The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

It was a small cabin, like Samuel had said, and a little forlorn: the stacks of blankets were musty, the cookstove was rusting in orange flakes, the windows were cobweb-clogged. But the smell—oh, the smell. Sunshine and pine, lake water and wind—it was as if all the smells of summertime had soaked into the walls. It was the perfect, scientific opposite to Brattleboro.

  It was only then that I noticed Jane, sitting at the foot of my bed with a steaming tin mug in her hands, watching Bad and me with a quirk at the corner of her mouth. Something about her had changed in the week we’d been apart. Maybe it was her clothes—her usual stodgy gray dress had been replaced by a calf-length skirt and loose cotton blouse—or maybe it was the sharp glitter of her eyes, as if she’d dispensed with a mask I hadn’t known she was wearing.

  I found myself suddenly uncertain. I looked at Bad’s back as I spoke. “Where did you find him?”

  “On the beach, in that little cove past the house. He was…” She hesitated, and I glanced up to see that the quirk in her mouth had flattened out. “Not in very good shape. Half-drowned, beaten bloody… It looked to me like someone dropped him over the bluff and hoped he’d drown.” She lifted one shoulder. “I did the best I could for him. I don’t know if that leg will ever be right.” My fingers found clipped patches of fur and stubbly lines of stitches. His back leg had been splinted and wrapped.

  I opened my mouth, but no words emerged. There are times when thank you is so inadequate, so dwarfed by the magnitude of the debt, that the words wilt in your throat.

  Jane, in case you ever read this: Thank you.

  I swallowed. “And how did… how are you here?”

  “As you might have surmised, Mr. Locke called me down to his office to inform me that my services would no longer be needed. I became… agitated, and was escorted from the grounds by that damned eerie valet of his, without even packing my things. I came back that night, of course, but you were already gone. A failure for which I am”—her nostrils flared—“deeply sorry.”

  She gave her shoulders a shake. “Well. Brattleboro is a white institution, I’m told. I was not permitted to visit you. So I went to the Zappia boy, figuring Italian is close enough to white, but his visitation was also denied. Apparently he delivered my package by more, ah, efficient means.” Her smile reappeared and widened enough to show the slim gap between her teeth. “Quite a devoted friend, isn’t he?”

  I didn’t find it necessary to respond to that. She continued, primly. “And a very nice young man. He gave me this address, a place to think and plan, a place to sleep, since I was no longer welcome at Locke House.”

  “I’m sorry.” My voice was small, feeble-sounding in my ears.

  Jane snorted. “I’m not. I have despised that house and its owner since the moment I arrived. I tolerated it solely on the basis of a bargain your father and I struck. He asked me to protect you, in exchange for… something I wanted very badly.” Her expression turned inward, burning with a kind of bottomless, bleak rage that made my breath catch. She swallowed it away. “Which he is no longer in a position to provide.”

  I wrapped my arm tighter around Bad and made my voice as even and neutral as I could. “So you’ll be leaving now. Going home.”

  I saw her eyes widen. “Now? And leave you sick and injured, hunted by gods-only-know-what? Julian might’ve broken the terms of our deal, but you and I have an entirely separate arrangement.” I blinked at her, stupidly. Jane’s expression softened as much as I’d ever seen it. “I am your friend, January. I will not abandon you.”

  “Oh.” Neither of us spoke for a time. I let myself fall back into a sweaty half doze; Jane prodded the cookstove to life and reheated her coffee. She returned to the edge of the bed, scooting Bad’s hind end aside and perching beside me. She held The Ten Thousand Doors—ruffled-looking, smeared with rust-red stains—on her knees, one thumb stroking the cover.

  “You should sleep.”

  But I found I couldn’t, quite. Questions buzzed and hummed in my ears, gnatlike: What had my father promised Jane? How had they met, really, and what was the book to her? And why had my father come to this gray, dull world at all?

  I fidgeted beneath the quilt until Bad sighed at me. “Would—do you think you could read to me? I just finished the fourth chapter.”

  Jane’s gap-toothed grin flashed at me. “Of course.”

  She opened the book and began to read.

  Chapter Five

  On Loss

  Heaven—Hell

  No one really remembers their own origins. Most of us possess a kind of hazy mythology about our early childhood, a set of stories told and retold by our parents, interwoven with our blurred baby memories. They tell us about the time we nearly died crawling down the stairs after the family cat; the way we used to smile in our sleep during thunderstorms; our first words and steps and birthday cakes. They tell us a hundred different stories, which are all the same story: We love you, and have always loved you.

  But Yule Ian never told his daughter those stories. (You will permit me the continued cowardice of third-person narration, I hope; it is foolish, but I find it lessens the pain.) What, then, does she remember?

  Not those first few nights when her parents watched the rise and fall of her rib cage with a kind of terrified elation. Nor the hot, raised feeling of fresh tattoos spiraling beneath their skin, spelling out new words (mother, father, family). Nor the way they sometimes looked at one another in the predawn glow, after hours of pacing and rocking and singing nonsense songs in half a dozen languages, with all their emotions written raw on their faces—a kind of stunned exhaustion, a slight hysteria, an unspeakable longing to simply lie down—and knew themselves to be the most profoundly lucky souls in ten thousand worlds.

  She is unlikely to recall the evening her father climbed back up to the little stone house and found her sleeping beside her mother on the hillside. She was openmouthed, naked except for the cotton cloth tied around her waist, a faint breeze brushing through her curls. Ade was curled around her, a golden-white curve like a lioness or a nautilus, nestled into her milk-sweet breath. It was nearly the end of summer and the evening shadows were creeping toward the two of them on chill tiptoes—but hadn’t reached them yet. The two of them were still shining, untouched, whole.

  Yule stood on the hillside watching them, feeling an exultant, vaulting joy edged with melancholy, as if he were already mourning its loss. As if he knew he could not live in heaven forever.

  It hurts me to speak of such things now. Even now as I write this—cowering in my tent in the foothills outside Ulaanbaatar, alone but for the scratching of my pen and the ice-rimed howling of wolves—I am grinding my teeth against waves of pain, an ache that settles in my limbs and poisons my marrow.

  Do you recall the time you asked me about your name, and I said your mother liked it? You left annoyed, dissatisfied, the line of your jaw so precisely like hers I could hardly breathe. I tried to return to my work but couldn’t. I crawled into bed, racked and shuddering, thinking of the shape of your mother’s mouth when she said your name: January.

  I missed dinner that night and left the next morning before dawn. You were rousted from bed to see me off, and your face through the carriage window—sleep-tousled, vaguely accusing—haunted me for months afterward. In the pain of my loss, I gave you the pain of absence.

  I cannot fill that empty place now; I cannot dive backward in time and force myself to fling open the carriage door and run back to you, gather you close to me, and whisper in your ear: “We love you, we have always loved you.” I have left it too late, and you are nearly grown. But I can give you at least an accounting of the facts, long overdue.

  This is why you were raised in the pine-pocked snows of Vermont rather than the stone islands of the Amarico Sea in the world of the Written. This is why your father’s eyes touch your face only rarely and lightly, as if you were a tiny sun that might blind him. This is why I am nearly six thousand miles away from you, hand cramping from the cold, alone
but for the twin harpies of despair and hope hovering always by my side.

  This is what happened to Yule Ian Scholar and Adelaide Lee Larson after the birth of their daughter, in the raw spring of the Written Year 6922.

  It was earliest spring when Yule first noticed an expression on his wife’s face he had not seen before. It was a kind of wistfulness, a tendency to gaze out at the horizon and sigh and forget, for a moment, what she was doing. At night she twisted and chafed, as if the quilt were a burdensome weight on her body, and woke before dawn to make tea and stare again out their kitchen window toward the sea.

  One night as they lay breathing together in the dark, wrapped in the green smell of spring, Yule asked, “Is there something wrong, Adelaide?”

  He asked in the language of the City of Nin, and she responded in the same manner. “No. Yes. I do not be knowing.” She reverted to English. “It’s just I’m not sure I like staying all tied up to one place. I love her, I love you, I love this house and this world, but… I feel like a mad dog on a short leash, some days.” She rolled away from him. “Maybe everybody feels this way at first. Maybe it’s just the season getting to me. I always did say springtime was made for leaving.” Yule did not answer but lay awake listening to the distant sighing of the sea, thinking.

  The following day he left the house early, while Ade and January were still sprawled in bed and the sky was not truly light but merely dreaming pale dreams. He was gone several hours, during which time he spoke to four people, spent the entirety of their modest savings, and signed three separate statements of debt and ownership. He returned to the stone cottage out of breath and beaming.

  “How was teaching?” Ade asked. (“Ba!” January added imperiously.)

  Yule plucked the baby from Ade’s arms, winked, and said, “Come with me.”

  They spiraled down into the City, past the square and the university, past his mother’s tattoo shop and the shoreline fish market, out onto the sun-warmed pier. Yule led her to the very end and stopped before a shapely little boat, larger and sleeker than The Key, with hastily stitched blessings in the sail for speed and adventure and freedom. There were supplies packed in canvas bags—nets and tarps, water barrels and smoked fish, dried apples, juniper wine, rope, a bright copper compass—and a tidy covered cabin at one end with a straw mattress inside.

  Ade was quiet for so long that Yule’s heart began to jitter and flutter with doubt. It is never advisable to make decisions before dawn or without consulting one’s spouse, and he had done both.

  “Is this ours?” Ade asked, finally.

  Yule swallowed. “Yes.”

  “How did you—why?”

  Yule lowered his voice and slipped his hand into hers so that their tattoos merged into a single black-inked page. “I will not be your leash, my love.” Ade looked at him then, with a soaring expression so full of love that Yule knew he had done something not merely kind but utterly vital.

  (Do I regret it? Would I take it back, if I could? Tell her to resign herself to home and hearth, to give up her wandering ways? It depends which weighs more: a life, or a soul.)

  January, who had been clapping her hands at a huddle of harassed gulls, grew bored. The ship caught her attention instead, and she made the squawking sound they normally interpreted as “Give me that immediately.”

  Ade pressed her forehead to her daughter’s. “I couldn’t agree more, darlin’.”

  Two mornings later the City of Nin was shrinking behind them and the eastern horizon was clean and bright ahead of them, and Ade was kneeling in the prow, wearing her own shapeless farmer’s coat and cradling her child close against her chest. Yule couldn’t be sure, but he thought she might be whispering to January, telling her how it felt to have waves rolling beneath your feet, see strange cities silhouetted at twilight and hear unknown languages singing through the air.

  They spent the following months like a small flock of birds on some circuitous migration of their own design, wheeling from City to City but never perching anywhere for long. Ade’s skin, which had grown milk-soft over winter, turned freckled and burnt again, and her hair became a bleached, knotted mess reminiscent of a horse’s mane. January turned a hot red-brown, like coals or cinnamon. Ade called her a “natural-born wanderer,” on the theory that any baby who learned to crawl on the gentle swaying of the deck boards, who bathed in salt water and used a compass as a teething toy, ought to be destined for a journeying sort of life.

  As spring deepened and the islands greened, Yule began to suspect their wandering was not entirely rudderless. They seemed to be heading east, however erratically and indirectly, and so he was not entirely surprised when Ade announced, one evening, that she missed her aunt Lizzie.

  “I just think she ought to know I’m not molding in a ditch somewheres, and I think she’d like to see a new Larson girl. And a man who stuck around.” What she did not say, but what Yule strongly suspected, was that she was homesick for the first time in her life. She spoke in the evenings about the smell of the Mississippi on a summer afternoon, the china-blue color of the sky above the hayfield. Something about having a child bends you back to your beginnings, as if you have been drawing a circle all your life and now are compelled to close it.

  They restocked at the City of Plumm, where Ade and Yule had first found one another the year before. A few marketgoers remembered them, and word spread that the merwoman had married the scholar and produced a (disappointingly normal) girl-child, and by the time they departed there was a small crowd on the beach. January alternated between screeching at them in delight and burying her face in her mother’s shoulder, while Ade supplied satisfyingly nonsensical answers to their questions (“Where are we headed? To a mountaintop in Colorado, if you want to know the truth”). By sunset it had become a sort of picnic, and they shoved off with the warm glow of bonfires against their backs. The crowd watched them go with expressions ranging from curiosity to hilarity to alarm, calling out warnings and well-wishes as the sky turned from pink silk to blue velvet above them.

  (I have thought often of these people in the years since, watching us sail away into the empty eastern sea. Did any of them come looking for us, when we failed to return? A curious trader or worried fisherman? What a slim hope to rest my heart upon.)

  Yule wasn’t accustomed to making such a fuss, but Ade laughed at him. “I’ve left a trail of faces just like that behind me in three dozen worlds. It’s good for ’em. Trying to explain things that can’t be explained is how you get stories and fairy tales, I figure.” She looked down at January, curled in her lap and chewing pensively on her own knuckle. “Our girl will be a fairy tale before she can walk, Jule. Isn’t that something? A natural-born wanderer if there ever was one.”

  Ade charted their course into the night, navigating by starlight and memory, with January sleeping against her chest. Yule watched from the cabin and drifted into dreams of his daughter as a grown woman: how she would speak six languages and outsail her father, how she would have her mother’s brave and feral heart, how she would never be root-bound to a single home but would instead dance between the worlds on a path of her own making. She would be strong and shining and powerfully, beautifully strange, raised in the light of ten thousand suns.

  Yule woke before dawn, when Ade crawled into the cabin and settled January between them. He fell back to sleep with his arm over both of them.

  The wind grew wilder and colder away from the City islands. They spent the following days cutting across some unseen current, waves slapping against their hull like warnings and their sail alternately stretched taut and luffing. Ade grinned into the salt spray like a hunting hawk with her quarry in sight. January crawled from stern to prow with a rope tied round her middle, rolling sometimes with the waves. Yule watched the horizon for Ade’s door.

  It appeared at dawn on the third day: two black crags emerging from the sea like dragon teeth, tilted toward one another with their stone tips nearly touching, so that a narrow passage of open sea la
y between them. Morning fog curled and steamed around the doorway, obscuring and then revealing it. Appears to avoid easy discovery, Yule wrote in his journal, which substantiates my initial premise.

  He tucked his notes away and stood in the prow with January bundled in his arms, her sleep-soft face peering out from the folds of Ade’s worn coat. The sea had gone still and silent; their prow slid across it like a pen across the page. The shadow of the stones fell over the boat. Just before they slid into the passageway, across the threshold and into the black maw of the space between worlds, Yule Ian turned back to look at his wife.

  Ade was crouched at the rudder, wide shoulders braced against the current, jaw set, eyes alive with fierce joy: in the thrill of diving through another doorway, perhaps, or in the glory of a life without borders or barriers, or in the simple pleasure of going home. Her hair was gathered in a loose honey-colored snarl over one shoulder, tangling with the winding lines of her tattoo. She’d changed since that first day Yule saw her in the cedar-strewn field more than a decade before—she was taller, broader, with merry lines gathering at the corners of her eyes and the first wisps of white hair curling at her temples—but no less luminous.

  Oh, January, she was so lovely.

  She looked up just as we crossed into the blackness and grinned her crooked, wild grin at the two of us.

  That smile, a white-gold smear against the mist, still hangs like a painted portrait before my eyes. It marks the last moment the world was whole, the last moment of our brief, fragile family. The last moment I saw Adelaide Larson.

  The blackness took us. The suffocating absence of the in-between. I closed my eyes against it, my coward’s heart trusting that Ade would see us through.

  And then a rending, splintering sound that wasn’t a sound, because there could be no sound in that airless place. My feet heaved beneath me and I thought wildly of sea monsters and leviathans, of vast tentacles encircling our ship—and then an enormous, sourceless pressure descended on us. It was as if the in-between itself were being bitten in half.