Until I felt a hand close around my ankle.
I didn’t think he would follow me. I want you to understand that—I didn’t mean for it to happen, any of it. I thought he would stay behind in his safe little world and crush my Door back to ash and char. I thought he would sigh regretfully, cross out my entry in his mental ledger book (In-between girl, magic powers suspected, value unknown) and then go back to his twin passions of amassing wealth and closing Doors. But he didn’t.
Maybe he loved me, after all.
I think I even caught a glimpse of love when I turned back to look at his face—or at least a possessive, conditional, desire-to-own—but it was quickly subsumed beneath his towering fury. There is nothing quite like the anger of someone very powerful who has been thwarted by someone who was supposed to be weak.
His fingers burrowed into my flesh. His other hand still held the shining revolver, and I saw his thumb move. There was no sound in the Threshold, but I imagined I could hear that ominous click-click again. No no no—I could feel myself slowing, floundering in the black, fear blurring my goal—
But I had forgotten Bad. My first friend, my dearest companion, my terrible dog who had always seen the Please Do Not Ever Bite list as a fundamentally negotiable document. He arched backward, yellow eyes gleaming in the fierce joy of an animal doing what he loves best, and buried his teeth in Locke’s wrist.
Locke’s mouth opened in a soundless scream. He let go of me. And then he was floating, falling alone in the empty vastness of the Threshold and his eyes had gone white and wide as china plates.
For all the Doors he’d closed, I wondered how long it had been since he’d stepped through one, since he’d seen the Threshold. He seemed to have forgotten his rage, his direction, the gun in his hand—now there was nothing in his face but wild terror.
He could still have followed me.
But he was too afraid. He was afraid of change and uncertainty, of the Threshold itself. Of things outside his power, and things in between.
I watched the darkness nibble, delicately, at the edges of him. His right hand and his revolver vanished. His entire arm. His eyes—his powerful, pale eyes, which had brought him such wealth and such status, which had subjugated enemies and persuaded allies and even reshaped stubborn young girls, temporarily—could do nothing against the darkness.
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.