She is unlikely to recall the evening her father climbed back up to the little stone house and found her sleeping beside her mother on the hillside. She was openmouthed, naked except for the cotton cloth tied around her waist, a faint breeze brushing through her curls. Ade was curled around her, a golden-white curve like a lioness or a nautilus, nestled into her milk-sweet breath. It was nearly the end of summer and the evening shadows were creeping toward the two of them on chill tiptoes—but hadn’t reached them yet. The two of them were still shining, untouched, whole.
Yule stood on the hillside watching them, feeling an exultant, vaulting joy edged with melancholy, as if he were already mourning its loss. As if he knew he could not live in heaven forever.
It hurts me to speak of such things now. Even now as I write this—cowering in my tent in the foothills outside Ulaanbaatar, alone but for the scratching of my pen and the ice-rimed howling of wolves—I am grinding my teeth against waves of pain, an ache that settles in my limbs and poisons my marrow.
Do you recall the time you asked me about your name, and I said your mother liked it? You left annoyed, dissatisfied, the line of your jaw so precisely like hers I could hardly breathe. I tried to return to my work but couldn’t. I crawled into bed, racked and shuddering, thinking of the shape of your mother’s mouth when she said your name: January.
I missed dinner that night and left the next morning before dawn. You were rousted from bed to see me off, and your face through the carriage window—sleep-tousled, vaguely accusing—haunted me for months afterward. In the pain of my loss, I gave you the pain of absence.
I cannot fill that empty place now; I cannot dive backward in time and force myself to fling open the carriage door and run back to you, gather you close to me, and whisper in your ear: “We love you, we have always loved you.” I have left it too late, and you are nearly grown. But I can give you at least an accounting of the facts, long overdue.
This is why you were raised in the pine-pocked snows of Vermont rather than the stone islands of the Amarico Sea in the world of the Written. This is why your father’s eyes touch your face only rarely and lightly, as if you were a tiny sun that might blind him. This is why I am nearly six thousand miles away from you, hand cramping from the cold, alone but for the twin harpies of despair and hope hovering always by my side.
This is what happened to Yule Ian Scholar and Adelaide Lee Larson after the birth of their daughter, in the raw spring of the Written Year 6922.
It was earliest spring when Yule first noticed an expression on his wife’s face he had not seen before. It was a kind of wistfulness, a tendency to gaze out at the horizon and sigh and forget, for a moment, what she was doing. At night she twisted and chafed, as if the quilt were a burdensome weight on her body, and woke before dawn to make tea and stare again out their kitchen window toward the sea.
One night as they lay breathing together in the dark, wrapped in the green smell of spring, Yule asked, “Is there something wrong, Adelaide?”
He asked in the language of the City of Nin, and she responded in the same manner. “No. Yes. I do not be knowing.” She reverted to English. “It’s just I’m not sure I like staying all tied up to one place. I love her, I love you, I love this house and this world, but… I feel like a mad dog on a short leash, some days.” She rolled away from him. “Maybe everybody feels this way at first. Maybe it’s just the season getting to me. I always did say springtime was made for leaving.” Yule did not answer but lay awake listening to the distant sighing of the sea, thinking.
The following day he left the house early, while Ade and January were still sprawled in bed and the sky was not truly light but merely dreaming pale dreams. He was gone several hours, during which time he spoke to four people, spent the entirety of their modest savings, and signed three separate statements of debt and ownership. He returned to the stone cottage out of breath and beaming.
“How was teaching?” Ade asked. (“Ba!” January added imperiously.)
Yule plucked the baby from Ade’s arms, winked, and said, “Come with me.”
They spiraled down into the City, past the square and the university, past his mother’s tattoo shop and the shoreline fish market, out onto the sun-warmed pier. Yule led her to the very end and stopped before a shapely little boat, larger and sleeker than The Key, with hastily stitched blessings in the sail for speed and adventure and freedom. There were supplies packed in canvas bags—nets and tarps, water barrels and smoked fish, dried apples, juniper wine, rope, a bright copper compass—and a tidy covered cabin at one end with a straw mattress inside.
Ade was quiet for so long that Yule’s heart began to jitter and flutter with doubt. It is never advisable to make decisions before dawn or without consulting one’s spouse, and he had done both.
“Is this ours?” Ade asked, finally.
Yule swallowed. “Yes.”
“How did you—why?”
Yule lowered his voice and slipped his hand into hers so that their tattoos merged into a single black-inked page. “I will not be your leash, my love.” Ade looked at him then, with a soaring expression so full of love that Yule knew he had done something not merely kind but utterly vital.
(Do I regret it? Would I take it back, if I could? Tell her to resign herself to home and hearth, to give up her wandering ways? It depends which weighs more: a life, or a soul.)
January, who had been clapping her hands at a huddle of harassed gulls, grew bored. The ship caught her attention instead, and she made the squawking sound they normally interpreted as “Give me that immediately.”
Ade pressed her forehead to her daughter’s. “I couldn’t agree more, darlin’.”
Two mornings later the City of Nin was shrinking behind them and the eastern horizon was clean and bright ahead of them, and Ade was kneeling in the prow, wearing her own shapeless farmer’s coat and cradling her child close against her chest. Yule couldn’t be sure, but he thought she might be whispering to January, telling her how it felt to have waves rolling beneath your feet, see strange cities silhouetted at twilight and hear unknown languages singing through the air.
They spent the following months like a small flock of birds on some circuitous migration of their own design, wheeling from City to City but never perching anywhere for long. Ade’s skin, which had grown milk-soft over winter, turned freckled and burnt again, and her hair became a bleached, knotted mess reminiscent of a horse’s mane. January turned a hot red-brown, like coals or cinnamon. Ade called her a “natural-born wanderer,” on the theory that any baby who learned to crawl on the gentle swaying of the deck boards, who bathed in salt water and used a compass as a teething toy, ought to be destined for a journeying sort of life.
As spring deepened and the islands greened, Yule began to suspect their wandering was not entirely rudderless. They seemed to be heading east, however erratically and indirectly, and so he was not entirely surprised when Ade announced, one evening, that she missed her aunt Lizzie.
“I just think she ought to know I’m not molding in a ditch somewheres, and I think she’d like to see a new Larson girl. And a man who stuck around.” What she did not say, but what Yule strongly suspected, was that she was homesick for the first time in her life. She spoke in the evenings about the smell of the Mississippi on a summer afternoon, the china-blue color of the sky above the hayfield. Something about having a child bends you back to your beginnings, as if you have been drawing a circle all your life and now are compelled to close it.