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