Yule Ian felt a tremor in his breastbone, as if there were a red thread tied around it and someone had just yanked the other end. He considered, briefly and foolishly, simply telling the truth: that he sought to follow the skittering ant-trails of words into other worlds, to find a burnt-orange field lit with fireflies, to find a girl the color of wheat and milk.
Instead, he said, “True scholarship needs neither an origin nor a destination, good master. To seek new knowledge is its own motivation.” This was precisely the sort of lofty non-answer that pleased scholars best. They preened and cooed like doves around him, signing their names to his proposal with many extra flourishes. Only the master paused before signing, watching Yule the way a fisherman watches a darkening cloud on the horizon. But he, too, bent his head to the pages.
Yule left the hall that day with a formal blessing and a new name, both of which his mother tattooed in sinuous spirals around his left wrist. The words were still hot and stinging in his flesh the next day when Yule ascended the white-stone stairs that led to his favorite reading room. He sat at a yellow-wood desk overlooking the sea and opened the first sweet-smelling page of a new notebook. In uncharacteristically neat script, he wrote: Notes and Researches vol. 1: A Comparative Study of Passages, Portals, and Entryways in World Mythology, compiled by Yule Ian Scholar, 6908.
The title, as you have no doubt surmised, has since been revised.
Yule Ian Scholar spent a considerable portion of the next twelve years hunched over that same desk, alternately scribbling and reading, surrounded by so many towers of books that his study came to resemble a paper model of a city. He read collections of folktales and interviews with long-dead explorers, logbooks and holy texts from forgotten religions. He read them in all the languages of the Amarico Sea, and all the languages that happened to have fallen through the cracks between one world and the next over the previous several centuries. He read until there was little left to read, and he was obliged to take his researches “into the field,” as he airily informed his fellows. They imagined, in the comfortable manner of scholars, that “the field” merely referred to exotic archives in other Cities and wished him well.
They did not presume that Yule would cram his shoulder bag full of journals and dried fish, pay for passage on a series of trade ships and mail carriers, and march out into the wilds of foreign islands with the focused air of a hound following an animal trail. But the trails he followed were the invisible, glimmering tracks left by stories and myths, and instead of animals he hunted doors.
In time, he found a precious handful of them. None of them led to a cedar-smelling world with inhabitants the color of cotton, but he was not discouraged. Yule was stuffed with the kind of unblemished confidence that belongs only to the very young, who have never truly known the bitterness of failure, or felt the years of their lives trickling away from them like water from cupped palms. It seemed to him then that his success was inevitable.
(Of course, I know better now.)
He often liked to imagine the scene: Perhaps he would find her home after weeks of hard traveling, and she would look up from her work to see him striding toward her, and that wild smile would split her face. Perhaps they would meet in that same field and they would run toward one another through springtime-green grasses. Perhaps he would find her in some distant city he could scarcely imagine, or in a howling thunderstorm, or on the shores of an unnamed island.
With the baseless arrogance that so often plagues young men, Yule never once considered the possibility that Adelaide would not be waiting for him. He never imagined she might have spent the past decade flitting in and out of worlds with the instinctive ease of a gull swooping from ship to ship in the harbor, without a single book or record to guide her. He certainly never imagined she might build herself a rickety boat in the mountains and sail it onto the indigo waves of the Amarico Sea.
It was such an outlandish notion, in fact, that Yule almost dismissed it entirely when he heard a strange rumor on the docks of the City of Plumm. It came to him as most rumors do: as a drifting set of jokes and have-you-heards that assembled themselves slowly into a single story. The most often-repeated details seemed to be these: There had been a strange ship sighted off the eastern coast of the City of Plumm, with sails of eerie white canvas. One or two fisherwomen and traders had approached it, curious to see what species of madman would sail a ship without blessings stitched into the canvas, but they had all veered quickly away. The ship, they claimed, was sailed by a woman as white as paper. A ghost, perhaps, or some pale undersea creature come to the surface.
Yule shook his head at the superstitions of seafolk and returned to his borrowed room in the Plumm libraries. He had come following local legends of fire-spewing lizards that lived in the centers of volcanoes and only emerged once every one hundred thirteen years, and spent his evening in careful review of his notes. It wasn’t until he lay in his narrow cot, mind spiraling freely in and out of half dreams, that it occurred to him to wonder what color the ghost sailor’s hair was.
Yule returned to the docks early the next morning and interrogated several startled merchants before he extracted an answer. “It was as white as she was!” a sailor assured him in a spooked tone. “Or, well, I suppose it was more a kind of straw color. Yellowish.”
Yule swallowed, very hard. “And was she coming this way? Will she come to Plumm?”
The man could offer no certainties here, for who could guess at the desires of sea witches or ghosts? “But she’ll run straight into the eastern beaches if she keeps her course. Then we’ll see who’s telling tales, won’t we, Edon?” Here he abandoned the conversation in order to elbow his doubtful shipmate and engage in a spirited debate about whether merfolk wore clothes.
Yule was left standing alone on the dock, feeling as if the world had suddenly tilted on its axis. As if he were a boy again, reaching toward that thin curtain with un-inked hands.
He ran. He didn’t know the way down to the eastern beaches—a rocky, barren stretch of coast frequented only by odds-and-ends collectors and a certain breed of romantic poet—but a series of breathless questions and answers saw him perched on the edge of the sea well before midday. He curled his legs to his chest and stared out at the gold-topped waves, watching for the thin white line of a sail topping the horizon.
She did not arrive that day, or the next. Yule returned to the coast each morning and watched the sea until dusk. His mind, restless and driven for so many years, seemed to have settled in upon itself like a cat curled up to sleep. Waiting.
On the third day, a sail crept over the waves, full-bellied and perfectly white. Yule watched the ship lumbering closer, awkward and squarish in the water, until his eyes burned from salt and sun. There was a single figure aboard, facing the island with a challenging, prideful stance and a flaxen tangle of hair whipping around her head. Yule felt a hysterical desire to dance or scream or faint, but instead he simply stood and raised one arm into the air.
He saw her see him. A stillness fell over her, despite the lolling of the ship beneath her feet. Then she laughed—a wild, whooping laugh that rolled over the water to Yule like summertime thunder—removed several layers of dirt-colored clothing, and dove into the shallow waves beneath her ship without a trace of hesitation. Yule had half a second in which to wonder precisely what manner of half-wild madwoman he had been questing after for twelve years, and to doubt his sufficiency for the task, before he was splashing out to meet her, laughing and dragging his white scholar’s robes through the waves.
And so, in the late spring of the year 1893 in your world, which was the year 6920 in that one, Yule Ian Scholar and Adelaide Lee Larson found one another in the noonday tides surrounding the City of Plumm. They were never willingly parted again.
The Locked Door
I dreamed in gold and indigo.
I was skimming over a foreign ocean, following behind a white-sailed ship. There was a blurred figure standing at the prow, hair running bright behind her. Her features were smeary and uncertain but there was something so familiar in the shape she made against the horizon, so whole and wild and true, that my dreaming heart broke.
It was the feeling of tears sliding down my cheeks that woke me up. I lay on the floor of my room, stiff and chilled, my face aching from where it pressed against the corner of The Ten Thousand Doors. I didn’t care.
The coin. The silver coin I’d found as a girl, half-buried in the dust of a foreign world, the coin that now lay blood-warm in my palm—it was real. As real as the chill tile beneath my knees, as real as the tears cooling on my cheeks. I held it, and smelled the sea.
And if the coin was real… Then so was the rest of it. The City of Nin and its endless archives, Adelaide and her adventures in a hundred elsewheres, true love. Doors. Word-working?
I felt a shiver of reflexive doubt, heard an echo of Locke’s voice scoffing fanciful nonsense. But I’d already chosen to believe, once, and written open a locked door. Whatever this story was—this unlikely, impossible fantasy of Doors and words and other worlds—it was true. And, somehow, I was a part of it. And so were Mr. Locke, and the Society, and Jane, and maybe even my poor lost father.
I felt like a woman reading a mystery novel with every fourth line missing.
There’s really only one thing a person can do when they’re hip-deep in a mystery novel: keep reading.
