The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,80

be strong and shining and powerfully, beautifully strange, raised in the light of ten thousand suns.

Yule woke before dawn, when Ade crawled into the cabin and settled January between them. He fell back to sleep with his arm over both of them.

The wind grew wilder and colder away from the City islands. They spent the following days cutting across some unseen current, waves slapping against their hull like warnings and their sail alternately stretched taut and luffing. Ade grinned into the salt spray like a hunting hawk with her quarry in sight. January crawled from stern to prow with a rope tied round her middle, rolling sometimes with the waves. Yule watched the horizon for Ade’s door.

It appeared at dawn on the third day: two black crags emerging from the sea like dragon teeth, tilted toward one another with their stone tips nearly touching, so that a narrow passage of open sea lay between them. Morning fog curled and steamed around the doorway, obscuring and then revealing it. Appears to avoid easy discovery, Yule wrote in his journal, which substantiates my initial premise.

He tucked his notes away and stood in the prow with January bundled in his arms, her sleep-soft face peering out from the folds of Ade’s worn coat. The sea had gone still and silent; their prow slid across it like a pen across the page. The shadow of the stones fell over the boat. Just before they slid into the passageway, across the threshold and into the black maw of the space between worlds, Yule Ian turned back to look at his wife.

Ade was crouched at the rudder, wide shoulders braced against the current, jaw set, eyes alive with fierce joy: in the thrill of diving through another doorway, perhaps, or in the glory of a life without borders or barriers, or in the simple pleasure of going home. Her hair was gathered in a loose honey-colored snarl over one shoulder, tangling with the winding lines of her tattoo. She’d changed since that first day Yule saw her in the cedar-strewn field more than a decade before—she was taller, broader, with merry lines gathering at the corners of her eyes and the first wisps of white hair curling at her temples—but no less luminous.

Oh, January, she was so lovely.

She looked up just as we crossed into the blackness and grinned her crooked, wild grin at the two of us.

That smile, a white-gold smear against the mist, still hangs like a painted portrait before my eyes. It marks the last moment the world was whole, the last moment of our brief, fragile family. The last moment I saw Adelaide Larson.

The blackness took us. The suffocating absence of the in-between. I closed my eyes against it, my coward’s heart trusting that Ade would see us through.

And then a rending, splintering sound that wasn’t a sound, because there could be no sound in that airless place. My feet heaved beneath me and I thought wildly of sea monsters and leviathans, of vast tentacles encircling our ship—and then an enormous, sourceless pressure descended on us. It was as if the in-between itself were being bitten in half.

I was breathless, blind, panicked. But there was a fraction of a second—suspended now in my memory like an axis point around which all else turns—when I might have chosen differently. I might have dived back toward the stern, toward Ade. I might have died, or been damned to unravel in the endless in-between, but at least I would have done so with Adelaide at my side.

Instead, I planted my feet and curled myself around you.

I think of this moment often. I do not regret it, January, not even at my darkest and most despairing.

The moment passed. The crushing intensified, until you and I were flattened against the groaning hull, our lungs empty and our skulls aching. My arms were a vise around you and I was no longer sure whether I was protecting you or crushing you—my eyes pressed inward—my teeth ground against one another—

Air. Thin, frost-sharp, smelling of pine and snow. We burst through some unseen barrier and our ship scudded against the ground. We were pitched forward, smashed against the cold earth of another world.

Here my memories grow reeling and confused, blinking in and out like a bad bulb in a projector; I believe my head knocked against some stone or flying timber. I remember you, tensed and screaming in my arms and therefore impossibly, wonderfully alive. I remember staggering upright, spinning