Only now did Yule’s expression begin to reflect the horror the master anticipated. He softened again. “Well, my boy, we haven’t reached that point just yet. Simply spend the next week in contemplation, consider your choices. And if you would like to stay here and take your scholar’s exams… find a path.”
Yule was dismissed. He found himself leaving the cool stone halls, striding through courtyards and spiraled streets, and then climbing the hills behind the City with the sun baking the back of his neck, without ever being fully aware of any particular destination. He was simply moving, fleeing the choice the master had given him.
To any other young boy hoping to join the ranks of the scholars, the choice would have been an easy one: either he proposed a line of research in Amarican history or ancient languages or religious philosophy, or he abandoned all such aspirations and worked as a humble scribe. But to Yule both paths were unspeakably bleak. Both of them would necessitate a narrowing of his boundless horizons, an end to his dreaming. The thought of either made him feel tight-chested, as if two great hands pressed on either side of his ribs.
He could not have known it then, but it was much the same way Ade felt on the days she ran out to the old hayfield to be alone with the sound of the riverboats and the wideness of the sky. Except that Ade had grown up with the harsh boundaries of her life always close at hand and had long since set her will against them; poor, charmed Yule had simply never known such rules existed before that day.
He staggered away from his discovery, past the scrubby hillside farms, past the last packed-earth roads, scrambling along animal trails and over rocky bluffs. Eventually even the animal trails disappeared into gnarled gray stone, and the wind carried faraway smells of salt-soaked wood. He had never been so high above his City, and he found he liked the way it dwindled below him until it was just a collection of distant white squares surrounded by the vastness of the sea.
His skin itched with wind-dried sweat and his palms were rubbed raw against the stones. He knew he ought to turn around, but his legs continued carrying him onward, upward, until he pulled himself over a ledge and saw it: an archway.
A thin gray curtain hung from the arch, fluttering in its own breeze like a witch’s skirt. A smell issued from it, like river water and mud and sunlight, nothing at all like the stony salt smell of Nin.
Once Yule saw the arch, he found his eyes reluctant to look anywhere else. It seemed almost to beckon him like a half-curled hand. He walked toward it with a mad feeling of hope flooding his limbs—an impossible, sourceless hope that there was something marvelous and strange on the other side of that curtain, waiting just for him.
He pulled aside the curtain and saw nothing but knotted grass and stone beyond it. He stepped beneath the arch and into a vast, swallowing darkness.
It pressed and sucked at him like tar, suffocating in its enormity, until he felt solid wood beneath his palms. He heaved against it in desperation and still-burning hope—felt it grind against long-undisturbed dirt—and then it was open, and Yule stepped out into burnt-orange grasses beneath an eggshell sky. He had only stood for a few moments, openmouthed in the strange air of another world, when she came striding toward him across the field. A young woman the color of milk and honeyed wheat.
I will not repeat the tale of that meeting a second time. You’ve already heard how the two young persons sat together in the early-fall chill and told their impossible truths of here and elsewhere. How they spoke in a long-dead language preserved only in a few ancient texts in Nin’s archives, which Yule had studied for the sheer pleasure of new syllables dancing on his tongue. How it did not feel like a meeting of two people so much as a collision of two planets, as if both of them had swung out of their orbits and hurtled into one another. How they kissed, and how the fireflies pulsed around them.
How doomed and brief their meeting was.
Yule spent the next three days in a state of dazed elation. The scholars grew worried that his mind had been subtly damaged in some fall or accident; his mother and father, who were more familiar with the maladies of young boys, worried that he had fallen in love. Yule himself offered no explanations but only smiled beatifically and hummed out-of-key versions of old ballads about famous lovers and sailing ships.
He returned to the curtained arch on the third day just as, on the other side of an endless darkness, Ade returned to the cabin in the hayfield. You know what awaited him, of course: bitterest disappointment. Instead of a magical door leading to a foreign land, Yule found nothing but piled stones on a hilltop and a gray curtain hanging still and rotten as the skin of some dead creature. It did not lead anywhere at all, no matter how furiously he cursed it.
Eventually Yule simply sat and waited, hoping the girl might find her way through to him. She did not. You may picture the two of them—Ade waiting in the deepening night of the overgrown field with hope guttering like an overspent candle in her chest, Yule perched on the hilltop with his skinny arms held around his knees—almost like figures on either side of a mirror. Except instead of cool glass between them it was the vastness between worlds.
Yule watched constellations creep over the horizon, reading the familiar words pricked in starlight: Ships-Heaven-Sent, Blessings- of-Summer, Scholar’s-Humility. They slid over him like pages from some great book, familiar as his own name. He thought of Ade, waiting in her separate darkness, and wondered what her stars told her.
He stood. He rubbed his thumb across the silver piece he’d brought with him—thinking he might show it to her as proof of his own world—and let it fall to earth. He didn’t know if it was an offering or a casting-away, but he knew he didn’t want to carry it any longer, to feel the knowing, silver-stamped eyes of the City Founder watching him.10 He turned away then, and did not return again to the stone arch.
But doors, you will recall, are change.
The Yule who left the arch that night was therefore a somewhat different Yule from the one who had found it three days previously. Something new thudded in his chest alongside his heart, as if a separate organ had suddenly come pumping to life. It had an urgent, driving rhythm, which Yule could not fail to notice even through his misery. He pondered it as he lay in his narrow bed that night, listening to the disgruntled sounds of his siblings falling back to sleep after being woken by his return. It did not feel like despair, or loss, or loneliness. It reminded him most of the feeling he had sometimes in the archives when a scrap of writing written on ancient vellum pulled him onward, deeper, until he lost himself in a spiraling trail of stories, but even that was nothing compared to the thrumming urgency he now felt. He fell asleep worrying vaguely that he’d developed some sort of murmur in his heart.
The following morning he recognized it as something much more serious: the discovery of his life’s purpose.
He lay in bed for several more minutes, contemplating the immensity of the task before him, then rose and dressed at such speed that his siblings caught only a glimpse of his white robes whipping out the door. He went straight to the master scholar’s office and asked to take his exams immediately. The master reminded him gently that aspiring scholars were expected to present thorough and prepared proposals for their future studies, which convinced their fellows of their seriousness, dedication, and ability. He suggested that Yule take the necessary time to compile bibliographies and collect his sources, perhaps consult with more advanced scholars.