The ice—the Ice—barred his way north.
Terec stood at the base of the enormous mass, the wind stirring his hair and beard, the frayed remnants of his clothes. His fire expanded just a little, not enough to burn the cloth but enough to warm him to his extremities.
It was night. The Wild danced above the glacier, the ice sheet, moving as if it could hear the deep, creaking, crackling song of the ice. Terec stood in a jumble of rocks and rubble, sheets of meltwater frozen slick by the night. The snow was no longer melting in the middle of the day, he noted idly.
His magic was still urging him forward.
He slipped and clambered up the rocks and rubble until he was right at the ice itself. It shone eerily in the Wild’s light, which caught echoing glints of green and red and gold deep in the heart of the ice.
Terec put his hand on the ice. Above him, the Wild turned about itself.
His magic pulsed, and water formed around his hand, dripping down his elbow, but Terec knew how inconsequential he was before those masses of ice. His little magic, enough to ban him from … the place before … was not enough to daunt this.
And still the Wild called him north.
He cast around, slipping around the ridges of stone and frozen earth the front of the ice sheet had ploughed up, and nearly missed the crevasse leading north but for the sudden flare of light deep within the dark.
He was far beyond any heed to reason. What matter to him if he followed his magic into the heart of the ice wall? He would die in the coming winter if his magic did not save him.
He did not much care one way or the other. His mind touched that thought and shrugged away. His body flexed, shoulders and knees, his hands moving on the ice, his magic stirring, as if to say, no, it is better to live.
Perhaps, Terec thought, the closest thing to humour he’d felt since … before, and stepped unafraid into the crack.
* * *
The crevasse was a narrow gap. It was open to the sky above him, but he did not see that to begin with. His attention was wholly focused on the passage: the walls, breathing cold, damp, air, and the ground, rough and rugged at first as he stumbled over folded and ridged earth and rock.
Deeper in, the ground was smoother, scoured to a smooth, scraped-clean stone. It was damp, a little slick under his bare feet. When he stretched out both arms he could touch the ice walls.
Despite the meltwater everywhere the air was dry, stale, almost old.
Terec breathed it in, holding the air in his mouth, his lungs, then slowly releasing it. His inner fire simmered, tingling all the way to the edge of his fingers, his toes. His skin raised goosebumps, not of a cold but of a deep, visceral excitement.
He stopped at one point, extended his arms again, fingertips stretching to touch the ice. Ahead of him the crevasse was almost invisible, a blue crack in a mass of blue and green shadows.
He tilted his head back. The ice rose up, high as the tower on his father’s keep, the high domes of the—what was it—that white building where the emperor lived—the palace. These were not simply walls, two-dimensional, tracing out human habitation. These were solids, massive, so heavy the earth bowed beneath their weight.
Even mountains seemed airier, their heads raised up in the sunlight, crowned with snow and stars.
Terec tilted his head back. The narrow ribbon of sky, a hundred feet above him, was a deep blue rimmed with white and spangled with stars for all it was still full day. He twisted around; there was a line of white behind him, the sun shining on the outer world.
But that was no longer for him.
Terec turned back, set his face to the mystery before him, the shadows of ice translucent as glass but so thick it was opaque with its own depth.
The ice was crowned with snow and starlight, but high, high above him. He had never felt so much a creature of the earth. The fire simmered in his veins, comforting, exhilarating, urging him on.
He walked north, into the heart of the ice.
* * *
It was the end of summer. The days were short, the nights ever longer. Terec followed the twisting, fractured line of the crevasse deeper and deeper, not stopping when the shadows darkened into indigo. He walked as if in a dream, his breath and skin steaming.
The ice was singing.
A deep, creaking symphony. Popping and cracking, the melodious drip and ripple of meltwater, the rumble and hum of far-hidden subterranean rivers, the exhales of the air whistling and vibrating through the invisible secret passages of the ice.
The cold pressed against him. Terec called the fire, a thought as simple and instinctive as breathing or scratching an itch.
The fire answered, as it had not … before.
He walked on. He was hungry; when he thirsted he wiped his hand against the ice wall and licked the water from his palm.
The liquid froze as the night deepened. Terec’s eyes adjusted slowly to a kind of dreamy dimness around him, all spangled with the stars that seemed to drift downwards with the ashes of snow.
His fire burned in his veins, under his skin. Steam wreathed around him; the cold pressed in, a weight like the weight of darkness and doubt.
The night grew darker and heavier. The ice groaned and laboured around him as the huge masses settled and expanded as they froze.
And then he saw the Wild.
Not in the sky above him, but deep in the ice.
He gazed wide-eyed at the shadows, the pale fire deep like the depths of a mirror that showed another world. He did not feel as if he were walking between mountains of ice; he felt as if he walked the narrow path between edge of glass and silvered back.
Terec’s magic answered. It ran in tiny little flames above the surface of his skin.
Deep in the ice the Wild danced, flames of green and red and a strange pale white, the sky-fire of the north refracted into the luminous heart of the ice sheet.
Terec walked forward, the Wild dancing on either side of him, as if it were a host of outriders accompanying him, or guards flanking him, or dogs rushing beside him on a hunt. He was falling, always falling, into the moment when lucidity became sleep.
He walked on.
The crevasse began to narrow.
Terec hesitated when he noticed that he could no longer see that crown of starlight and snow when he looked up; only a pale blue arch of ice wreathed in the Wild’s green fire: just the colours he had once loved. Pale blue, pale green, white: ice, to freeze out the fire in his blood.
This ice sang to his fire, and though he hesitated, he did not turn back. He had chosen to follow the Wild: he followed it now, north, always north. Freedom, it sang to him, as it had sung when the falling star fell into his hand. Freedom.
And then he came to the end of the path.
Terec stopped there, where the crevasse opened up into a small cave, all smooth-sided and sinuously moulded.
Somewhere far away from him the sun must have risen, he thought vaguely, for the ice was glowing a clear, impossible, blue.
It was not large, this chamber: large enough for him not to be able to touch the ceiling or opposite walls at once, but not more than three paces wider than that.
In the very centre was a hole opening upwards, like an eye staring up at the sky, and below it a perfectly circular pool of perfectly blue water.
He had never seen anything that colour. It was bluer than ultramarine, bluer than a forget-me-not, bluer than the sky. It was so blue it hurt his eyes and filled his heart.
He walked around the pool, tracing the wall with his hand. Once, twice, three times. The Wild in the ice was coming closer to the surface, as if drawn by his touch.
He was suddenly unbearably thirsty.
He knelt before the pool, and stared down at the image wavering there, the face crowned with sunlight. All a dark smudge of beard and hair, but for a bright star in each eye. He did not remember that light, but he could not quite bring any faces to mind, let alone his own.
If that was him. Perhaps it was a person, some nymph of the glacier, some god of the wild, shaggy and impossible.
A drop of water fell from above him and plinked into the pool, just the sound of a harp-string plucked by his sister, and the image wavered and vanished.
Terec had to reach down with a cupped hand to reach the water.
The shock of the water on his hand woke him fully. He rocked back, staring with sudden fear around him, unable to see the entrance of the crevasse in the shining blue ice, the twisting flames of the Wild pulsing closer, a full circle around him, around the impossible blue of the pool. The white eye above him stared down pitilessly on his panicked realization that he had walked carelessly into the ice the full length of an arctic winter’s night.
He shuddered as the fire in him shivered and flickered, but the fire heartened him, loaned some courage, some strength, something like hope.
Freedom sang the Wild in the ice, in the wind moaning through the eye above him, in the harp of the meltwater, in the groan and creak and sighing of the ice itself.
And what was its freedom?
But his magic was a part of him now, and answered his call, his thought, his heart, not only rising in flame but subsiding, dowsing, fading to cool embers. He had never been able to call it to hand or send it away again; and that was a freedom for which he had given up all that lay Before.
He had given up his humanity to win it, he thought again, and again bent his head over the pool.
This time his mind was awake, and he could accept that it was his face he saw.
Or himself, at least.
He traced the heavy pelt of beard, the weight of his hair, lifting his hand to run his damp fingers through the strands. The fire warmed and dried his hands, singed the knots out of his hair, as precise as the wish his hand might move more gently.
His family had not been so highly-ranked that he’d worn his hair shaven except on that one journey to the capital to see the emperor on his throne. Terec looked at the light haloing his reflection, and remembered that golden figure, the face he had not been able to look on, the magic so thick and choking around him all he could do was bow and feel the fire in him stir and leap awake for the first time.
He had never worn his hair long; and always been clean-shaven. His beard was a rich brown, sable, a touch ruddier than his hair. Both wavy, his hair falling in heavy locks, smooth-shining, his beard rippling down his chest.
And his eyes. Terec studied them, unnerved by the way his reflection seemed to be studying him back. Something in him wanted to back away, presenting images of bears and wolves and huge long-toothed hunting cats and other creatures he could not name nor imagine he’d ever seen. In that period when he had given himself wholly to the magic he had run as an animal, and learned animal instincts. One did not look into the eyes unless in challenge.
He dropped his gaze, and dipped his hand into the cold, cold water, which was somehow perfectly clear when he lifted it up to drink, and silver as it beaded his beard.
He drank down his fill. It was intensely pure, as impossibly so as its colour.
Freedom, whispered the Wild, dancing around him.
And what, Terec wondered, with a rustiness in his mind, a sense of breaking free of some crusty resistance, did this freedom mean?
Come and see, said the Wild, with a thread of something that was not quite humour.
There was nothing behind him. If he walked back down that long crevasse … then what? He would be in the winter of the Wild anyway. And this way—well—perhaps there was something to come now that he had woken to himself and his magic was no longer alienated from him.
He stood up and walked around the pool to where the Wild’s pale fire had gathered together.
It was not exactly a doorway. It hovered there, the white fire twisting and ceaselessly shifting deep below the surface of the ice. Now it seemed a winged bird, now a horse, now a leaping fish, now a great cat, now some great serpent—
Terec could not look away, mesmerized by its motion, the shapes a fire could take when the mind dreamed upon it.
He set his hands on the ice, palms flat, fingers outstretched, bracketing the Wild.
Come and see, said the Wild.
Terec was wide-eyed and awake as he called up the fire in him, the answer to the lights in the ice, and walked forward into the tunnel of steam and air that opened for him.