“And what are you going to write?”
His eyes, when they met hers, went solemn and dark as underground pools. Ade felt a slight tremor in her belly. “I would like to write: On this day in the summer of 6920, Adelaide Lee Larson and Yule Ian Scholar found love, and did swear to keep it eternally.” He swallowed. “If you do not object, I mean. Written this way, in this ink, the words will last some weeks but they can still be washed away. It is only a kind of promise.”
Ade’s heart thrummed. “What happens if I decide I don’t want to wash it off?”
Silently, Yule held up his left arm. Tattoos wound around it in tight, dark lines, naming him Scholar and listing his most prestigious publications. Ade looked at the markings very seriously for a moment, like a woman seeing her future and giving herself one last chance to turn away, then met Yule’s gaze. “Why bother with the pen, then. Where can we get ourselves tattooed?”
A great bubble of giddy relief burst in Yule’s chest. He laughed, and she kissed him, and when they left the washerwoman’s home that afternoon there was fresh black ink circling their entwined hands, spelling out their futures for the world to see.
They spent the following hours shopping in Plumm’s bright-awninged marketplace. Yule negotiated for dried fruits and oats in short, practical phrases of Amarican-common while Ade gathered a trail of fascinated onlookers like a ship’s wake behind them. There were giggles and shrieks from skinny-armed children, pitying mutters from market women, rumbling gossip from the fishers who’d heard rumors of the ghost woman.
Yule hired a wobbly cart to pull their supplies down to the eastern beach, where Ade’s fat little ship still bobbed in the bay. They spent the night tucked beneath a spare scrap of canvas in the boat bottom, listening to the sluicing of waves against the pine-tarred hull and watching the night wheel over them like a dancer’s star-studded skirt. Ade nestled into the softness of his arm and thought about happily-ever-afters and sweet-tasting endings. Yule thought about once-upon-a-times and bold beginnings.
At dawn they departed. When asked what she wanted to see, Ade replied, “Everything,” so Yule obediently charted a course toward everything. They docked first at the City of Sissly, where Ade could admire the pink domes of the local chapels and taste the pepper-bite of fresh gwanna fruit. Then they stayed three nights on the abandoned Island of Tho, where the ruins of a failed City loomed like broken gray teeth against the sun, before skipping along a string of low, sand-scoured islands too small to be named. They walked the streets of the City of Yef and slept in the cool grottoes of the City of Jungil, and walked across the famed bridge connecting the twin Cities of Iyo and Ivo. They sailed north and west, following the summer currents out of the sweating heat of the equator, and saw Cities so distant even Yule had only read their names on his charts.
Yule’s scholar’s stipend, meant for the renting of small rooms and the eating of plain meals, was not so generous that they could supply themselves endlessly from City markets. Instead Yule fumbled to recall his father’s long-ago lessons in knot tying and hook setting, and fished for their dinner. Ade cut and bent thin saplings and built them a kind of arched bower in the stern of the ship where they could shelter from the sun and rain. In the crowded City of Cain, Yule bought a spool of waxed thread and an iron needle as long as his palm. They spent a day floating in Cain’s harbor while Yule stitched blessings into their scandalously bare sailcloth. He wrote all the usual prayers for good weather and safe passage, but where most ships added some specific dedication—to fruitful fishing or profitable trading or comfortable travel—he wrote only to love. Ade saw the word twined around her wrist mirrored on the sail, and kissed his cheek, laughing.
It was difficult to imagine an ending to those golden months they spent on The Key. The summer heat faded and was replaced with the cool, high winds of the trading season, when the Amarico was so trafficked with ships the sea itself was scented with spice and oil and fine flaxen paper. Yule and Ade traced love-drunk spirals through the currents, winding back southward on white-edged waves, planning no further than the next island, the next City, the next night spent curled together on some empty beach. Yule thought they might go on forever like that.
Yule was, of course, mistaken. True love is not stagnant; it is in fact a door, through which all kinds of miraculous and dangerous things may enter.
“Julian, love, wake up.” They had spent the night on a small, pine-covered island, occupied only by woodsmen and goatherds. Yule was nestled deep in their bed of canvas and cloth, sweating out the juniper-berry wine of the previous evening, but he peeled his eyes open at Ade’s call.
“Nng?” he asked articulately.
She was sitting with her back to the sea, crosshatched by the dawn light slinking through pine branches. Her straw-colored hair hung around her shoulders in a jagged line where she’d made Yule cut it with his fishing knife, and her skin had turned a rawish, unlikely shade of burnt brown. She wore the practical wrapping of a sailor woman but hadn’t yet mastered the folds and tucks it required, so that her clothes hung around her body like loose netting. Yule thought she was the most beautiful thing in his or any other world.
“There’s something I need to tell you.” Ade was rubbing the black words still staining her left wrist. “Something pretty big, I guess.”
Yule looked more closely at her, but her expression was unfamiliar to him. In their months together he’d seen her exhausted and elated, furious and fanged, bored and brave; he’d never seen her fearful. The emotion sat like a foreign tourist on Ade’s features.
She blew out a breath and closed her eyes. “Julian. I think—well, I know, actually, I’ve been pretty sure for a while now—I’m going to have a baby.”
The world hung suspended. The waves ceased their slapping, the pine boughs no longer brushed together, even the small creatures in the earth stopped their burrowing. Yule wasn’t certain his heart was still beating, except that he didn’t seem to be dead.
“Well, you don’t have to look so damned surprised. I mean, two people doing what we’ve been doing for half a year, you’d have to be downright stupid not to think we might—that I might—” Ade sucked her breath through tight-clenched teeth.
But it was difficult for Yule to hear her clearly, because the momentary silence had given way to something raucous and celebratory, as if his own stuttering heart had been replaced with a City parade. He strove to respond gently, cautiously. “What will you do?”
Ade’s eyes widened and her fingers splayed helplessly over her own stomach, as if warding him away. “Doesn’t seem like I have much choice, does it.”12 But there was no bitterness or regret in her voice, only that chill fear. “But men do, don’t they. Lord knows my father wasn’t—he didn’t—what will you do?”
And Yule realized then what should have been obvious: it wasn’t the baby Ade was frightened of, but him. It was such an enormous relief that Yule laughed, a great shout of joy that scattered the birds perched above them and made Ade bite her cheek with sudden hope.
Yule tossed his blankets aside and crawled to her. He took her hands—scarred and burnt, blunt-nailed and beautiful—in his. “Here’s what I will do, if you will let me: I will take you back to Nin and marry you, and find someplace to make a home for us. And the three of us—or four of us? Or six?—wait till you meet my brothers and sisters—will spend our winters in Nin and our summers sailing, and I will love you and our child more than any man has loved anything. I will never leave either of you as long as I live.”
He watched the fear in her face vanish. It was replaced by some burning, luminous thing that made Yule think of sea divers standing at the edges of cliffs or word-workers staring at the blank page. “Yes,” she said, and their whole lives lay in that single word.
If only Yule had been a better man, he might have kept his promise—to his daughter, if not to his wife.
Yule’s own mother tattooed their wedding vows on their arms. She worked with her white-knotted hair pul
led back beneath a kerchief and her needles up-and-downing in the same rhythm Yule knew from childhood. It still seemed to him a kind of magic to see words emerging in the blood-and-ink trail of the needle like dawn following some old god’s chariot. For Ade the ritual lacked the weight of tradition, but she still caught her breath at the strange beauty of dark lines twisting up her forearm, and when she pressed her arm against Yule’s so their red-black wounds touched, and spoke the inked words out loud, she still felt something tectonic shifting beneath her feet.
The traditional Signing of the Blessings followed their vows. Yule’s parents—wearing bemused, affable expressions that indicated they didn’t quite understand how their son came to be married to a milk-pale foreigner with nothing to her name but the world’s ugliest boat, but were happy for him anyway—hosted the gathering, and all Yule’s cousins and stoop-backed aunties and university fellows came crowding in to have their prayers for the newlyweds recorded in the family book. They lingered to eat and drink themselves into a traditional stupor, and Ade spent her third night in the City of Nin crammed into Yule’s childhood bed, watching his cut-tin stars twirl overhead.
It took another week for Yule to wrangle a new arrangement between himself and the university. He announced that he had finished with his researches in the field and needed time and quiet to compile his thoughts, and would also like a stipend large enough to support a wife and child. They balked; he insisted. In the end, and after much muttering about his expected future contributions to the university’s reputation, the master required him to teach three times a week in the City square and provided him enough pay to afford a small stone house on the high northern hillside of the island.
The house was a tired, settling sort of structure, half-buried in the hill behind it, which emitted a strong smell of goats on warm afternoons. It had only two rooms, a blackened oven occupied by several generations of mice, and a bed of straw-stuffed canvas. The mason who chiseled their names into the stone mantel thought privately it was a grim, lean home for a young family, but to Yule and Ade it was the most beautiful building ever to claim four walls and a rooftop. This is the mad Midas touch of true love, which transforms everything it touches to gold.
Winter crept over Nin stealthily, like a great white cat made of chill mists and sharp-edged winds. Ade was entirely unimpressed by it, and laughed at Yule as he wrapped woolen cloths around his chest and shivered by the bread oven. She went on long walks through the hills, dressed only in her summer things, and returned with wind-scoured cheeks.
“Won’t you take something warmer?” Yule pleaded one morning. “For his sake?” He snaked an arm around the gentle slope of her belly.
She laughed at him, pulling away. “Her sake, I think you mean.”
“Mm. Well, perhaps you’d wear—this?” he said, and pulled from behind his back a brownish, rough-looking canvas coat, as foreign to his world as it was familiar in hers.
She fell still. “You kept it? All these years?”
“Of course.” He whispered it into the salt-smelling tangle of hair at the back of her neck, and her walk that morning was somewhat delayed.
Spring in Nin was a season of saturation. Warm rains turned every trail to mud and every stone to moss. Their neat-folded clothes molded in their stacks and bread grew stale almost before it cooled. Ade spent more time down in the City with Yule, swaying up and down rain-slicked streets and practicing her abysmal Amarican on every passing citizen, or working with Yule’s father to scrub small, shelled creatures off the keels of his fishing boats. She took care of The Key, too, adjusting and rebuilding under Yule’s father’s direction until it sat a little more jauntily at the dock, its mast thinner and taller and its hull well sealed. She liked to watch it rocking in the waves and feel her baby rolling beneath her ribs. One day she’ll be yours, Ade told her, one day you and The Key will sail off into the sunset.
In midsummer, in the sun-bleached month Ade called July, Yule returned to their home to find Ade swearing and bent over, pearled sweat slicking her skin.
“Is it—he’s coming?”
“… She,” Ade panted, and she looked at Yule with the expression of a young soldier charging into her first battle. Yule gripped her hands, their tattoos twining like paired snakes up their wrists, and made the same desperate, silent prayers that every father makes in that moment: that his wife would live, that his child would be whole and healthy, that he would hold them both in his arms before dawn.
And, in the world’s most often-repeated and transcendent miracle, his prayers were granted.
Their daughter was born just before sunrise. She had skin the color of cedarwood and eyes like wheat.
They named her for an old, half-forgotten god from Ade’s own world, whom Yule had studied once in an ancient text preserved in Nin’s archives. He was a strange god, depicted in the faded manuscript with two faces staring both backward and forward. He presided not over one particular domain but over the places between—past and present, here and there, endings and beginnings—over doorways, in short.
But Ade thought Janus sounded too much like Jane, and she’d be damned if any daughter of hers would be named Jane. They named her after the god’s own month instead: January.
Oh my sweet daughter, my perfect January, I would beg for your forgiveness, but I lack the courage.
All I can ask for is your belief. Believe in doors and worlds and the Written. Believe most of all in our love for you—even if the only evidence we’ve left you is contained in the book you now hold.
The Door of Blood and Silver
When I was a child, breakfast was twenty minutes of absolute silence seated across from Miss Wilda, who believed that conversation interfered with digestion and that jam and butter were only for holidays. After her departure I joined Mr. Locke for breakfast at his enormous polished dining table, where I did my best to impress him with my good posture and ladylike silence. Then Jane arrived and breakfasts became stolen coffee in a forgotten sitting room or jumbled attic room, where everything smelled of dust and sunlight and Bad could disperse fine bronze hairs on the armchairs without rebuke.
At Brattleboro, breakfast was the splat of porridge ladled into tin bowls, the pale filtering of light from high windows, the click of the attendants’ heels down the aisles.
Good behavior had granted me the right to join the murmuring flock of women who ate in the dining hall. I was seated that morning beside a mismatched pair of white women: one of them was old, narrow, and pursed-looking, with her hair drawn into a bun so severe it tugged her eyebrows into little arches; the other was young and wide, with moist gray eyes and chapped lips.
Both of them stared as I sat down. It was a familiar stare: a mistrustful, what-exactly-are-you stare that felt like a knife blade pressed to my flesh.
But not that morning. That morning my skin was shining plated armor, it was silver snakeskin, it was invulnerable; that morning I was the daughter of Yule Ian Scholar and Adelaide Lee Larson, and those eyes could not touch me.
“You going to eat that?” The gray-eyed girl had apparently determined I wasn’t so odd she couldn’t ask for my biscuit. It sat half-sunk in my porridge, a flattish lump the color of fish scales.
“No.”
She took the biscuit, sucking the dampness out of it. “I’m Abby,” she offered. “That’s Miss Margaret.” The older woman didn’t look at me, but her face pinched further inward.
“January Scaller,” I said politely, but I thought: January Scholar. Like my father before me. The thought was a lantern glow in my chest, a brightness so real I thought it must be leaking from me like light around a closed door.
Miss Margaret gave a faint, high-bred snort, perfectly calibrated to be mistaken for a sniff. I wondered what she’d been before she was a madwoman—an heiress? A banker’s wife? “And what kind of a name is that, exactly?” She still wasn’t looking at me but addressed her question to the air.
The lantern in my chest glowed brighter. “Mine.”
All mine. Given to me by my own true parents, who loved one another, who loved me—who had abandoned me, somehow. The lantern glow dimmed a little, flickering in a sudden draft.
What happened to that little stone house on the hillside, to The Key, to my mother and father?
I almost didn’t want to know. I wanted to linger as long as I could in the fragile, fleeting past, in that brief happily-ever-after when I’d had a home and a family. Last night I’d stuffed The Ten Thousand Doors beneath my mattress rather than read another page and risk losing it all.
Abby was blinking her damp eyes into the sudden silence. “I got a telegram from my brother this morning. I’m going home on Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday, he said.” Margaret snorted again. Abby ignored her. “Do you think you’ll stay long?” she asked me.
No. There was too much to do—finish my damn book, find Jane, find my father, write it all right again—to stay locked up here like some tragic orphan girl in a Gothic novel. Plus, if I stayed past dark I was three quarters certain a vampire would climb through my window and eat me.
I had to find a way out. And wasn’t I the daughter of Yule and Ade, born beneath the sun of another world? Wasn’t I named after the god of in-betweens and passageways, the god of Doors? How could I be locked away, really? My very blood seemed a sort of key, an ink with which I could write myself a new story.
Ah. Blood.
A slow smile peeled my lips back over my teeth. “No, I don’t think so,” I answered breezily. “I’ve just got so much to do.” Abby nodded contentedly and launched into a long and unlikely story about the picnic she would have when she arrived back home, and how her brother really missed her very much, and it wasn’t his fault she was such a trying sister.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January Page 17
