The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,66
scholar’s hands settle lightly on her shoulders. Ade pulled back very briefly to look at him—the red-edged dark of his skin, the very different smile now gleaming at her like a scimitar moon, the seriousness of his eyes on her face—then laughed, once, and pushed him downward.
Outside Yule’s room, the City of Plumm sank into a sweet evening stupor, its citizens caught in that quiet hour after dinner but before nightfall. Beyond Plumm the Amarico Sea shush-shushed itself against a thousand tarry hulls and rocky islands, and blew salt-heavy breezes through doors into other skies, and all the ten thousand worlds reeled in ten thousand twilit dances. But for the first time in their lives, neither Ade nor Yule cared about these other worlds, for their own universe was now contained in a narrow cot on a washerwoman’s second floor in the City of Plumm. It was some days before they emerged.
Once we have agreed that true love exists, we may consider its nature. It is not, as many misguided poets would have you believe, an event in and of itself; it is not something that happens, but something that simply is and always has been. One does not fall in love; one discovers it.
It was this archaeological process that so occupied Ade and Yule during their days in the washerwoman’s room. They discovered their love first through the strange and miraculous language of the body: through skin and cinnamon-sweat, the pink-edged creases left by rumpled sheets, the deltas of veins charting the backs of their hands. To Yule it was an entirely new language; to Ade it was like relearning a language she thought she already knew.
But soon spoken words filtered into the spaces between them. Through the underwater heat of the humid afternoons and into the relief of the cool nights, they told one another twelve years of stories. Ade told her story first, and it was a thrilling confabulation of starlit train rides and foot-worn journeys, of leaving and coming, of doors standing slantwise in the dusk, half-open. Yule found he couldn’t listen to her without a pen in his hand, as if she were an archival scroll sprung to life, which he had to document before she vanished.
She finished with the story of Mount Silverheels and the door to the sea, and only laughed when Yule pressed her for details and dates and specifics. “That’s exactly the kind of nonsense that ruins a good yarn. No, sir. About time you told me your story, don’t you think?”
He lay on his stomach on the cool stone floor, legs tangled in sheets and forearms smeary with ink. “My story is your story, I think.” He shrugged.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean… That day in the field changed me just as it changed you. Both of us have spent our lives seeking out the secrets of doors, haven’t we, following stories and myths.” Yule laid his head on his arm and looked up at the golden sprawl of her in his cot. “Except my quest involved much more time in libraries.”
He told her about his dreamy childhood and dedicated youth, his respected scholarly publications (which never directly asserted the existence of doors but merely presented them as mythological constructions offering valuable social insights), his unending quest to discover the truest nature of the doors between worlds.
“And what have you found out, Julian?” He reveled in the foreign, rolled-together way she said his name.
“Some,” he said, gesturing at the many volumes of A Comparative Study of Passages, Portals, and Entryways in World Mythology that lay stacked on the desk. “And not enough.”
She stood and leaned over his desk, perusing the angles of foreign words on the page. Her body looked strangely calicoed to Yule, her skin shifting dramatically from palest milk to burnt freckles. “All I know is there are these places—sort of thinned-out places, hard to see unless you’re doing a certain kind of looking—where you can go to somewhere else. All kinds of somewhere elses, some of them packed full of magic. And they always leak, so all you have to do is follow the stories. What else you got?”
Yule wondered if all scholars dedicated their lives to questions that other people had already casually answered, and if they found it vexing or pleasing. He suspected Ade would often be both. “Not very much,” he told her dryly. “There are, as you say, thinned-out places, where worlds bleed into one another. But I have this idea that this leakage