Yule wondered if all scholars dedicated their lives to questions that other people had already casually answered, and if they found it vexing or pleasing. He suspected Ade would often be both. “Not very much,” he told her dryly. “There are, as you say, thinned-out places, where worlds bleed into one another. But I have this idea that this leakage is somehow… important. Vital, even.”
Doors, he told her, are change, and change is a dangerous necessity. Doors are revolutions and upheavals, uncertainties and mysteries, axis points around which entire worlds can be turned. They are the beginnings and endings of every true story, the passages between that lead to adventures and madness and—here he smiled—even love. Without doors the worlds would grow stagnant, calcified, storyless.
He ended with a scholar’s solemnity. “But I don’t know where the doors come from in the first place. Have they always been there, or were they created? By who, and how? It might cost a word-worker her life to split the world open like that! Although—perhaps not, if the worlds are already hovering so close together. Perhaps it is more like drawing aside a veil, or opening a window. But they would first need to be persuaded that it was even possible, and I doubt—”
“Why’s it matter so much where they came from?” Ade had lain down beside him while he spoke, watching him with a mix of admiration and levity.
“Because they seem so fragile. So easily closed. And if they can be destroyed but not created, won’t there be fewer and fewer doors over the years? The thought… haunted me. I thought I might never find you.” The weight of twelve years of fruitless searching pressed down on the two of them.
Ade flung an arm and leg over Yule’s back. “That doesn’t matter anymore. I found you anyhow, and there won’t be any more closed doors for us.” She said it so fiercely and fearlessly, a tigress growl rumbling in her ribs, that Yule believed her.
It took another generous handful of days before Ade and Yule could simply lie still and quiet beside one another in the cot, without the frenzied need to know one another. They had unearthed the rough shape of the love between them and were content to let the rest of it proceed more sedately, unfurling like an endless sea before their prow.
To Ade, it was a kind of homecoming: after years of rootless wandering, years of drifting down the subtle trails of stories with a restless ache in her heart, she found herself at last content to be still. To Yule, it was a departure. He had lived his life within the comforting confines of research and scholarship, driven to pursue his studies with single-minded fervor, rarely looking up toward the horizon. But now he found himself adrift, unmoored—what did his studies matter now? What were the mysteries of doors compared to the far grander mystery of Ade’s long white heat stretched beside him?
“What do we do now?” he asked her one morning.
Ade had been half drowsing in the pink-pearl light of dawn. The worry in his voice made her laugh. “Anything we like, Julian. You could show me your world, for starters.”
“All right.” Yule was quiet for several long breaths. “There’s something I would like to do, first.” He rose and scrabbled through his desk for a pen and a thick, jellied bottle of ink. He crouched beside the cot and stretched her left arm straight against the sheets. “When something happens, something important, we write it down. If it is something important that everyone ought to know, we write it down here.” He tapped the softness of her inner wrist.
“And what are you going to write?”
His eyes, when they met hers, went solemn and dark as underground pools. Ade felt a slight tremor in her belly. “I would like to write: On this day in the summer of 6920, Adelaide Lee Larson and Yule Ian Scholar found love, and did swear to keep it eternally.” He swallowed. “If you do not object, I mean. Written this way, in this ink, the words will last some weeks but they can still be washed away. It is only a kind of promise.”
Ade’s heart thrummed. “What happens if I decide I don’t want to wash it off?”
Silently, Yule held up his left arm. Tattoos wound around it in tight, dark lines, naming him Scholar and listing his most prestigious publications. Ade looked at the markings very seriously for a moment, like a woman seeing her future and giving herself one last chance to turn away, then met Yule’s gaze. “Why bother with the pen, then. Where can we get ourselves tattooed?”
A great bubble of giddy relief burst in Yule’s chest. He laughed, and she kissed him, and when they left the washerwoman’s home that afternoon there was fresh black ink circling their entwined hands, spelling out their futures for the world to see.
They spent the following hours shopping in Plumm’s bright-awninged marketplace. Yule negotiated for dried fruits and oats in short, practical phrases of Amarican-common while Ade gathered a trail of fascinated onlookers like a ship’s wake behind them. There were giggles and shrieks from skinny-armed children, pitying mutters from market women, rumbling gossip from the fishers who’d heard rumors of the ghost woman.
Yule hired a wobbly cart to pull their supplies down to the eastern beach, where Ade’s fat little ship still bobbed in the bay. They spent the night tucked beneath a spare scrap of canvas in the boat bottom, listening to the sluicing of waves against the pine-tarred hull and watching the night wheel over them like a dancer’s star-studded skirt. Ade nestled into the softness of his arm and thought about happily-ever-afters and sweet-tasting endings. Yule thought about once-upon-a-times and bold beginnings.
At dawn they departed. When asked what she wanted to see, Ade replied, “Everything,” so Yule obediently charted a course toward everything. They docked first at the City of Sissly, where Ade could admire the pink domes of the local chapels and taste the pepper-bite of fresh gwanna fruit. Then they stayed three nights on the abandoned Island of Tho, where the ruins of a failed City loomed like broken gray teeth against the sun, before skipping along a string of low, sand-scoured islands too small to be named. They walked the streets of the City of Yef and slept in the cool grottoes of the City of Jungil, and walked across the famed bridge connecting the twin Cities of Iyo and Ivo. They sailed north and west, following the summer currents out of the sweating heat of the equator, and saw Cities so distant even Yule had only read their names on his charts.
Yule’s scholar’s stipend, meant for the renting of small rooms and the eating of plain meals, was not so generous that they could supply themselves endlessly from City markets. Instead Yule fumbled to recall his father’s long-ago lessons in knot tying and hook setting, and fished for their dinner. Ade cut and bent thin saplings and built them a kind of arched bower in the stern of the ship where they could shelter from the sun and rain. In the crowded City of Cain, Yule bought a spool of waxed thread and an iron needle as long as his palm. They spent a day floating in Cain’s harbor while Yule stitched blessings into their scandalously bare sailcloth. He wrote all the usual prayers for good weather and safe passage, but where most ships added some specific dedication—to fruitful fishing or profitable trading or comfortable travel—he wrote only to love. Ade saw the word twined around her wrist mirrored on the sail, and kissed his cheek, laughing.
It was difficult to imagine an ending to those golden months they spent on The Key. The summer heat faded and was replaced with the cool, high winds of the trading season, when the Amarico was so trafficked with ships the sea itself was scented with spice and oil and fine flaxen paper. Yule and Ade traced love-drunk spirals through the currents, winding back southward on white-edged waves, planning no further than the next island, the next City, the next night spent curled together on some empty beach. Yule thought they might go on forever like that.