The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,79
or a soul.)
January, who had been clapping her hands at a huddle of harassed gulls, grew bored. The ship caught her attention instead, and she made the squawking sound they normally interpreted as “Give me that immediately.”
Ade pressed her forehead to her daughter’s. “I couldn’t agree more, darlin’.”
Two mornings later the City of Nin was shrinking behind them and the eastern horizon was clean and bright ahead of them, and Ade was kneeling in the prow, wearing her own shapeless farmer’s coat and cradling her child close against her chest. Yule couldn’t be sure, but he thought she might be whispering to January, telling her how it felt to have waves rolling beneath your feet, see strange cities silhouetted at twilight and hear unknown languages singing through the air.
They spent the following months like a small flock of birds on some circuitous migration of their own design, wheeling from City to City but never perching anywhere for long. Ade’s skin, which had grown milk-soft over winter, turned freckled and burnt again, and her hair became a bleached, knotted mess reminiscent of a horse’s mane. January turned a hot red-brown, like coals or cinnamon. Ade called her a “natural-born wanderer,” on the theory that any baby who learned to crawl on the gentle swaying of the deck boards, who bathed in salt water and used a compass as a teething toy, ought to be destined for a journeying sort of life.
As spring deepened and the islands greened, Yule began to suspect their wandering was not entirely rudderless. They seemed to be heading east, however erratically and indirectly, and so he was not entirely surprised when Ade announced, one evening, that she missed her aunt Lizzie.
“I just think she ought to know I’m not molding in a ditch somewheres, and I think she’d like to see a new Larson girl. And a man who stuck around.” What she did not say, but what Yule strongly suspected, was that she was homesick for the first time in her life. She spoke in the evenings about the smell of the Mississippi on a summer afternoon, the china-blue color of the sky above the hayfield. Something about having a child bends you back to your beginnings, as if you have been drawing a circle all your life and now are compelled to close it.
They restocked at the City of Plumm, where Ade and Yule had first found one another the year before. A few marketgoers remembered them, and word spread that the merwoman had married the scholar and produced a (disappointingly normal) girl-child, and by the time they departed there was a small crowd on the beach. January alternated between screeching at them in delight and burying her face in her mother’s shoulder, while Ade supplied satisfyingly nonsensical answers to their questions (“Where are we headed? To a mountaintop in Colorado, if you want to know the truth”). By sunset it had become a sort of picnic, and they shoved off with the warm glow of bonfires against their backs. The crowd watched them go with expressions ranging from curiosity to hilarity to alarm, calling out warnings and well-wishes as the sky turned from pink silk to blue velvet above them.
(I have thought often of these people in the years since, watching us sail away into the empty eastern sea. Did any of them come looking for us, when we failed to return? A curious trader or worried fisherman? What a slim hope to rest my heart upon.)
Yule wasn’t accustomed to making such a fuss, but Ade laughed at him. “I’ve left a trail of faces just like that behind me in three dozen worlds. It’s good for ’em. Trying to explain things that can’t be explained is how you get stories and fairy tales, I figure.” She looked down at January, curled in her lap and chewing pensively on her own knuckle. “Our girl will be a fairy tale before she can walk, Jule. Isn’t that something? A natural-born wanderer if there ever was one.”
Ade charted their course into the night, navigating by starlight and memory, with January sleeping against her chest. Yule watched from the cabin and drifted into dreams of his daughter as a grown woman: how she would speak six languages and outsail her father, how she would have her mother’s brave and feral heart, how she would never be root-bound to a single home but would instead dance between the worlds on a path of her own making. She would