Terec and the Wild Read online

  A couple of miners sat down at his table without a by-your-leave. Terec could barely decipher their accent, but when they asked him—he thought—if he minded, he shook his head. They roared with laughter and called to the bartender.

  The barmaid, a buxom woman who’d been laughing with the mercenary, of all people, came over with a tray containing some clear liquid. The miners joshed with her for a few minutes, their expressions ones of long familiarity. The barmaid laughed at them and set down the tray before tipping a thin stream of another liquid into each glass.

  The clear liquid—liquor, Terec realized, not water—immediately clouded over, milky-white, and a strong scent of aniseed rose up.

  “Arrak!” the miners cried, and shoved one of the glasses at him.

  Terec tried to protest—he had never liked aniseed—but the one miner clapped him hard on the shoulder, and the other shoved the glass insistently into his hand, and everyone was looking at him, laughing and mocking, and so with a grimace and a bravado he did not feel, Terec tossed the foul drink back.

  And then, of course, it was hard to stop.

  He woke on a pallet with a head that was savagely painful. His mouth felt as if he’d coated it with anise-flavoured sandpaper. Or perhaps that was the inside of his eyes. He winced as he tried to sit up, and put his hand on an unexpected warm leg.

  “Gerroff,” someone grumbled, shoving at him.

  Terec recoiled, but the room was full of sleeping, snoring men, all still drunk and dishevelled. There was no hint he’d … lost control with any of them.

  There was, however, a definite charred outline where he’d been resting on the straw pallet.

  Terec stared at the black ash, the straw crumpling under his fingers, and was abruptly so revolted with himself he had to run outside to vomit.

  He knelt in the alley behind the stables long after his heaves had subsided into clear bile, his head shattering in the sunlight, his eyes leaking tears. How could he be so weak? How could he not suppress that magic, that fire that came out in his sleep?

  At least, he thought grimly, he had not burned down the tavern. He’d not killed anyone. Not even hurt anyone with his magic. Not yet.

  Not yet.

  He found a trough and dunked his head, far from the niceties of even two days before. He needed water and food … and his horse. He needed to keep going.

  It was past dawn, but he felt the Pax on his shoulders, magic lighter than it had been, but both too heavy and too light. Too heavy to bear, and too light to hold his magic in check.

  He went into the stables to see to his horse, only to find it gone.

  He looked around. The Allandales were gone, and another handful of stalls were empty. His was swept clean, as if no horse had been there at all.

  When he went into the tavern the barman shrugged.

  “But it was stolen,” Terec protested. “I paid for the stabling.”

  “Sure you didn’t wager it in a game last night? Lots of betting happens at the Ghost. Wouldn’t be the first time a southern lad woke up to find he’d lost everything.”

  Terec had lost everything that mattered when he did not turn off for Forgellenburg.

  He couldn’t say anything to the barman, not without crying or railing, but since he had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, he went back out to the thicket where he’d left his sack, and he set off north.

  4

  He reached Tukong after another week of trudging on foot. It was exceptionally lonely: no one passed him bar the Post-courier, who galloped by with a very small sack of mail and not even a glance spared for him.

  It rained, a fine thin drizzle. The leather cape kept the worst of it off his back and shoulders, but it didn’t have a hood, and only reached to his knees. Over the course of the first rainy day the damp slowly penetrated his boots and leggings. He bent his head into the rain, for of course it was coming towards him, and kept on. He would, he decided, buy a hat in Tukong.

  At least his wild magic kept him warm. And when he tried to start a campfire with it in the evenings, the rain kept him from lighting the northern forests on fire.

  Small gifts, he told himself. He felt there might be a Fitzroy Angursell song about that … something about Jullanar of the Sea … He had never really been into Fitzroy Angursell’s songs. Oh, they were fun, no doubt about that, with that edge to them—the knowledge that some of them were so sharp they were banned—but really, Terec had always been a quite law-abiding and normal young man. He liked his lot in life and was happy with what it would bring him.

  It was no good thinking about that.

  He spun small, attainable dreams for when he reached Tukong. He would buy a hat; he would visit the bath-house the barmaid back in Yttergorick had mentioned. He would have a hot meal, cooked by someone who knew what they were doing. He would dry out his clothes and find something clean to wear.

  More than that he could not imagine.

  Even that was almost more than Tukong could manage.

  Terec reached Tukong in the early afternoon. He’d smelled the town long before it came into sight: woodsmoke drifted far. It lifted his spirits.

  The land had been thickly forested the whole way, spruce and the shimmering, trembling aspen, white birch and miscellaneous unidentifiable shrubs. His food had been supplemented by the surprisingly abundant game: he’d been able to shoot grouse or rabbit almost every other day. His small bow was proving very useful. He blessed the barmaid in Yttergorick for her rough insistence on seeing he was adequately provisioned.

  Provisioned for what, he didn’t know. He would reach Tukong and then … and then see what the North brought.

  The days this far north were very long. Terec’s sense of time was all confused. He’d always thought himself good at telling time by the sun, but he’d been walking for far more than six hours between sunrise and noon, he was sure of it.

  Around noon by the sun, regardless of his personal opinions about the time, the road started to make lazy sweeps back and forth as it climbed up and over a long, steep rise. Terec followed the road, as the earthen paths going directly up were too steep for him. He was footsore and heartsore and it was still raining, and another hour or two of climbing wasn’t going to do anything but help him sleep better that night.

  At the top of the hill, there was an open area. It looked as if there had been a forest fire here, a year or two ago: the remaining tree trunks were black or silvery, but there was a lot of grass and other plants, including exuberant raspberries, everywhere. Some plant grew as high as his chest with magenta-pink flowers, the lower, spent seedheads already turning into a downy puff. He rubbed the fluff between his fingers before realizing the raspberries were ripe.

  There was one of the military wells just past the raspberries. Terec washed his sticky fingers and drank deeply before refilling his canteen. Then he looked up, for he’d been much occupied with the fruit beside the road, and realized that he had a view in front of him.

  Not a view—a vista.

  From the ridge on which he stood, the land fell down into a u-shaped valley. A river glinted in places, winding towards his left, it seemed. He turned to the right. Yes, there were mountains that way, green-clad foothills rising up into ice-clad stony peaks. What were the northeastern mountains called? He’d never been a great one for geography. Conju had always been more interested—

  Terec blinked hard and turned to the north, straight ahead across the valley. The valley was forested, with a cleared area not too far ahead of him, where the road met the river: Tukong. The woodsmoke rose up thickly from the town.

  The cloud cover had lightened today, and though it was not exactly sunny, it was bright, the clouds high and wispy. They made very little contrast with the silvery veil that swept down in front of him, except that he could not see past the ridge facing him.

  At first he thought it was a strange low cloud cloaking the distance, but then he looked to the right and the left again and realized the cloud cut a line across the whole of the horizon, straight as a ruler as far as he could see until it bent with unnatural elegance to follow the river valley towards the west.

  It was the Border. This side, however remote from the capital, was Astandalas: that side was … not.

  It was perhaps the tiniest bit exciting.

  Terec set off down into the valley. He still had just enough money for a room at an inn, he thought.

  He did not have enough money for room at an inn.

  Not if he also wanted to visit the baths, have his clothing cleaned by the laundry next door, have a hot meal, and replenish his supplies.

  The hat alone cost almost as much as one of his finer ones back home, and it was a shapeless felt thing whose great virtue was its wide brim.

  He hesitated after buying the hat, then decided that he could better stand a cold meal than another night of endless griminess. Accordingly he handed over his clothes to the laundry to be cleaned while he went to the baths.

  The attendant was a dour older woman, reading a book, entirely uninterested in Terec. She took his money and gave him one of the bathhouse’s towels and a bar of cheap soap, and informed him that it was quiet today but she would drag him out, clothes or no clothes, at sunset.

  “I could stay that long?” Terec asked, dumbfounded.

  “They’re natural hot springs,” the attendant said, already turning back to her book.

  He wrapped himself in the towel, leaving his cleanest garments on the wooden shelf in the first room, his boots on the rack below. There were, indeed, no sign of other people’s belongings. He pushed open the next door with some trepidation, but though the temperature and humidity had both increased sharply, there wasn’t an actual bath in the next room. Instead there was a lever on the wall, a sluice-pipe over
head, a slatted wooden floor for drainage.

  Terec hung his towel on a hook on the door on the farther side of the room from the entry and stood under the sluice. This water was lukewarm at best, and felt good. He lathered himself up, the lye stinging his eyes as he scrubbed the dust and dirt of the journey from his skin, his hair, under his nails.

  He could hear water gurgling overhead, and hoped some system was refilling the cistern. It was, though the next water was far colder. He spluttered under it and was shivering, all his skin rising in goosebumps, as he grabbed his towel and continued to the next room.

  Somewhere under the surface of his skin his magic stirred, blooming warmth from his extremities to his core. Terec bit his lip but he could not help the comfort he took from the heat. It was cooler up here, this far north; the wind had been blowing across the northern range and bore a dry chill in its wake.

  The next room was the hot spring proper. The door opened on what was a natural grotto. A wooden deck was built along one side, overhanging the rough rock; a ladder let down into the water. The far side was a rocky cliff, the stone a dully gleaming dark grey, set off by ferns and small brilliant-green cushions of moss growing in the cracks and crevasses.

  Terec put his towel on the bench that ran along the back of the decking, and tentatively lowered himself into the water.

  It was warm: as warm as his own body, shockingly hot after the cool air, the cold water. Terec stepped unexpectedly off the bottom of the ladder and found himself falling entirely into the water. He spluttered up, tasting a kind of rotten-egg minerality to the water. It was not foul, but he grimaced, wiped his face with a wet hand, and swam over to what turned out to both a hotter and shallower portion of the pool.

  There were smooth stones under the surface, which formed a kind of seat. After some experimentation Terec found he was able to sit on one stone, submerged to just above his shoulders, his back against the stone, his head and neck supported by a water-smoothed rock.

  By degrees the ripples and waves made by his motions settled, and then—it was quiet.

  Terec felt himself relax little by little, as if muscle by muscle he had to let go of the tensions and fears of the journey north. He was here: in the north, the northernmost edge of the Empire, where the very border itself was visible as a curtain of magic in the sky.

  The Pax was thin here. All the way down that last slope into the valley were Tukong lay he could feel the weight of it lessening. Now, here, his breath coming slow and steady, the water exactly as warm as he most liked it—so much hotter than anyone else did, his siblings had always been aghast at how hot he wanted the bathwater, insisting he wait so as not to burn himself—Terec felt some inner tension release.

  He let the stone take the weight of his head. The sky overhead was a pale grey, and as he looked a fine rain started to fall. He closed his eyes. There was something magical about the cool rain on his face, the soft pattering sound of it on the surface of the pool, and the warm embrace of the water.

  He had always come closest to being able to touch his magic in a truly hot bath. There was something in the security afforded by the water surrounding him, the heat penetrating from the outside to match the heat inside, that let him relax whatever inner muscle he usually kept clenched tight.

  Here he was so far from the centre of Astandalas, and there was water all around. Water in the air, water in the pool, and steady stone at his back, far less flammable than any enamelled bath.

  Terec hesitated, but what had he come north for, if not for this?

  He sank a little lower, so his ears were just above the surface. His nose had adjusted now, and he no longer noticed the sulphurous odour.

  His attention turned inward. The fire was close to the surface. As soon as he let his control lapse it surged, strong as a fire worked by the bellows.

  Terec suppressed the instinctive panic that surged in its wake. He was safe here, he chanted to himself. Everyone else was safe, too. There was so much water around him—

  And his magic reached the edge of his skin, sparkled forth—he could feel it, fire running for a moment along his skin, his fingers, before the water doused it—before the fire in the water answered.

  His magic retreated just below his skin as a foreign magic reached out and touched him curiously.

  Terec could feel it, as easily as he had felt the Pax fall over him, but this was no net, no chains of binding and control, but an alien … mind?

  The water heated still hotter around him, a current almost too hot even for him.

  Almost, almost, but not quite.

  He opened his eyes when the heat nudged against his hands, his fingers curling automatically around something, as if a dog had thrust its head into his grasp.

  There was a … lizard?

  A nursery tale came to his mind, swimming through the fog of his memory as this creature swam through the water, all fire twisting in the water.

  It was a foot long or more, all tale and paddling feet, long and sinuous, burning clearly under the water, its shape outlined by its own light.

  Not a lizard, no. A salamander.

  Salamander: the elemental spirit of fire.

  Terec had always thought it a bit strange that an animal that in its ordinary, unmagical form was an amphibian, dwelling in the damp and the moist, even the wet for part of its lifespan—he and Conju had searched for tadpoles and efts and all their ilk in their boyhoods—would be the sign and alchemical symbol of fire.

  But this was a salamander, the colour of red coals, its eyes a brighter, leaping gold, swimming easily through the water of the hot springs.

  Terec’s magic reached out to greet the elemental, and Terec himself reached out his hand, running it down the salamander’s back, scratching the side its head when it coiled and arched itself against his touch.

  For the first time he could ever remember, his magic was content.

  He bent his head and wept, grateful for the rain washing down his face though there was only the salamander to see, and its steam rose up around him in a soft, silent comfort.

  The Border guards were talking about a new rotation coming up to replace them.

  Terec listened to them gossiping in the shops and bathhouse and taverns, with which Tukong was more than amply supplied. They never really talked to him, but they also didn’t stop talking when he came by.

  “I’m going home to my wife,” one soldier said to her friend as they sorted through a box of used books at the general store. Terec had been sent from the bathhouse for more soap and a bundle of rags, and was leaning up against the counter waiting while the storekeeper found the soap. He had persuaded a few of the shop-owners to pay him a pittance or a trade for running errands for them, which they did with a pity he could barely stomach.

  “Lucky you,” the second soldier replied. “I’m off to my grandfather’s. Someone needs to be the old reprobate’s comfort in his old age, and I got picked.”

  “You’re selling out?”

  The second soldier snorted. “Been bought out, more like. My family—”

  The shopkeeper came back then with the soap, and Terec was forced to leave off his eavesdropping.

  Oh, how he wished he could go home—

  “Expecting letters from the South?” the bathhouse owner said as she went over the order.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You look like you’re waiting for the next blow to fall.”

  Terec tried to rearrange his expression into a glower. The bathhouse owner laughed and patted him on the shoulder.

  “Don’t fret so, lad. A new rotation of border guards is always exciting. They bring all the news and are always so nicely turned out. Very sharp. And they get lonely quickly, you know? Homesick.”

  Terec mumbled a response, accepted his payment in the form of a chit to use the baths, and walked slowly on to the tavern where he spent the evenings. He had a room upstairs in exchange for running errands and cleaning up the taproom in the mornings.

  It was … it was something.

  He had been starting to think this would be his life: an unskilled, undemanding, unrespectable job running errands during the day, long desolate evenings in the tavern nursing a cup or two of wine so he didn’t end up drunk and set everything on fire.