They restocked at the City of Plumm, where Ade and Yule had first found one another the year before. A few marketgoers remembered them, and word spread that the merwoman had married the scholar and produced a (disappointingly normal) girl-child, and by the time they departed there was a small crowd on the beach. January alternated between screeching at them in delight and burying her face in her mother’s shoulder, while Ade supplied satisfyingly nonsensical answers to their questions (“Where are we headed? To a mountaintop in Colorado, if you want to know the truth”). By sunset it had become a sort of picnic, and they shoved off with the warm glow of bonfires against their backs. The crowd watched them go with expressions ranging from curiosity to hilarity to alarm, calling out warnings and well-wishes as the sky turned from pink silk to blue velvet above them.
(I have thought often of these people in the years since, watching us sail away into the empty eastern sea. Did any of them come looking for us, when we failed to return? A curious trader or worried fisherman? What a slim hope to rest my heart upon.)
Yule wasn’t accustomed to making such a fuss, but Ade laughed at him. “I’ve left a trail of faces just like that behind me in three dozen worlds. It’s good for ’em. Trying to explain things that can’t be explained is how you get stories and fairy tales, I figure.” She looked down at January, curled in her lap and chewing pensively on her own knuckle. “Our girl will be a fairy tale before she can walk, Jule. Isn’t that something? A natural-born wanderer if there ever was one.”
Ade charted their course into the night, navigating by starlight and memory, with January sleeping against her chest. Yule watched from the cabin and drifted into dreams of his daughter as a grown woman: how she would speak six languages and outsail her father, how she would have her mother’s brave and feral heart, how she would never be root-bound to a single home but would instead dance between the worlds on a path of her own making. She would be strong and shining and powerfully, beautifully strange, raised in the light of ten thousand suns.
Yule woke before dawn, when Ade crawled into the cabin and settled January between them. He fell back to sleep with his arm over both of them.
The wind grew wilder and colder away from the City islands. They spent the following days cutting across some unseen current, waves slapping against their hull like warnings and their sail alternately stretched taut and luffing. Ade grinned into the salt spray like a hunting hawk with her quarry in sight. January crawled from stern to prow with a rope tied round her middle, rolling sometimes with the waves. Yule watched the horizon for Ade’s door.
It appeared at dawn on the third day: two black crags emerging from the sea like dragon teeth, tilted toward one another with their stone tips nearly touching, so that a narrow passage of open sea lay between them. Morning fog curled and steamed around the doorway, obscuring and then revealing it. Appears to avoid easy discovery, Yule wrote in his journal, which substantiates my initial premise.
He tucked his notes away and stood in the prow with January bundled in his arms, her sleep-soft face peering out from the folds of Ade’s worn coat. The sea had gone still and silent; their prow slid across it like a pen across the page. The shadow of the stones fell over the boat. Just before they slid into the passageway, across the threshold and into the black maw of the space between worlds, Yule Ian turned back to look at his wife.
Ade was crouched at the rudder, wide shoulders braced against the current, jaw set, eyes alive with fierce joy: in the thrill of diving through another doorway, perhaps, or in the glory of a life without borders or barriers, or in the simple pleasure of going home. Her hair was gathered in a loose honey-colored snarl over one shoulder, tangling with the winding lines of her tattoo. She’d changed since that first day Yule saw her in the cedar-strewn field more than a decade before—she was taller, broader, with merry lines gathering at the corners of her eyes and the first wisps of white hair curling at her temples—but no less luminous.
Oh, January, she was so lovely.
She looked up just as we crossed into the blackness and grinned her crooked, wild grin at the two of us.
That smile, a white-gold smear against the mist, still hangs like a painted portrait before my eyes. It marks the last moment the world was whole, the last moment of our brief, fragile family. The last moment I saw Adelaide Larson.
The blackness took us. The suffocating absence of the in-between. I closed my eyes against it, my coward’s heart trusting that Ade would see us through.
And then a rending, splintering sound that wasn’t a sound, because there could be no sound in that airless place. My feet heaved beneath me and I thought wildly of sea monsters and leviathans, of vast tentacles encircling our ship—and then an enormous, sourceless pressure descended on us. It was as if the in-between itself were being bitten in half.
I was breathless, blind, panicked. But there was a fraction of a second—suspended now in my memory like an axis point around which all else turns—when I might have chosen differently. I might have dived back toward the stern, toward Ade. I might have died, or been damned to unravel in the endless in-between, but at least I would have done so with Adelaide at my side.
Instead, I planted my feet and curled myself around you.
I think of this moment often. I do not regret it, January, not even at my darkest and most despairing.
The moment passed. The crushing intensified, until you and I were flattened against the groaning hull, our lungs empty and our skulls aching. My arms were a vise around you and I was no longer sure whether I was protecting you or crushing you—my eyes pressed inward—my teeth ground against one another—
Air. Thin, frost-sharp, smelling of pine and snow. We burst through some unseen barrier and our ship scudded against the ground. We were pitched forward, smashed against the cold earth of another world.
Here my memories grow reeling and confused, blinking in and out like a bad bulb in a projector; I believe my head knocked against some stone or flying timber. I remember you, tensed and screaming in my arms and therefore impossibly, wonderfully alive. I remember staggering upright, spinning back toward the scattered remains of our ship and looking desperately for some flash of white or gold, except my eyes weren’t focusing right and then I was back on my knees. I remember looking for the great timber-frame door Ade told me about and finding nothing but rubble and ash.
I remember shouting her name and receiving no answer.
I remember a figure looming out of the shadows, silhouetted by the dawn.
Something connected with the back of my head and the world fragmented. My nose crashed against pine needles and stone and the ocean-taste of blood filled my mouth.
I remember thinking: I am dying. And I remember feeling a distant, selfish relief, because by then I knew: Ade had not come through the door with us.
The Ivory Door
As a general rule I’m not a person who cries much. When I was younger I cried over everything from sneers to sad endings, and even once over a puddle of tadpoles that dried up in the sun, but at some point I learned the trick of stoicism: you hide. You pull yourself inside your castle walls and crank up the drawbridge and watch everything from the tallest tower.
But I cried then: lying bloody and exhausted in the Zappia family cabin, with Bad beside me and Jane’s voice rolling over us, telling my father’s story.