Terec and the Wild Read online

  TEREC AND THE WILD

  VICTORIA GODDARD

  Copyright © 2022 by Victoria Goddard

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Author’s Note

  1

  It was a fine morning.

  Early summer, a clear day, the scent of new-cut hay on the air. The roses were coming out in Terec’s mother’s garden, crushed-velvet and rumpled silk petals in all the tenderest of pinks and reds. His mother didn’t care for the yellow roses dear to the emperors; with a fine disregard for custom she thought them vulgar.

  Terec woke early, as he did habitually despite a tendency to insomnia. He had not slept well the night before, having been beset by troubled dreams of the house burning down and all his family with it. It was not the first time he had had the dream.

  The scent of smoke was still in his nose, overpowering the sweet hay. Terec sat up. The edge of his sheet was singed and sooty where his hands had clenched at it in the night.

  He rubbed his hands together, shaking. The sunlight filled the room, which was decorated with all the cool, pale colours he loved. No reds or oranges or yellows: no, Terec preferred silvery greys, cool near-whites, icy blues, the palest of seashell greens.

  His sisters teased him for living inside an ice palace; his mother asked him every autumn, every winter, whether he didn’t want a fire laid in the elegant white-marble hearth. Their house might be warmed with magic, but nothing, simply nothing, she declared, could replace a proper fire.

  Terec was never cold. Fire filled his dreams, and ever more and more noticeably his blood.

  His pressed his fingers into the sheets. The sun was no longer the bright promise on the horizon, but the daystar itself. He braced himself, as he braced himself every morning. His father would be performing the morning rituals soon.

  There. The net fell across his shoulders, and he bowed his head in a willing submission to the magic. Under his fingers the sheets smouldered and smoked as the fire flickered a warning before retreating to embers.

  He did not know the specifics—his eldest sister was the heir, and Terec did not need to know what was done to bind their land to the Empire—but Terec was intimately aware of the magic at work. All the promise and freshness of the morning, all the freedom of the new day—gone.

  Every morning, every landed aristocrat in the Empire performed certain rituals. They were designed so they need not be performed by a wizard, but nevertheless worked magic: the magic that held the Empire in prosperity and might, bound five disparate worlds together, bound the very weather and natural processes of the land under its net.

  The net dropped down over the house, running from cornerstone to hearth and on to the next. The sunlit room was still, calm, dreaming, like a soft smile turned up to the sky. Terec could not see the magic, but he could feel it: heavy, weighted nets intended to catch every stray bit of magic and weave it into the beautiful totality that was called, in glorious simplicity, the Pax Astandalatis.

  Every citizen of the Empire partook of that peace and all that its magic brought. In return they lived and worked and died for the Emperor, shining heart of all that power and prestige, giving up a tithe of their earnings, even a tithe of themselves, to his glory.

  There was an old saying that a citizen of Astandalas bowed his neck to Astandalas and thereby stood taller than any outside its bounds.

  Under Terec's fingers the hem of the sheets fell apart in flakes of black ash.

  The magic settled into its daily yoke, which was more obvious by the day.

  Terec swallowed hard, but the decision was made. Wild magic was not necessarily illegal, but it was a sentence of exile nonetheless.

  He joined the household for morning tea, as was customary when his parents were not at court. Terec tried not to look at them too deeply or too much, to be too obviously memorizing their laughs and their voices, their scents and the way they held their cups and saucers.

  There was his mother, elegant and beautiful, her dark hair loose this morning but for two pairs of braids at each temple. His father, handsome despite the long, narrow nose he had bequeathed to all his children, strong-shouldered, competent, disregarding the limp left from his early career in the army.

  Of Terec’s five siblings, two sisters—the eldest and youngest—lived at home; his third sister was married to a woman in the neighbouring duchy. His two brothers were away as well, the elder in the army and the younger still at university.

  Terec was in the middle in all respects, except for that unwelcome secret curse of magic.

  “And what are your plans for today, Terec?” his mother asked him, smiling genially.

  Terec set down his teacup so he had an excuse not to look at her. “I thought I might ride into Forgellenburg for a few days.”

  “Conju’s visiting his sister Seldra there, isn’t he?” his mother said knowingly.

  Terec managed a smile as his siblings took up the familiar teasing, asking him when he and Conju were going to set the date, whether they would be looking at wedding garments in the duchy seat. He picked up half a buttered muffin and took a bite. The butter seems to coat the inside of his mouth with a clammy film.

  “Do tell Seldra to write us sometime, won’t you?” his eldest sister said, and everyone laughed and went on with discussing the minutiae of their upcoming day. Terec met his father’s eyes once, by accident as he reached to set down his plate, and saw in them something that made him swallow back tears and flee the room with the excuse that he should get ready to leave if he wanted to make the city by evening.

  He had already packed; had packed and repacked his saddlebags any number of times over the past month. Each evening he persuaded himself it was all in his imagination that the fire would be held back no longer; and each morning the Pax landed more and more heavily on his shoulders. The Pax heard no protestations or excuses: it bound what was loose, or crushed it.

  He took all his money and what small valuables he possessed. Theirs was not a rich family, not with six children and several orphaned cousins and solitary aunts and uncles to support. Terec and his friend Conju had been intending to go to Astandalas and seek out honourable positions in some great lord’s household. They had been arguing whether they should travel first and then marry, or marry first and then travel.

  They had been planning it for years. Conju would be an exemplary secretary or gentleman-in-waiting, and Terec, they thought, would be an excellent household natural philosopher, even a wizard if he could only—

  Well, no matter those dreams.

  Terec was careful to be nonchalant as he shut the door to his room behind him and made his way downstairs. He bid easy farewells to those of the household he saw as he passed, glad none of them were his mother. His father’s study door was ajar, and though he turned his head to avoid catching his father’s eye, his father called out for him to enter.

  Terec shifted the two saddlebags over his shoulder. His father peered at him over his glasses. “Heading out, then?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your eyes are a bit red …”

  Terec grimaced. “Touch of hay fever. You know how it is, father.”

  “I do, yes,” his father replied, rubbing his own irritated eyes. “Terec …” He trailed off, then seemed to gather himself. “Here.”

  He reached into the drawer of his desk and pulled out a leathe
r pouch. Terec stared at it, unmoving, until his father shook it in his direction. Coins clinked. “Take it. For your ... travels.”

  Terec walked forward and accepted the pouch. It was heavy, was all he could think at first. It sat in his hands as heavy and cold as the muffin still in his throat.

  His father twiddled the quill he’d been sharpening. He did not seem willing to meet his son’s eyes.

  “Write us when—when you arrive, will you?”

  Terec nodded. “I will,” he promised quietly.

  “Safe travels, Terec,” his father said, and turned resolutely to the ledger before him.

  He saddled his riding horse, bid a brief farewell to the groom mending tack at the stable door, and did not look back any more than usual as he descended the long, slanting lane that led away from home.

  It was a fine morning, sunny and clear and scented with new hay. The birds were singing; somewhere up ahead of him someone was burning brush. He passed out of his father’s lands after two hours of riding, reached Forgellenburg at the dinner hour, and at the crossroads he turned north.

  And that, he supposed, was that.

  2

  Lund, the broad valley ruled over by his father, was north of Astandalas by a goodly distance. Terec himself had been to the capital once, on the occasion of his sister’s presentation as heir. Their whole family had gone: mother, father, all six children, three cousins, his father’s sisters and his mother’s brother. It had been a wildly extravagant venture, a once-in-a-lifetime occasion.

  Terec had seen the Emperor himself, the shining golden figure on the high golden throne. The glowing, gleaming radiance had woken something in him; at that moment he had not realized it was wild magic, the fire that once woken could never be put out. At that moment he had simply wanted to swear enduring fealty, and watched with envious eyes as his sister was taken forward to make her curtsy and be greeted by the Emperor in the name of the rank she held.

  That had been three years ago, when he was sixteen. He had come back and told his best friend Conju all about the trip, and Conju had caught his enthusiasm and begun planning out his future. In the course of the conversation the you coulds had turned to we shoulds, and when he realized what Conju meant, Terec had leaned forward and kissed him for the first time.

  He rode past the turning to Vilius, though his horse, well-accustomed to his usual habits, wanted to turn in. Instead he spurred her to a canter and then to a gallop, kicking up dust on the lane before they clattered onto the highway in a spray of gravel and sweat, and he was forced to slow down to rest his horse and watch the traffic.

  Conju’s sister Seldra, the one who lived in Forgellenburg, was a notoriously poor correspondent. She was a person who exulted in being busy, cramming as much as possible into her days. It was always exhausting visiting her; one barely had two moments to spare to oneself from midmorning until well past midnight, when the evening whirl of dinner parties finally settled.

  Conju had written Terec once, to tell him he’d arrived safely and outline a truly packed schedule for the week of his visit. Terec had written back, claiming excessive fatigue merely at the thought, and told his friend (his lover, his betrothed, his all) not to trouble himself about writing, that he would hear all his news on his return.

  No one would expect to hear from Terec until Conju returned.

  No one would follow him until he was well on his way, and by then the letters he would send would reach them, and they would know why they shouldn’t.

  He rode down the central lane of the highway, which his father’s rank permitted to him. Here, so close to Lund, he was obviously what he was. Further north, farther from the capital, the regional cities, the provincial lords, it would be different.

  For now, he made use of being a gentleman, and cantered down the road in style.

  Lund was a broad valley in a region of broad valleys, separated from each other by low, forested hills: the Geir, it was called. It stretched some two hundred miles from the alluvial plains of the river Ast, to the south, to the edge of the sea in the west, the mountains in the east, and, to the north, the range of low hills famed in song and story, the Northern Range.

  On the other side of the Northern Range was the edge of the Empire. As it was the only Border Terec knew how to find, and certainly the closest, he headed there.

  He passed the turn to Forgellenburg at dusk and kept riding, knowing if he stopped then he would be too tempted to find Seldra and Conju and fail at his resolution. The smell of singed cotton was in his nose and he forced himself to grit his teeth and spur his tired horse onwards, ever onwards, north to the Border.

  Five miles north of the turn-off was a small country inn, pleasant and welcoming with its lights golden in the twilight. Terec was walking his horse by then, knowing he had pushed her harder than he ought, and he too was tired. He asked for a room and stabling for his horse and food for the both of them, and took his plate of boiled ham to a seat by the hearth.

  The inn was quiet, only a handful of locals sitting over their jars of cider. Lund was cider country: Terec had been riding between orchards and piggeries all afternoon. His father was noted for the magnificence of his pigs, and a particularly rare variety of apple that gave a certain piquancy to the local cider. This side of Forgellen was no different, though he was starting to see a greater prevalence of Banded Jurts over the Spotted Lunds that comprised the majority of his father’s sounders.

  The accents were starting to shift, too: they were broader than the tenants Terec was familiar with. The locals were gossiping desultorily with each other, their comments and replies uttered at long intervals.

  “Lunden lad, eh,” said one. Terec shifted uneasily.

  “Eyup,” said another.

  There was a long silence. Terec ate his ham and drank his cider sparingly. The innkeeper wiped down her bar and then came by with a pitcher of cider to refill the locals’ jars.

  “Getting away from home, eh.”

  “Eyup.”

  Terec could feel a headache building. He was doing nothing wrong, he told himself fiercely. This was the right thing to do.

  The fire in the hearth spluttered suddenly, sparks fountaining up. Terec jumped at the retort, knocking over the undrunk portion of his cider. “I’m sorry,” he said to the innkeeper, who gave him a withering look even as she hastened over with a cloth.

  “Jumpy, ain’t he,” said one of the locals.

  “Eyup.”

  “Going north.”

  “Eyup.”

  The implication that he was running away from something was strong. Terec refused to look at them. “Please, which is my room?” he asked the innkeeper, not caring that he was hardly showing himself well.

  He was close enough to Lund that people might talk … but … but that was no longer his concern. His family’s reputation would recover quickly enough, without the fresh source of an uncontrolled wild mage to feed gossip.

  Anything was better than him setting them all on fire one night.

  He didn’t sleep well, unsurprisingly. In his dreams he was chased by a golden giant holding a glittering net. He ran and ran, sobbing with fear and regret, crashing through the thorny embrace of his mother’s rose garden. “Hold me, hold me,” he cried in his dream. “Bind me, bind me.”

  But the giant strode up, step by deliberate step, and all the roses caught fire around him to prevent the net from coming down.

  He departed before dawn, leaving an extra handful of coins on the bedside table to pay for the singed sheets.

  He rode up and over the highlands of the Geir, passing out of Lund and into Kiluzs as the sun rose over the horizon. More apple orchards and pigs, and fields upon fields of young grain sprouting out of black soil. He crossed Kiluzs before dark, stopping only at a small village to buy bread and cheese and some of the ubiquitous smoked sausages. In the same shop, which seemed to serve as the general store for the area, there was a voluminous brown leather cape, oiled on one side and lined with wool on th
e other.

  The shopkeeper saw him fingering it. His eyes lit up. “That’s a genuine Turgyeni cape, that is,” he said.

  Terec regarded him down his nose. This was, Conju always said, quite effective; about the only good effect of the feature, which was exaggerated in him to an extent all of his siblings had escaped. “Really? How did it come to be here?”

  The shopkeeper regaled him with a long tale about a soldier returning home to Kiluzsburg, down the valley, who had stopped in this nameless village to water his horse and wet his throat. He’d ended up embroiled in a game of darts with the locals, and one thing had led to another and eventually he’d lost his cloak in a bet.

  “And then—this was five, six years ago,” he said, “back in the early days of the Emperor Artorin, you see—”

  “How much?” Terec asked bluntly.

  The shopkeeper gave him a calculating glance. He took in Terec’s good clothes, flicked his glance outside at where his horse was tied up to the rail, rose up onto his toes in eagerness, and then deflated again with a sigh. “You’re heading north? All the way north?”

  That meant only one thing. Terec nodded unenthusiastically.

  “Thought so,” the shopkeeper mumbled. “You can have it for a sunburst. If you come back this way, I’ll buy it back from you.”

  “I won’t be,” said Terec, reaching back into his coin pouch. A sunburst was nothing—the room the night before had cost four. For a cloak of oiled leather and thick, warm, wool? It didn’t have to be a genuine Turgyeni cape for it to be valuable to anyone heading north.

  “All the more reason to sell it to you,” the shopkeeper said. “It’d cost five for someone heading south. Not that they’d need it.”