Terec returned to himself slowly, sense by sense.
First he became quietly, gently aware of the air in his lungs, the taste of ice, cold and thin and dry. He breathed, the air in his throat, his mouth, his nose.
He smelled the rich vibrant scent of earth after rain, and savoured it for what seemed a long time. There were ashes in the wind, familiar and almost friendly, as if they marked home.
The ashes were forest-char, he knew, in a way he had not known … before. He could almost taste what kinds of trees had burned, though he could only picture them, not name them. Some sort of pine with wide spreading branches, teardrop-shaped cones that held their seeds tight until the fire tickled them open.
And then the air was on his skin, and the earth under his feet, earth and water. He felt himself moving easily in a landscape, which he knew by the wind on his face and the scent in the air, the feel of moss and damp soil, gritty stone and flexible plants bending under the incessant wind.
He saw movement, textures, colours, flowing around him without outlines or names. He could not distinguish the green scent on the wind from the hundred tossing shapes of green in his eyes, the grey lichen-taste of the stone from the grey and black and white and brown textures around him, smooth or sharp, sandy or firm. Above him were a thousand shapes of blue and white and grey, sometimes swift as a bird’s shadow, sometimes vast as a thunderstorm, sometimes speckled with light like the water of a stream breaking around his shins.
He moved through the movements, part of them.
He tasted sweetness on his lips, his tongue, bursts of intense flavour.
Strawberries, the word came slowly, blossoming in his mind, even as each tiny berry offered a present to his tongue, like the drops of ran on a lake, like the stars he’d seen … that time.
He blinked as his mind snagged on words, on the desire to hold that memory, understand it. Think it.
Green and gold and bright-grey and shadowy umber, scents of wind and fruit and distant water and the lumbering retreat of another animal after it caught his own scent.
For a moment he was suspended there, and then the distant dark shape took the name bear, and the world was suddenly full of shapes for which he had names.
He was sitting in a meadow under a thin bright sun, his hands stained red with berries. He licked his lips. He could not think he’d ever eaten anything so sweet and good before. Sunlight concentrated down into the tiny speck of red smeared between his thumb and forefinger.
He was sated, and he found himself laying back, his muscles moving smoothly, habitually, until the grass and little three-leaved plants cradled his head and he was looking up at an incredibly blue sky.
There were a few high wisps, like feather-touches, and a bird circling on wide, straight wings.
Eagle, Terec thought tentatively, oddly out of practice with naming things.
* * *
He woke refreshed. It was afternoon, he rather thought, standing and stretching. He was a little thirsty, and without thinking about it turned his head into the wind and followed a scent he could not disentangle with his mind to a stream.
His feet carried him upriver, until he came to a place where the stream tumbled down a low and broken cliff, all full of ferns and moss and mossy trees, where the water was a deep brown and sparkling silver-white.
Before one of the pools he cast himself down onto his front, bending his head to drink.
The water was good. Cold enough nearly to make his teeth hurt, refreshing, the most satisfying water he could remember drinking.
He lifted his head, the water running from his lips, his beard, and lifted his hand to his face.
Yes. He had a beard, and his hair was long and falling over him.
He bent his head down, as the ripples from the droplets falling from his beard slowly subsided.
What an odd animal, he mused. A pelt like a beaver’s, almost, rich dark brown, but with bare patches where brown skin showed through.
It took him a long time to realize it was himself. He could think that, could acknowledge that he might well have grown his hair and beard, but he could not look at the reflection in the pool and recognize it. It was hard even to identify it as a human being.
His beard was long and full. He brushed his fingers through it, the motion familiar, as if he groomed himself this way. The same with his hair. There were tangles, knots, but not so much in the way of matting.
His fingers caught on one knot, could not untangle it, and even as he thought to himself perhaps he needed a comb, there was a spark of warmth and the scent of singed hair, and the knot was burned away in a flicker of magic.
It was at that moment that Terec realized his magic no longer felt alien and distinct. He could hardly feel it at all, in fact; no more than he could feel his sense of vision as something separate from himself.
* * *
Even after he woke up to conscious thought, he found himself floating, dreamlike, as if he were perpetually at the moment when one is aware one is falling into sleep but has neither woken up to the thought nor fallen away into unconsciousness.
So long as he did not try to think, to name anything, he moved through the world of the Wild as part of it.
He had never been so much a part of anything before, except perhaps his family. Yet even in his family, he remembered vaguely, he had always been the odd one out, for that magic in his blood.
He did not think much on his family, bar a distant sense of comfort twinned with loss. It was an old loss now, he thought once, when his mind snagged on the present and he found himself holding fire in his hands as he reached in for a trout wrapped in mud and leaves in the embers. The fire licked at his hands, as kind as his—his father’s dogs, yes. His father and sister had loved dogs, hunting, his father always surrounded by boarhounds, his sister by spaniels, and the dogs had licked his hands.
Their faces were in his mind, sweet and loving. Terec sat back with the fish in his hands, the clay envelope radiating warmth into his hands. He waited until it cooled, letting his mind rest on the images risen up, the feeling of love radiating from them as warm and comforting as the fire.
He ate the fish, spitting out the bones, and curled up beside the fire, with its light playing over him. He was not cold—he was never cold—but he still wore the soft, worn, linen tunic, the leather breeches he had been wearing when he left … wherever it was.
He stared into the fire, trying for a moment to dredge up the name. He could see it in his mind, smoke in the air, the Wild striking the wall that had been in the sky, the glowing fire-salamander in the hot water pools in that cave. There had been someone who had kissed him, ashes and wine in their mouths.
Terec felt a pang, and another face came into his mind, lean and elegant, with a jawline that he had loved to trace with his fingers.
Conju, came the name, whispering in his mind, as if even the Wild could not dissolve that anchor in his heart. Terec smiled at the fire, letting a few tears well up as he memories ran through his mind, took shape in the flames, all those splendid moments with his friend.
And then he did dissolve into sleep, and when the next day came he did not surface.
* * *
He had swum in the lake on Conju’s father’s land, and he had always loved laying just below the surface, face turned up, the cold water welling below him, the sunlight forming a wavering barrier, holding his breath and able to be suspended there in moments beyond time and care.
With practice, he learned how to live in that suspension.
If he did not think, did not try to name anything, he could float there, suspended below the surface of full consciousness, aware of sunlight and shadow, of the colours and textures in the world without, but not present to it.
That wasn’t quite right, he mused one night. Almost the opposite. He was so present he dissolved into pure awareness.
Eating food over the fire brought him awake almost every time. He could float, careless in every way, as his body and magic worked in concert, instinctive as an animal, through all his animal life.
But fire was human, for all it was sparked from his hands as he drew them down twigs and tinder, and once he had awoken to the strawberries he could not again fully subside.
He did not quite want to. Some part of him wanted to rouse, to be consciously in his body, to name the things he saw and did and thought and felt. To feel, in fact.
But when he sat by the fire, rabbits or fish or game birds spitted over it, in a circle of light with the night hugely dark around him, he shied away from his feelings. Some were dark and cold, loneliness and fear and sorrow. Others were bright and warm, joy and contentment and ease, and those he found more frightening.
Who was he, what had he become, that he ran through the Wild like an animal, and was glad?
And yet when he ran like an animal, when he let instinct and magic guide him, when his nose caught scents he could not name, when his ears heard sounds he could not parse, when his eyes saw shapes he could not discern and his hand flung a stone he had not thought to pick up and hit a bird he had not noticed, he did not care about anything at all but the moment.
Not moments in which he found himself.
Moments in which he lost himself.
* * *
Yet he surfaced more and more.
The seasons were changing, the nights growing longer and colder. He did not spend long beside his fires now. He would eat, and spend the time he ate reminding himself of faces and names. Sometimes he stumbled over matching face to name, knowing one was his sister, his brother, his mother, his father, but not being able to assign their proper names, and then it was easier to douse his fire with an impulse of will and let himself dissolve with the afterimages of the sparks in his eyes.
He had no words for the struggle in his heart. He wanted to stay in that floating, lucid dream state, when his magic and his body were at one, his mind unneeded, careless.
But he did care.
He did.
One day he woke to himself in the middle of a vast plain threaded with innumerable waterways.
It was full of birds, hundreds of thousands of geese and ducks and swans and tall, elegant cranes. Terec had a belly full of snow goose, and he did not know why he could not sleep. He let his fire sputter and go out, but though the night pressed close, full of the sound of all those hundreds and thousands of birds, he did not fall asleep.
The ground beneath him was uncomfortable.
He examined that thought with a strange incomprehension.
There had been no sense of discomfort. He remembered it as a word from before, from that life on the other side of the wall in the sky.
His head turned to the side of the sky where a pale golden light hung there.
He did not like to look at that golden light. His magic and his body and his memories all retreated from it.
But his mind woke up, and said: The Wall.
The wall in the sky. The edge of … before.
Terec shivered as a cold shudder racked him, and turned deliberately away. He would not sleep, would find it impossible to drift, with that hanging over him.
But he could not leave it behind.
The waterways seemed to guide his footsteps always in parallel with the Wall. He turned again and again away, and again and again found himself facing it.
Without being able to drift below the surface, his thoughts interrupted his ability to know the wordless world. He tried, tried to remember what he had been, how he had been, but all he had were images.
There had been no words for so long. Now he wanted to name everything, and had no words. He had never known the names of these plants, these birds, these incredible clouds of insects.
His magic simmered just below the surface, steady and unconcerned, burning each insect that dared come too close. He was not cold. He could light fire when he thought of it, and douse the fires as well, as easily as he moved his hand to grip or drop a thing.
Finally he stopped trying to avoid the water, and instead plunged into each stream and pond, rousing the flights of geese and swans and ducks and cranes, struggling through the soft muck at the edges, the thickets of rushes and reeds. He put his back to the Wall and each time he lost himself and found his face to it he turned again and struggled away.
He was strong, his body fuelled by fire and the food of the marshes: even with his thoughts interfering there were so many birds a stone would hit one, and there were fish and frogs innumerable, and somehow his hands knew to pull up certain of the rushes and chew the crunchy, sweet hearts at their bases.
The days were shortening, and the air was growing colder. The grasses and rushes were changing colour, golden and violet and brown. The birds were mustering, and there were fewer clouds of insects.
He went north. The Wall still hung in the sky to the south, and he hated it, the knot of emotions that tangled his thoughts until he tripped, the grief and longing and fear.
In the night it was better. The Wild danced above him, green and red and silver-gold, calling him ever north and hiding the Wall. He followed it through the nights, only stopping now when hunger cramped his stomach. He did not always light a fire, sometimes choking down the fish raw, sometimes willing the fire in himself to cook the carcases as he continued on.
At last the land began to slope up, and the marshes grew drier, the waterways further apart, and he could run instead of stumble.
Terec ran, aware that the birds were rising behind him, flock after flock lifting up and heading south. Some went straight for the Wall, striking it with their beaks, great silver and white circles rippling out from where they passed through.
Others, most of them, turned right or left, following the line of the Wall away from the north, going where only they knew.
Terec looked at them, but he had never wanted to fly. He liked the fire and the water and sometimes the earth. He liked the ice, thin as the finest glass in the mornings at the edge of the pools and ponds in the wide and increasingly empty land.
He followed the sky-fire north. Each night was longer, colder, and he ran faster, the ground firmer underfoot, the distant Wall almost nothing more than the haze of smoke or mist in the air.
Game was scarcer, but plump, fat and thick-furred, ready for the coming winter. Terec ate hares and ptarmigan and other animals whose names he did not know, feeling the silky winter fur of the hares, eyeing the thick yellow fat, gorging himself. But he was moving too much to put on a layer of fat, and though his hair and beard were long and thick they were not a pelt fit for the winter.
He did not think of that. Thoughts of the coming winter pressed on his conscious mind, his animal instincts, but each time fear trickled into his awareness the fire rose up and obliterated it.
* * *
He remembered that he looked back for the Wall, to find it disappeared at last in the distance.
He remembered that the snow fell in white pellets, the wind bitter and sharp in his face, but though he blinked against the stinging pellets, he felt no bite of the cold, no fear of the wind.
He followed the lights in the sky, the Wild, driven no longer by the desire to get away from the Wall but by some deep urgency to go north, to follow the Wild, to run faster and faster.
The birds had gone south, driven by the coming winter. Terec ran north, into the face of the snow, at last forgetful of his words and his fears and his logic, aware only of the call of the magic in his blood and the fire in the air.
And then he came to the Ice.