The Ten Thousand Doors of January(87)

I remember kneeling beside her, clutching at the long, gaping edges of the cut, seeing my own hands blacken with blood. I remember Jane’s expression of distant surprise.

I remember Samuel crouching on her other side, his guttural hiss—“Bastard”—and the sight of his back disappearing through the curtain after Ilvane.

And then there were other hands pressing beside mine—competent, probing hands—and a clean, crushed-mint smell. “S’all right, child, just give me some room.” I drew back to let the gray-haired woman bend closer over Jane, an old-fashioned lantern sputtering beside her. I held my blood-gummed hands awkwardly away from my body, as if hoping someone would tell them what to do.

The woman called for clean cotton and boiled water and someone skittered to obey. Her voice was so calm, so unhurried, that the tiniest curl of hope unwound in my stomach.

“Is she—will she—” My voice raw-sounding, like something recently peeled.

The woman cast a harassed eye over her shoulder. “All this is just mess and show, girl. He didn’t get anything she can’t do without.” I blinked at her and she softened. “She’ll be fine, long as we can keep infection out.”

I went slack with relief, muscles unspooling like cut wires. I pushed sticky palms into my eyes, pressing back the hysterical tears that sizzled just below the surface, and thought: She’s alive. I didn’t kill her.

I stayed that way, half-slumped over my knees and weak with relief, until the feathered curtain rustled again. It was Samuel, and I knew from the grim line of his mouth that Mr. Ilvane had escaped back through the Door.

Samuel did not look at the people now filling the square with fearful whispers, or at the ruby gleam of blood in the lantern light. He strode straight to me, feet bare and shirt half-buttoned, eyes roiling with some dark emotion. It was only when he stood directly above me that I knew what it was: fear.

“I followed him to the tree,” he said softly. “I tried to follow him farther, tried to go through after him. But”—and I knew what he would say, knew it as surely as if I’d stood beside him on that empty plain—“there was nothing, no way through.”

Samuel swallowed. “The door is closed.”





The Lonely Door


Samuel had spoken softly, his voice a tired rasp, but tragedy has its own terrible volume. It rolls and cracks, shakes the ground beneath your feet, lingers in the air like summer thunder.

The Arcadians gathered in the courtyard fell silent, their eyes turned toward us in a dozen shades of disbelief and terror. The quiet stretched, taut as piano wire, until one man issued a strangled curse. Then came a rising clamor of panicked voices.

“What will we do?”

“My babies, my babies need—”

“We’ll starve, every last one of us.”

An infant woke and wailed in his mother’s arms, and she gazed down at his crumpled face in listless despair. Then a wide form shouldered past her and moved to the front of the crowd. Molly Neptune’s stovepipe hat was missing and the upward glow of the lantern painted shadowed hollows over her face.

She held up two hands. “Enough. If the way is closed, we’ll find another way through. We’ll find another way to survive. Aren’t all of us here survivors, one way or the other?” She surveyed them with a kind of fierce love, willing strength into their shaking limbs. “But not tonight. Tonight we’ll rest. Tomorrow, we’ll plan.”

I found myself leaning into the rumble of her voice, letting it beat back the tide of guilt and horror that threatened to swallow me—until her eyes met mine, and I watched all the warmth flow out of her face like dye running in the rain. It left nothing behind but bitter regret. Regret that she’d ever seen my father, perhaps, or ever offered Arcadia as a refuge; regret that she’d let me set foot in her fragile kingdom with monsters on my heels.

She turned away and addressed the woman still bent over Jane. “Will she live, Iris?”

Iris ducked her head. “Likely, ma’am. Except it’s deep in some places, and messy, and…” I saw the pink dart of her tongue as she moistened her lips, the fearful flick of her eyes toward the feathered curtain. “And we’re out of iodine. Even salt water might do the job, but we, we can’t…” Her voice trailed to a racked whisper.

Molly Neptune rested a hand gently on her shoulder and shook her head. “No use worrying now. You’ll do the best you can for her, and that’s it.” She called for two young men to help roll Jane onto a sheet and carry her into a nearby house. Iris trailed behind them, hands hanging bloody and empty at her sides.

Molly’s eyes raked over us once more and her lips rippled as if she wanted to say something, but she turned away and followed the last trailing group of Arcadians back up the dark streets. Only now, when her people couldn’t see her, did she allow her shoulders to bow in defeat.

I watched her until she disappeared into the depths of her doomed, beautiful city. I wondered how long they could last without supplies from their home world, and if a second city would die here among the bones of the first.

I closed my eyes against the weight of guilt settling on my shoulders, heard the click of claws and the scuff of worn shoes as Samuel and Bad approached. They settled on either side of me, warm and constant as a pair of suns. What would happen to them, trapped in this starved world? I pictured Bad with sharp ribs and dull fur; Samuel with the ember-glow gone dull in his eyes. Jane might be swallowed by fever before she could even feel the desperate bite of hunger in her belly.