The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,56

away from the top of his head. His eyes on Yule were troubled.

“Sit, young Yule, sit. I’d like to talk to you about your future here at the university.” The master’s eyes fell on the book still clutched in Yule’s hands. “I will be blunt with you: we find your lack of focus and discipline of gravest concern. If you can’t settle yourself to a course of study, we will have to consider other avenues for you.”

Yule’s head tipped curiously to one side, like a cat offered an unfamiliar bit of food. “Other avenues, sir?”

“Activities better suited to your mind and temperament,” the master said.

Yule was silent for a moment but could think of nothing better suited to his temperament than spending sun-soaked afternoons curled beneath the olive trees reading books in long-forgotten languages. “What do you mean?”

The master, who had perhaps expected this conversation to involve more distressed pleading and less polite puzzlement, pressed his lips into a thin maroon line. “I mean you might apprentice elsewhere. Your mother, I am sure, would still train you as a tattooist, or you could act as a scribe for one of the word-workers on the east side, or even a merchant’s bookkeeper. I could speak to my wife, if you’d like.”

Only now did Yule’s expression begin to reflect the horror the master anticipated. He softened again. “Well, my boy, we haven’t reached that point just yet. Simply spend the next week in contemplation, consider your choices. And if you would like to stay here and take your scholar’s exams… find a path.”

Yule was dismissed. He found himself leaving the cool stone halls, striding through courtyards and spiraled streets, and then climbing the hills behind the City with the sun baking the back of his neck, without ever being fully aware of any particular destination. He was simply moving, fleeing the choice the master had given him.

To any other young boy hoping to join the ranks of the scholars, the choice would have been an easy one: either he proposed a line of research in Amarican history or ancient languages or religious philosophy, or he abandoned all such aspirations and worked as a humble scribe. But to Yule both paths were unspeakably bleak. Both of them would necessitate a narrowing of his boundless horizons, an end to his dreaming. The thought of either made him feel tight-chested, as if two great hands pressed on either side of his ribs.

He could not have known it then, but it was much the same way Ade felt on the days she ran out to the old hayfield to be alone with the sound of the riverboats and the wideness of the sky. Except that Ade had grown up with the harsh boundaries of her life always close at hand and had long since set her will against them; poor, charmed Yule had simply never known such rules existed before that day.

He staggered away from his discovery, past the scrubby hillside farms, past the last packed-earth roads, scrambling along animal trails and over rocky bluffs. Eventually even the animal trails disappeared into gnarled gray stone, and the wind carried faraway smells of salt-soaked wood. He had never been so high above his City, and he found he liked the way it dwindled below him until it was just a collection of distant white squares surrounded by the vastness of the sea.

His skin itched with wind-dried sweat and his palms were rubbed raw against the stones. He knew he ought to turn around, but his legs continued carrying him onward, upward, until he pulled himself over a ledge and saw it: an archway.

A thin gray curtain hung from the arch, fluttering in its own breeze like a witch’s skirt. A smell issued from it, like river water and mud and sunlight, nothing at all like the stony salt smell of Nin.

Once Yule saw the arch, he found his eyes reluctant to look anywhere else. It seemed almost to beckon him like a half-curled hand. He walked toward it with a mad feeling of hope flooding his limbs—an impossible, sourceless hope that there was something marvelous and strange on the other side of that curtain, waiting just for him.

He pulled aside the curtain and saw nothing but knotted grass and stone beyond it. He stepped beneath the arch and into a vast, swallowing darkness.

It pressed and sucked at him like tar, suffocating in its enormity, until he felt solid wood beneath his palms. He heaved against it in