The Ten Thousand Doors of January(111)
Samuel wonders if perhaps this young woman is a bit mad. “Yes. But Mr. Locke has been away for months now—the house is empty, the staff have started to leave—there are rumors about his will, about his return—”
The woman flaps an unworried hand. “Oh, he won’t be returning. And his will has just recently been, ah, discovered.” Her smile is sly, mischievous, with a little curl of vengeance at its edges. “Once the lawyers get done signing things and siphoning off as much money as they can, the house will be mine. I think it’ll suit my purposes rather well, once I get rid of his ghastly collections.” Samuel tries to picture this wild young woman as the rightful heiress to Locke’s fortune, fails, and wonders if perhaps she is mad and a criminal. He wonders why this possibility doesn’t bother him more. “I’m thinking I ought to return his things to their proper owners, where possible, which will require a great deal of travel to some very strange and surprising places.” Her eyes spark and flare at the thought.
“We’ll go to East Africa first, of course. We’ll need Jane to show us the precise spot, but I imagine she’ll turn up—have you seen her, by chance?” She continues before Samuel can answer. “I’ll miss her terribly once she goes home, but I might be able to do something about that… There are so many doors in Locke House, after all—who’s to say where they lead?”
She squints her eyes like a woman redecorating her parlor. “One to Africa, one to Kentucky, maybe even one to a certain cabin on the north end of the lake, if you like. They’ll cost me, but it would be worth the price. And I’m getting stronger, I think.”
“Ah,” says Samuel.
That summer-bright smile returns, shining at him like a small sun. “Read fast, Samuel. We have work to do.” She reaches up, quite fearlessly, and touches his cheek. Her fingers are ember-warm against his cold skin, and she is very close to him now and her eyes are alight and the hole in his heart is howling, chattering, aching—
And he sees her face, just for a moment, peering down at him from the third story of Locke House. January. The word is a door creaking open in his chest, pouring light into that terrible absence.
She kisses him—a soft heat, so fleeting he isn’t sure whether he imagined it—and turns away. Samuel finds himself entirely unable to speak.
He watches the woman and her dog walk back down the alley. She stops and draws her finger through the air, as if she were writing something on the sky. The mist swirls and snakes around her like a great pale cat. It draws itself into a shape like an archway or a door.
She steps through it, and is gone.
Acknowledgments
Books, like babies, require villages. Through a combination of luck, privilege, and witchcraft, I happen to have the best village in the history of the world. This, I am afraid, is simple math.
I am grateful to my agent, Kate McKean, who answered every email with patience and grace, even the ones with bullet points and color coding and extraneous historical statistics. To Nivia Evans, an editor who knows the difference between doors and Doors, and whose chief business is building more of them for readers to walk through. And to Emily Byron, Ellen Wright, Andy Ball, Amy Schneider, and the entire Orbit/Redhook team, who know how to make those Doors shine on the shelf.
To Jonah Sutton-Morse, Ziv Wities, and Laura Blackwell, the first people to read this book who weren’t contractually bound to be kind through either blood or marriage, but who were kind anyway.
To the history departments of Berea College and the University of Vermont, who should not be held accountable for my fanciful use of fact, but who should probably be blamed for the footnotes.
To my mother, for giving us ten thousand worlds for the choosing—Middle Earth and Narnia, Tortall and Hyrule, Barrayar and Jeep and Pern—and my brothers for wandering through them with me. To my father for believing we could build our own, and for standing beside me in that overgrown hayfield in western Kentucky.
To Finn, who was born in the exact middle of this book, and Felix, who was born at the very end. Neither of them helped in the slightest way, except to trample around in my heart, toppling walls and letting in the light.
And to Nick, first and last and always. Because you can’t write your heart out until you’ve found it.