The Ten Thousand Doors of January(54)

The house was a tired, settling sort of structure, half-buried in the hill behind it, which emitted a strong smell of goats on warm afternoons. It had only two rooms, a blackened oven occupied by several generations of mice, and a bed of straw-stuffed canvas. The mason who chiseled their names into the stone mantel thought privately it was a grim, lean home for a young family, but to Yule and Ade it was the most beautiful building ever to claim four walls and a rooftop. This is the mad Midas touch of true love, which transforms everything it touches to gold.

Winter crept over Nin stealthily, like a great white cat made of chill mists and sharp-edged winds. Ade was entirely unimpressed by it, and laughed at Yule as he wrapped woolen cloths around his chest and shivered by the bread oven. She went on long walks through the hills, dressed only in her summer things, and returned with wind-scoured cheeks.

“Won’t you take something warmer?” Yule pleaded one morning. “For his sake?” He snaked an arm around the gentle slope of her belly.

She laughed at him, pulling away. “Her sake, I think you mean.”

“Mm. Well, perhaps you’d wear—this?” he said, and pulled from behind his back a brownish, rough-looking canvas coat, as foreign to his world as it was familiar in hers.

She fell still. “You kept it? All these years?”

“Of course.” He whispered it into the salt-smelling tangle of hair at the back of her neck, and her walk that morning was somewhat delayed.

Spring in Nin was a season of saturation. Warm rains turned every trail to mud and every stone to moss. Their neat-folded clothes molded in their stacks and bread grew stale almost before it cooled. Ade spent more time down in the City with Yule, swaying up and down rain-slicked streets and practicing her abysmal Amarican on every passing citizen, or working with Yule’s father to scrub small, shelled creatures off the keels of his fishing boats. She took care of The Key, too, adjusting and rebuilding under Yule’s father’s direction until it sat a little more jauntily at the dock, its mast thinner and taller and its hull well sealed. She liked to watch it rocking in the waves and feel her baby rolling beneath her ribs. One day she’ll be yours, Ade told her, one day you and The Key will sail off into the sunset.

In midsummer, in the sun-bleached month Ade called July, Yule returned to their home to find Ade swearing and bent over, pearled sweat slicking her skin.

“Is it—he’s coming?”

“… She,” Ade panted, and she looked at Yule with the expression of a young soldier charging into her first battle. Yule gripped her hands, their tattoos twining like paired snakes up their wrists, and made the same desperate, silent prayers that every father makes in that moment: that his wife would live, that his child would be whole and healthy, that he would hold them both in his arms before dawn.

And, in the world’s most often-repeated and transcendent miracle, his prayers were granted.

Their daughter was born just before sunrise. She had skin the color of cedarwood and eyes like wheat.

They named her for an old, half-forgotten god from Ade’s own world, whom Yule had studied once in an ancient text preserved in Nin’s archives. He was a strange god, depicted in the faded manuscript with two faces staring both backward and forward. He presided not over one particular domain but over the places between—past and present, here and there, endings and beginnings—over doorways, in short.

But Ade thought Janus sounded too much like Jane, and she’d be damned if any daughter of hers would be named Jane. They named her after the god’s own month instead: January.


Oh my sweet daughter, my perfect January, I would beg for your forgiveness, but I lack the courage.

All I can ask for is your belief. Believe in doors and worlds and the Written. Believe most of all in our love for you—even if the only evidence we’ve left you is contained in the book you now hold.





The Door of Blood and Silver


When I was a child, breakfast was twenty minutes of absolute silence seated across from Miss 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.