The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,138

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