s mouth press into a thin line, like a sutured wound. She shook her head. “No.” Then, almost angrily, “Who are you, to ask about my Yule, eh? We have not seen him for twenty years, almost.”
I wanted to wail at the moon or curl up on the doorstep and weep like a little lost child. My father had never come home and neither had my mother, and what was broken would never be mended; the old woman’s words were a final, cruel verdict.
They were also, rather mysteriously, in English.
A dangerous, foolish tingling began in my limbs. How did she know a language from my world? Had someone taught her? And had I gone entirely insane, or did she and I share the same cheekbones, perhaps the same tilt to our shoulders—but then the crowd of questions fell silent.
There was someone else in the little stone house on the hillside. Beside me, Bad’s ears stood up straight.
I caught a flash of movement behind the old woman’s lamplit silhouette—a white-gold glimmer in the darkness, like summer wheat—and then there was another woman standing in the doorway.
Now, with the calming benefit of time and familiarity, I can describe her to you easily: a tired, tough-looking woman with yellow hair gone gray at the temples, skin so freckled and burnt it could almost pass for native, and the sort of strong, unbeautiful features novelists call arresting.
But in that moment, standing on the threshold of the home I was born in, with a squeezing in my chest as if someone had reached behind my ribs and seized my heart, I looked at her all out of order. Her hands: thick-fingered, scored and hashed with shiny white scars, with three fingernails missing entirely. Her arms: stringy muscle wrapped in black ink. Her eyes: soft, dreamer’s blue. Her nose, her square jaw, her level brows: all just like mine.
She didn’t recognize me, of course. It was absurd to wish she did, after nearly seventeen years spent on different planets. I wished it anyway.
“Hello, Adelaide.” Should I have called her Mother instead? The word sat heavy and unfamiliar on my tongue. I knew her better as a character from my father’s book, anyway.
Her eyebrows crimped in the uncertain expression of someone who can’t recall your name and doesn’t want to offend—her mouth opened to say something like Pardon me? or Have we met? and I knew it would feel just like being shot again, a burrowing pain that would worsen with time—but then her eyes went wide.
Maybe it was because I’d spoken English, or maybe it was my familiar/foreign clothes that did it, but she began to look at me, really look at me, with an avid, desperate hunger in her face. I saw her eyes performing the same frenzied dance mine had a few moments before—my wild bundle of braided hair, my blood-rusted arm, my eyes, nose, chin—
And then she knew me.
I saw the knowing arrive, wonderful and
terrible. In my memory she has two entirely different faces at once, like the god she named me for: On one face is riotous joy, blazing at me like the sun itself. On the other is deepest mourning, the keening, marrow-deep ache of someone who has looked for something too long and found it too late.
She reached her hand toward me, and I saw her mouth move. Jan-u-ary.
Everything wavered, like the final shaky frames of a film reel, and I remembered how achingly, terribly tired I was, how much I hurt, how many steps I’d taken to arrive at this precise place. I had time to think, Hello, Mother, and then I was falling forward into painless darkness.
I cannot be sure, but I thought I felt someone catch me as I fell. I thought I felt strong, wind-scoured arms wrap around me as if they would never let me go again, felt the thrum of someone else’s heartbeat against my cheek—felt the jangled, broken thing in the center of me fit itself back together and begin, perhaps, to mend.
And now: I sit at this yellow-wood desk with a pen in my hand and a stack of cotton pages lying in wait, so clean and perfect that every word is a sin, a footstep in fresh-fallen snow. An old, unmarked compass sits on the windowsill, still pointing stubbornly out to sea. Tin-cut stars dangle above me, flashing and twisting in the amber sun slanting through the window. I watch little trails of light dance over the pearled scars on my arm, the neat bandaging at my shoulder, the cushions carefully piled around my hip. It still hurts, a burrowing, spine-deep heat that never quite fades; the doctor—Vert Bonemender, I think they called him—said it always would.
Seems fair, somehow. I think maybe if you write open a Door between worlds and consign your guardian-jailer to the eternal blackness of the Threshold, you shouldn’t get to feel precisely the way you did before.
And anyway, Bad and I will match. I can see him now, scrubbing his back against the stony hillside in that ecstatic way of dogs that makes you think maybe you should give it a try. He looks sleek and bronze again, without those jaggedy stitches and lumps all over him, but one leg still doesn’t seem to straighten all the way.
Beyond him, I see the sea. Dove-gray, gold-tipped in the sunlight. Adelaide had this room added to the stone house on the hillside years ago; I don’t think it’s an accident that the windows face the sea, so she can keep her eyes always on the horizon, watching, searching, hoping.
It is the sixteenth day I’ve been here. My father hasn’t come.
I convinced Ade (Ade is still easier to say than Mother; she doesn’t correct me, but sometimes I see her flinch, as if her name is a stone I’ve thrown at her) not to load up her boat and sail out into the blue looking for him, mapless and rudderless, but it was a near thing. I reminded her that neither of us knew where his Door came through to the Written, that all sorts of perils might have befallen him in between, that she would feel really stupid if she sailed away from Nin just as Father was sailing toward it. So she stays, but her whole body has become another compass needle leaning seaward.
“It’s not so different, really,” she told me on the third day. We were in the stone dimness of her bedroom, in the soft, breathing hours before dawn. I was propped on pillows, too fevered and pain-racked to sleep, and she sat on the floor with her back against the bed and Bad’s head in her lap. She hadn’t moved in three days, as far as I could tell; every time I opened my eyes I saw the square line of her shoulders, the white-streaked tangle of her hair.
“Before, I was always searching for him, questing after him. Now I’m waiting for him.” Her voice was tired.
“So you… you did try.” I licked my cracked lips. “To find us.” I made an effort to keep the bitterness and hurt out of my voice, the Where have you been all these years and the We needed you—yes, I know it isn’t fair to blame my mother for being stuck in another world my entire life, but hearts aren’t chessboards and they don’t play by the rules—but she heard it anyway.
The firm line of her shoulders flinched, then curved inward. She pressed her palms against her eyes. “Child, I have tried to find you every single damn day for seventeen years.”
I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t, actually.
After a moment, she went on. “When that door closed—when that son of a bitch closed it, according to you—I was left stranded on that little scrap of rock for… days and days. I don’t know how long, t’tell the truth. No food, a little water I found floating in the wreckage. My breasts hurting, then leaking, then drying up, and I couldn’t get to you, couldn’t find my baby—” I heard her swallow. “The sun got at me after a while, and I started to think maybe I could burrow through the stone and find my way through to you. If I tried hard enough. I guess that’s how they found me: crazy as a loon, clawing at solid rock, crying.”
She curled her hands to her chest, hiding her missing fingernails. That newly mended thing in my chest ached.
“It was a couple of fisherfolk from the City of Plumm who’d seen us sail away, and got worried when we didn’t come back. They took me in, fed me, put up with a lot of swearing and screaming. Kept a rope tied around my middle, I guess, so’s I wouldn’t dive back into the sea. I don’t… remember too much of that time.”
But she’d gotten better, eventually, or at least better enough to lay plans. She bought passage back to the City of Nin, told Yule Ian’s parents what happened—“I told the whole truth, like a fool, but they just figured their son and grandbaby got lost at sea and set about mourning”—earned, begged, and stole sufficient funds to outfit The Key, and sailed off in search of another way home.
The first years were lean and frantic. There are still stories told about the mad widow who turned white with grief, who endlessly sails the seas in search of her lost love. She haunts out-of-the-way places—ocean caves and abandoned mines and forgotten ruins—calling out for her baby girl.
She stumbled through dozens of Doors. She saw winged cats that spoke in riddles, sea dragons with mother-of-pearl scales, green cities that floated high in the clouds, men and women made of granite and alabaster. But she never found the only Door she wanted. She wasn’t even sure such a Door existed, or that she would find her husband and daughter on the other side of it. (“I thought maybe you got lost in the in-between—thought maybe I should go diving in after you, sometimes.”)
Eventually she took up small-time trading to pay her way around the Written. She earned a reputation as a sailor willing to go very far for very little money or sometimes just for the price of a good story or two, who was sometimes delayed for days or weeks but who often showed up with strange and wondrous goods to sell. She never made much money because she refused to run regular routes to the same places, as any sane trader would, but she didn’t go hungry.
And she kept looking. Even after she knew her daughter would be ten, twelve, fifteen—an absolute stranger to her; even after Yule’s parents suggested, gently, that she might have another child if she remarried soon. Even after she’d forgotten the precise shape of Yule Ian’s hands around his pen, the way he hunched over his work, or the way his shoulders shook when he laughed (had I ever seen him laugh like that?).
“I come back here a few times a year, between jobs, sleep in my own house, remember how to set still. Visit Julian’s folks, who moved out here when Tilsa gave up her ink shop. But mostly I just… keep moving.”
The sun had risen by then, and a line of lemony light crept across the floor. I felt like something recently taken apart, scrubbed clean, and reassembled, except nothing was quite where it used to be. There was still some bitterness floating around in there, and quite a bit of hurt, but there was also something feather-light and glimmering—forgiveness, maybe, or compassion.
I hadn’t spoken in so long my voice creaked a little, like a disused hinge. “I always used to dream about a life like that. Roaming around, free.”
My mother blew a sad huff of laughter out her nose. “A natural-born wanderer, like I always said.” She stroked Bad’s head, scratching his favorite under-the-chin spot. He became a furry bronze puddle in her lap,
pawing weakly at the air. “But take it from me: freedom isn’t worth a single solitary shit if it isn’t shared. I’ve spent so much time wishing we’d never sailed through that door, January. But at my ugliest, most selfish moments—I wished it had been me standing in the prow, with you. At least Julian had you.” Her voice was so soft I could hardly hear it, choked with seventeen years of vicious pain.
I thought of my father. Of how rarely I saw him, and how his face had the same hollowed-out tiredness my mother’s did, and how his eyes skimmed across my face as if it might hurt if he looked too long. “I… Yes, he had me. But I wasn’t enough.” Odd—that used to make me so angry, but now the anger had gone all runny and soft, like melting wax.
A ragged, furious gasp from my mother. “You damn well should have been! Was he—did he—” I knew she was going to ask, Was he a good father? and I found I didn’t want to answer; it seemed needlessly cruel.
“Would I have been enough for you?” I asked instead. “Would you have stopped looking for Father?”
I heard her breath catch, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. “Here.” I wallowed around in my cushions and quilts, found the warm leather cover of The Ten Thousand Doors. “I think you ought to read this. So you can”—forgive him—“understand him.”
She took it.
I still catch her rereading passages, running her fingers over the printed words like they were miracles or magic charms, her lips moving in something very much like prayer. I think it helps. Well, not helps, exactly—I think it hurts like hell to reread the narrative of her life, with all its broken promises and lost chances, to read about the man my father became and the choices he made.
But she keeps reading it. It’s a kind of proof, I suppose, that he still lives and still loves her, that he’s striving to find his way back to her. That what was shattered will be made whole again.
So now there are two of us staring seaward. Waiting. Hoping. Watching ships crest the curve of the horizon, reading the black swirls of blessings stitched into their sails. My mother translates them for me, sometimes: To many fat fish. To mutually profitable dealings. To safe travels and strong currents.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January Page 33