I turned away. It was not an easy turning-away; a part of me still wanted to reach my hand back to him, to save him; another part of me wanted to watch him vanish, piece by piece, to pay for every betrayal and every lie. But I felt my home world still waiting for me, certain and steady as the North Star, and I could not go toward it if I were still looking back.
My bare foot found solid, warm stone.
I knew nothing but sunlight, and the smell of the sea.
It was sunset when I opened my eyes. I could see the sun sinking like a squat red coal into the western ocean. Everything was soft around the edges, lit by a pinkish-gold glow that reminded me for a sleepy moment of the quilt my father had given me when I was a girl. Oh, Father, I miss you.
I must have sighed aloud, because there was a smallish explosion beside me that was Bad springing to his feet as if fired from a dog-sized cannon. He landed awkwardly on his bad leg, yipped, and contented himself with wriggling all over and burying his face in my neck.
I threw my arms around him, or tried to—only my right arm obeyed with any real enthusiasm. The left one just sort of flopped over, fishlike, and lay still. It was at that moment, as I stared in mild dismay at my disobedient arm, that the politely waiting pain cleared its throat, stepped forward, and introduced itself.
Damn, I thought, cogently. Then, after another few heartbeats, during which I could feel every fiber of torn muscle in my shoulder and every shuddering bone in my left hip, I revised it: “Shit.”
It actually helped a little; Mr. Locke had forbidden me to swear when I was thirteen and he’d caught me telling the new kitchen boy to keep his goddamned hands to himself. I wondered how long it would take before I stopped discovering these petty little laws that’d governed my life, and whether I would only reveal them by breaking them. It was a rather cheerful thought.
And then I wondered how long it would take before I stopped seeing Mr. Locke devoured by incarnate darkness, and sobered a little.
I pulled myself to my feet—slowly and painfully and with lots more swearing—and tucked The Ten Thousand Doors beneath my arm. The city lay below me. How did I describe it to you before? A world of salt water and stone. Buildings standing in whitewashed spirals, free of coal smoke and grit. A forest of masts and sails along the coast. It was all still there, and nearly unchanged. (I wonder, now, what the closing of the Doors has meant to the other worlds, not just my own familiar one.)
“Shall we?” I murmured to Bad. He led the way down the craggy hillside, away from the stone archway and raggedy curtain I’d come through, away from the sunbaked bloodstains flaking and cracking on the ground, and down into the City of Nin.
It was fully dusk by the time our feet hit cobbled city street. Honey-colored lamplight oozed from the windows and dinnertime conversations swooped swallowlike through the air above me. The language had a familiar rise-and-fall rhythm to it, a languorous roll that reminded me of my father’s voice. The few passersby sort of looked like him, too—reddish-dark, black-eyed, with spirals of ink winding up their forearms. I’d grown up thinking of my father as fundamentally foreign, eccentric, unlike anyone else; now I saw he was just a man very far from home.
Judging from the staring and muttering and hurrying-past people were doing, I was still out of place, not quite right. I wondered if I would always be wrong-colored and in-between, no matter where I went, before recalling that I was wearing foreign clothing in a state of considerable disrepair and that Bad I were both limping, dirty, and bleeding.
I wound vaguely north, watching new stars wink mischievously at me in their strange constellations. I didn’t, in fact, know where I was going—a stone house on the high northern hillside was imprecise, as addresses go—but this seemed a small, surmountable sort of obstacle.
I slumped against a white-stone wall and dug Mr. Ilvane’s coppery-green compass out of my sack. I held it tight in my palm and thought of my father. The needle whirled westward, pointing straight out into the calm gray sea. I tried again, picturing instead a golden evening seventeen years ago when I’d lain with my mother on a sun-soaked quilt, when I had a home and a future and parents who loved me. The needle hesitated, jittering beneath the glass, and pointed not-quite-north.
I followed it.
I found a dirt track that seemed to align well with my little copper needle and followed it toward the straw-colored sickle of the moon. It was a well-traveled path but steep, and I paused sometimes to let the pain stomp its feet and yell in my ears, before shushing it and continuing on.
More stars emerged, like shimmering loops of writing in the sky. And then the low, shadowed bulk of a house appeared ahead of us. My heart—and I don’t think any heart has ever been so exhausted and wrung-dry in the history of the world—stuttered to life in my chest.
The window lit with flickering light, and two figures stood illuminated: a man, tall but hunched with age, hair sprouting in white tufts around his skull, and an old woman with a kerchief around her hair and arms black to the shoulder with ink.
Neither of them was my father or my mother. Of course. You don’t really know how high your hopes have gotten until you watch them plummeting earthward.
A logical person would have turned around then, returned to the city proper and begged or mimed their way into a warm meal and a place to sleep and some medical attention. They certainly wouldn’t have staggered onward, tears sliding silently down their cheeks. They wouldn’t have stood before the door-that-wasn’t-theirs, a graying, salt-preserved slab of wood with an iron hook for a knob, and raised their good hand to knock.
And when an old woman answered, her seamed face tilted questioningly upward, eyes milky and squinting, they wouldn’t have burst into tear-slurred speech. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am, it’s just I was wondering if you know the man who used to live here. Only I’ve come a really long way and I wanted—I wanted to see him. Julian was his name. Yule Ian, I mean—”
I saw the old woman’s mouth press into a thin line, like a sutured wound. She shook her head. “No.” Then, almost angrily, “Who are you, to ask about my Yule, eh? We have not seen him for twenty years, almost.”
I wanted to wail at the moon or curl up on the doorstep and weep like a little lost child. My father had never come home and neither had my mother, and what was broken would never be mended; the old woman’s words were a final, cruel verdict.
They were also, rather mysteriously, in English.
A dangerous, foolish tingling began in my limbs. How did she know a language from my world? Had someone taught her? And had I gone entirely insane, or did she and I share the same cheekbones, perhaps the same tilt to our shoulders—but then the crowd of questions fell silent.
There was someone else in the little stone house on the hillside. Beside me, Bad’s ears stood up straight.
I caught a flash of movement behind the old woman’s lamplit silhouette—a white-gold glimmer in the darkness, like summer wheat—and then there was another woman standing in the doorway.
Now, with the calming benefit of time and familiarity, I can describe her to you easily: a tired, tough-looking woman with yellow hair gone gray at the temples, skin so freckled and burnt it could almost pass for native, and the sort of strong, unbeautiful features novelists call arresting.
But in that moment, standing on the threshold of the home I was born in, with a squeezing in my chest as if someone had reached behind my ribs and seized my heart, I looked at her all out of order. Her hands: thick-fingered, scored and hashed with shiny white scars, with three fingernails missing entirely. Her arms: stringy muscle wrapped in black ink. Her eyes: soft, dreamer’s blue. Her nose, her square jaw, her level brows: all just like mine.
