The man leaned back in surprise, his face creasing with … laughter?
Yes. Laughter. Terec felt his fire burble and heat in his chest. He shifted position, remembering how to sit upright, straightened his back, tucking his elbows in, all those postures of etiquette he had been taught until, he had thought, they were simply how he was.
The man laughed, and reached forward to his glass, his eyes gleaming. “They say that wine is the benison of society, but I must admit I was not expecting it to be high society.”
Terec felt his face move in the unfamiliar motions of a smile. “Hardly,” he demurred. “Not … now.”
“Jakory Greenwing,” the man said, indicating himself. “Major, to be technical; Jack, to be preferred.”
That was a little too quick and clever for Terec to parse, but he grasped the point of the introduction, and nodded back. “Terec of Lund.” He winced. “Or … I was. Just Terec, now.”
“Terec of the Wild,” the man, Jack, said. He frowned, his eyes growing distant. “Lund, Lund … I think … I remember hearing about your disappearance. Not too often one of the Upper Ten Thousand runs off to be a wild mage. It was all the gossip for a season. Not that we often get court gossip at home, but I happened to be at court that season and heard it.”
Terec worked his way through Jack’s words. Before he had quite formulated any sort of response, Jack went on.
“Please—don’t think it was—I can understand why you left, with magic like that. Not something you could keep within the Empire … I remembered particularly because my good friend’s brother showed a few signs when he was very young, of wild magic. For a time we were all alert for any rumour.”
“I didn’t want to go,” Terec said, curling his hands. He touched the bread and cheese, and frowned at them. His stomach rumbled, and he picked a few crumbs off the edge of the bread. “I couldn’t stay.”
Jack nodded, and addressed himself to his own meal. Terec ate mechanically, the taste and texture so foreign in his mouth, and yet waking memories that had long since subsided. The wine helped it go down. He slowly relaxed. When Jack yawned hugely, Terec was surprised into a laugh.
“Lady, I am weary,” Jack muttered. He looked around the shack. “We should keep watch …”
“There’s no one around,” Terec said, feeling the Wild close by. “The Wall on one side, the Wild on the other … not even any animals bar a few birds.”
Jack hesitated, but now even Terec could see how exhausted he was. Terec was tired, too, but not as bone-deep as the other man.
“I’ll watch,” he offered, and when Jack gave him a grateful smile managed to smile tentatively back. He let Jack move around slowly, piling up some sort of old blankets by the fire, and went to sit in the doorway, the door open behind him and his face to the glowing sky.
* * *
Jack slept behind him, beside the fire.
Terec sifted through his memories, murmuring words out loud, remembering names, people, places, things.
He named all his family, and all of Conju’s too, and all the tenants on their fathers’ neighbouring estates. He named the towns of Lund and Vilius, the duchy of Forgellen, the other duchies of the Geir.
It was bittersweet, remembering them, naming them, their faces coming to mind, some blurry and distinct, some as sharp as if he’d seen them that very morning.
Oh, how he missed them.
He stared up at the sky. From the doorway, the threshold, he could see the Wall in the sky. The Border, he corrected, remembering the proper name for it. The Wild danced on the free side, unconstrained by the wizards of Astandalas, powerful and capricious as any emperor, any heart.
Terec watched the sky turn, the Wild dance, the stars tilt and fall away from the rising sun in the morning. Perhaps Jack would have paper and a pen, and Terec could write a letter to his family, to Conju, to tell them he was … alive .
He looked down from the resplendent sky at his hands. His fingers were strong, sinewy. He clenched his fists, spread out his fingers, stared at the way the tendons in his wrists moved, the muscles of his forearms were defined. Wiry muscles, hard under his touch.
He ran his hands across his arms, down his torso over the ragged, filthy remnants of his tunic, the leather breeches moulded against his legs with endless use and wear. There was nothing soft about him now, not a single ounce of fat. Each muscle was sharply defined without bulging.
He stroked his beard. There was a twig near the steps, and he picked it up, but fumbled trying to remember how to hold it like a quill. His fingers did not want to bend in those shapes, make those fine, impossible motions.
Perhaps Jack would help him remember. He was an officer, a major, he would be accustomed to writing. And he seemed kind, in his own way, gentle with Terec’s … madness.
Half a dozen crows began to squabble in a tree above the shack. Terec cocked his head, listening with the part of him that knew the animal world.
There was a soft step behind him, and Jack said, “What do you hear?”
“They have found food,” Terec replied, and then, hearing the distance in his own voice, scrambled upright, forcing himself away from the lure of the wind and the nameless world.
“You should have woken me,” Jack said, but he was smiling.
“I was … thinking,” Terec said, trying to smile back.
“Would you like to sleep now? Or eat?”
Terec was not accustomed to eating more than once a day, and he shook his head.
“You should rest. I’m sure that magic took its toll.”
His magic stirred as if in insulted. But he was tired, Terec was. He had walked through the night and the ice and the fire however long it had been when he drifted after the mountain fell.
* * *
He woke, and found the surface of consciousness easy to breach.
He sat up and ran his hands through his hair, his beard, combing them with little fizzling sparks of his magic to clear the tangles.
Jack sat at the table, a cup of some sort of herbal tea (mint, his nose identified) steaming beside him. He had clearly been staring down at the wooden top, but looked up when Terec rose.
“There’s water,” Jack said.
Terec stared at him, but the meaning came more quickly, and he nodded jerkily in answer before rising fluidly and striding across the shack to the door.
It was a bright day, the air clear, somehow more translucent than usual. The mountains rising around them seemed almost weightless, as if Terec could turn his head and they would turn translucent, or waver as their reflections in the bucket of water by the step.
He washed his face, his hands, and breathed deeply. His fire rumbled, content. There were feathery clouds, very high up, catching the sunlight with the glints of the Wild as it refracted against the golden curtain of the Wall.
Terec looked at the Wall, mute and enormous, hiding all the mountains and valleys and people on its other side, and he ducked his head and returned to the shack.
Jack piled mint leaves in another cup and poured more hot water onto them. Terec sat on the stool, and frowned quizzically when Jack shook his head and smiled at him.
“Perfect posture,” Jack murmured. “Truly not what I expected from the wild man walking out of a stone wall in front of me.”
Terec had nothing to say to that. He pulled his cup towards him, and saw that Jack had drawn lines on the wooden surface with charred sticks. The lines made no sense to him, but they did not seem to be words.
“I am trying to work out what to do,” Jack explained. “I don’t suppose you’re familiar with the geography here?”
Terec opened his mouth, and shocked himself with the rough laugh that tore itself out of his throat. He laughed until he coughed, and then he nearly broke into rough sobs of commingled humour and disbelief.
At last he groped his way to a certain fragile balance.
Jack did not look alarmed or pitying. He studied Terec thoughtfully, as if Terec was telling some fascinating story he did not know whether to believe.
Finally Terec sipped his lukewarm mint tea and was able to say, “I don’t know where we are.”
Jack’s face went still, and then he laughed ruefully. “Of course not. You did come out of a solid rock face … I had forgotten our people couldn’t do that, you see. The people here can. The Lowessy. The Stone Speakers.”
Terec had a hazy image of a river of men climbing up the steep path towards them before the fire obscured his vision and memory alike. “Can they come through that … pass?”
“Not after you cracked the mountain,” Jack replied. Before Terec could quite digest that statement the other man tapped the table, at a point near the middle. “That was the Gate of Morning, it’s called, the pass into Bloodwater. I’d come up from the Seven Valleys, that’s to the south,” he tapped another set of lines.
Terec stared helplessly. He did not know any of these names. Surely they were not anywhere in the Vale of Astandalas?
“What happened?” he ventured.
“I was at Loe, or rather my company was, I was on a scouting mission into Lowessy territory. On my return I discovered the fortress had been betrayed and the command staff were being led as captives. My scouts and I followed—there were three of us—but we were only able to rescue one of the commanders, the general, alive. We got to the pass—Vozhi, my lieutenant, figured out where we were—but the Lowessy were coming behind us. Someone had to hold the pass so the others could get to the Border and tell them to close it. There was an opening, you see, the plan was to come behind in secret, take the pass from this side.”
Terec frowned. None of those places made any sense, but he grasped the main point. “Is that where we’re going? The opening?”
Jack chuckled bitterly. “No. I heard it close—you were fair out of it by then, I can see.”
Terec nodded. He did not even have any distinct memories after the fire, just a whirlwind of scents and colours and sensations.
Jack pondered his rough … map, that was what this was. A map. Terec looked at it again, and said, “Where are we?”
“Here,” Jack said, tapping a point.
“No,” Terec said, frustrated with his inability to think in words. “Where … what country? What … mountains? I don’t know … I can’t remember … ”
Jack looked at him with dawning comprehension. “This is the southwestern part of Northwest Oriole. That’s … Alinor. You were … still on Ysthar?”
“Outside the Vale.”
“And you walked through the stone to find yourself here in time to save my life.”
Terec ducked his head, feeling the unfamiliar-familiar sweep of embarrassment up his face. “I followed the Wild through the ice.”
“As you say,” Jack replied agreeably. “I was part of the Seven Valleys campaign, the idea being to push the Border back another range or two—there’s some fine land on the other side, so our sources say—and connect across to the coast on the other side, which already belongs to Astandalas.”
Terec stared at the table. The lines made little sense to him. “Where are you from?” he asked, inconsequentially.
“South Fiellan, in the middle part of Northwest Oriole—say, that’s an idea,” Jack murmured, leaning over his map, tracing out lines with his fingers, stepping up along one strongly marked line. “This is the same Border that runs up to the mountains bordering West Erlingale … if we followed it up we’d find another outpost eventually, and we could cross there. I’d be closer to home that way, too.”
Terec felt his stomach twist at Jack’s clear longing. “You would not go back to the Seven Valleys?”
“Can’t even if there wasn’t a battlefield or three between here and there,” Jack replied. “Not with what you did to that pass. It fell down sheer. Even if we had ropes, that would just drop us at the rear of a hornet’s nest of angry soldiers. No. It’s north, north and east for me. And—you’re welcome to join me.”
That made his stomach twist again. “I can’t … pass through the Wall.”
“The Wall? Oh, the Border … yes, I suppose it would seem a wall, to you.” Jack hesitated. “Did you talk to anyone about … ways to contain your magic?”
Terec remembered long, long hours scouring the few references to wild magic he could find. Over and over again he had come up against the three responses Astandalas had to the Wild: exile, madness, or death.
He had chosen exile, and found madness. Death would come eventually, no doubt.
He shook his head.
“Perhaps it will be different on Alinor than it was in the Vale of Astandalas proper,” Jack said, not exactly bracingly but not hopelessly, either. “The magic was so thick when I went there that even I felt it. I don’t know how anyone stands it. And … my wife is from the Woods … they have strange magic there, they are close to Faerie and their magic is much closer to the Wild, I think. Someone there might know. And even if not … the Border runs close behind the Woods. If you needed to, you could live there, and we could … visit you.”
Terec lifted his gaze from the table and stared at this man he had just met, who was offering him … showering him … with such precious promises.
“Why?” He whispered. “Why do you offer …”
“You saved my life, and I do not take that lightly,” Jack replied, and then, when Terec could not help but continue to stare, to plead silently with him that he did not understand, could not understand, Jack said: “Terec … my best friend’s brother might have wild magic, might share your fate. Do you think we haven’t spent many hours talking over what might become of him?”
Terec looked away, emotions rising up in his throat. Had his mother, his father, his siblings, talked over his wild magic? He had tried so hard to hide it, but surely the servants had mentioned the singed sheets. He’d been scolded for taking candles to bed when he was younger.
Jack sounded very empathetic. “You were lost, but you are coming back to yourself, the more you talk to me, aren’t you? How could anyone see that and not want to help?”
Terec looked back at him. “I was lost, yes,” he said. “Or free.”
“They look much the same, sometimes,” Jack answered. “I have seen it with soldiers who sell out. They are free … and very often lost, for a while. Seven years is a long time.”
“Is that how long you’ve been a soldier?”
Jack paused, his eyes boring into Terec’s. “No … that’s how long you’ve been gone.”
* * *
They spent another night in the shack, resting, for there was not much to gather by way of supplies. Jack had his sword, and Terec his magic. Jack found a rusty, broken knife-blade in one of the corners of the shack, and spent much of the day forming a usable hilt for it.
Terec napped, listening to the wind and feeling the fire simmer in his heart.
Seven years he had wandered in the grip of the Wild.
Seven years.
He could hardly fathom it. Jack had no reason to lie, not about something so easily found out. Or easily found it if they ever found a way back into the Empire, or to contact with it. Terec felt the looming presence of the Wall at all times, regardless of whether he could see it or not. It was a blank, bland golden curtain, hiding all that lay behind.
“It’s in battle-readiness along here,” Jack said. “We can’t cross directly anywhere south of … oh, I expect the Fifty Baronies.”
Terec had never paid very much attention to geography, and could probably never have named more than the Imperial Provinces and a handful of their capitals. Northwest Oriole; East Oriole; and there was some other part of Alinor that was part of the Empire.
Jack looked longingly at the golden Wall, then slung the bundle of raggedy blankets from the shack over his shoulders. There was no more bread or wine, but he’d found another wheel of the hard cheese, and a length of dusty string. Terec had nothing to carry. There was nothing he could find useful in the shack.
Terec set his left side to the Wall and cocked his head to the whirling, invisible call of the Wild. Was it still urging him north? Was there a call coming out of the high mountains ahead of them?
He looked back once, but there was nothing familiar behind them, just the beginnings of the valley that led back to the pass Jack had been left to guard and the opening in the Border that had closed without him.
The wind was light and playful, tugging at his hair, his beard, bringing with it the scent of snow and water, green growing things and distant game. He blinked up at the deep blue sky, the ethereal clouds, the last few stars of the morning as the sun rose somewhere on the other side of the mountains, and something shifted in him.
“It’s … beautiful,” he said.
Jack had stopped on a rock in the middle of the stream barring their path, and he turned now in one full circle, face turned up to the same circle of mountains and sky.
“Above the mountain,” Jack said, his voice ringing suddenly clear, “Infinite the lake of stars; a fire burns brightly.”
Terec remembered … something. One of those splendid summer afternoons under the willows, dappled sunlight in his eyes, a book of poetry fallen from his hand, roses and spice warm-scented on his skin, the voice of his friend in his ear—
His heart leapt into his throat, the fire surging in his veins.
Here there was snow in long veils cast off from the peaks, the wind sharp as a knife, a voice calling: alluring, luring him once more onwards and on, to wherever that narrow path led that lay betwixt and between the Wall and the Wild and those pale, still-shining stars.