The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,59
to a cedar-smelling world with inhabitants the color of cotton, but he was not discouraged. Yule was stuffed with the kind of unblemished confidence that belongs only to the very young, who have never truly known the bitterness of failure, or felt the years of their lives trickling away from them like water from cupped palms. It seemed to him then that his success was inevitable.
(Of course, I know better now.)
He often liked to imagine the scene: Perhaps he would find her home after weeks of hard traveling, and she would look up from her work to see him striding toward her, and that wild smile would split her face. Perhaps they would meet in that same field and they would run toward one another through springtime-green grasses. Perhaps he would find her in some distant city he could scarcely imagine, or in a howling thunderstorm, or on the shores of an unnamed island.
With the baseless arrogance that so often plagues young men, Yule never once considered the possibility that Adelaide would not be waiting for him. He never imagined she might have spent the past decade flitting in and out of worlds with the instinctive ease of a gull swooping from ship to ship in the harbor, without a single book or record to guide her. He certainly never imagined she might build herself a rickety boat in the mountains and sail it onto the indigo waves of the Amarico Sea.
It was such an outlandish notion, in fact, that Yule almost dismissed it entirely when he heard a strange rumor on the docks of the City of Plumm. It came to him as most rumors do: as a drifting set of jokes and have-you-heards that assembled themselves slowly into a single story. The most often-repeated details seemed to be these: There had been a strange ship sighted off the eastern coast of the City of Plumm, with sails of eerie white canvas. One or two fisherwomen and traders had approached it, curious to see what species of madman would sail a ship without blessings stitched into the canvas, but they had all veered quickly away. The ship, they claimed, was sailed by a woman as white as paper. A ghost, perhaps, or some pale undersea creature come to the surface.
Yule shook his head at the superstitions of seafolk and returned to his borrowed room in the Plumm libraries. He had come following local legends of fire-spewing lizards that lived in the centers of volcanoes and only emerged once every one hundred thirteen years, and spent his evening in careful review of his notes. It wasn’t until he lay in his narrow cot, mind spiraling freely in and out of half dreams, that it occurred to him to wonder what color the ghost sailor’s hair was.
Yule returned to the docks early the next morning and interrogated several startled merchants before he extracted an answer. “It was as white as she was!” a sailor assured him in a spooked tone. “Or, well, I suppose it was more a kind of straw color. Yellowish.”
Yule swallowed, very hard. “And was she coming this way? Will she come to Plumm?”
The man could offer no certainties here, for who could guess at the desires of sea witches or ghosts? “But she’ll run straight into the eastern beaches if she keeps her course. Then we’ll see who’s telling tales, won’t we, Edon?” Here he abandoned the conversation in order to elbow his doubtful shipmate and engage in a spirited debate about whether merfolk wore clothes.
Yule was left standing alone on the dock, feeling as if the world had suddenly tilted on its axis. As if he were a boy again, reaching toward that thin curtain with un-inked hands.
He ran. He didn’t know the way down to the eastern beaches—a rocky, barren stretch of coast frequented only by odds-and-ends collectors and a certain breed of romantic poet—but a series of breathless questions and answers saw him perched on the edge of the sea well before midday. He curled his legs to his chest and stared out at the gold-topped waves, watching for the thin white line of a sail topping the horizon.
She did not arrive that day, or the next. Yule returned to the coast each morning and watched the sea until dusk. His mind, restless and driven for so many years, seemed to have settled in upon itself like a cat curled up to sleep. Waiting.
On the third day, a sail crept over the waves, full-bellied