The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,71

Wilda, who believed that conversation interfered with digestion and that jam and butter were only for holidays. After her departure I joined Mr. Locke for breakfast at his enormous polished dining table, where I did my best to impress him with my good posture and ladylike silence. Then Jane arrived and breakfasts became stolen coffee in a forgotten sitting room or jumbled attic room, where everything smelled of dust and sunlight and Bad could disperse fine bronze hairs on the armchairs without rebuke.

At Brattleboro, breakfast was the splat of porridge ladled into tin bowls, the pale filtering of light from high windows, the click of the attendants’ heels down the aisles.

Good behavior had granted me the right to join the murmuring flock of women who ate in the dining hall. I was seated that morning beside a mismatched pair of white women: one of them was old, narrow, and pursed-looking, with her hair drawn into a bun so severe it tugged her eyebrows into little arches; the other was young and wide, with moist gray eyes and chapped lips.

Both of them stared as I sat down. It was a familiar stare: a mistrustful, what-exactly-are-you stare that felt like a knife blade pressed to my flesh.

But not that morning. That morning my skin was shining plated armor, it was silver snakeskin, it was invulnerable; that morning I was the daughter of Yule Ian Scholar and Adelaide Lee Larson, and those eyes could not touch me.

“You going to eat that?” The gray-eyed girl had apparently determined I wasn’t so odd she couldn’t ask for my biscuit. It sat half-sunk in my porridge, a flattish lump the color of fish scales.

“No.”

She took the biscuit, sucking the dampness out of it. “I’m Abby,” she offered. “That’s Miss Margaret.” The older woman didn’t look at me, but her face pinched further inward.

“January Scaller,” I said politely, but I thought: January Scholar. Like my father before me. The thought was a lantern glow in my chest, a brightness so real I thought it must be leaking from me like light around a closed door.

Miss Margaret gave a faint, high-bred snort, perfectly calibrated to be mistaken for a sniff. I wondered what she’d been before she was a madwoman—an heiress? A banker’s wife? “And what kind of a name is that, exactly?” She still wasn’t looking at me but addressed her question to the air.

The lantern in my chest glowed brighter. “Mine.” All mine. Given to me by my own true parents, who loved one another, who loved me—who had abandoned me, somehow. The lantern glow dimmed a little, flickering in a sudden draft.

What happened to that little stone house on the hillside, to The Key, to my mother and father?

I almost didn’t want to know. I wanted to linger as long as I could in the fragile, fleeting past, in that brief happily-ever-after when I’d had a home and a family. Last night I’d stuffed The Ten Thousand Doors beneath my mattress rather than read another page and risk losing it all.

Abby was blinking her damp eyes into the sudden silence. “I got a telegram from my brother this morning. I’m going home on Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday, he said.” Margaret snorted again. Abby ignored her. “Do you think you’ll stay long?” she asked me.

No. There was too much to do—finish my damn book, find Jane, find my father, write it all right again—to stay locked up here like some tragic orphan girl in a Gothic novel. Plus, if I stayed past dark I was three quarters certain a vampire would climb through my window and eat me.

I had to find a way out. And wasn’t I the daughter of Yule and Ade, born beneath the sun of another world? Wasn’t I named after the god of in-betweens and passageways, the god of Doors? How could I be locked away, really? My very blood seemed a sort of key, an ink with which I could write myself a new story.

Ah. Blood.

A slow smile peeled my lips back over my teeth. “No, I don’t think so,” I answered breezily. “I’ve just got so much to do.” Abby nodded contentedly and launched into a long and unlikely story about the picnic she would have when she arrived back home, and how her brother really missed her very much, and it wasn’t his fault she was such a trying sister.

We left the hall in the same gray lines. I tried to make my shoulders curve inward and my back