Terec and the Wall: Terec of Lund, #2

By Victoria Goddard

In the north of Ysthar, past the edge of the Empire of Astandalas, there is the tundra, and beyond the tundra, the great wall of ice. No one goes there, save for a few hunters after mammoth ivory or furs, unless it is to look upon the Ice and then, suitably impressed, turn back to be awed by the wall of magic that is the border of the Empire.

 

But there are those for whom the Wild is not only out there but a magic within their blood, and for them--or at least for Terec, once of Lund and now only of the wastelands--the Ice is a wall that might, perhaps, contain a door ...

 

Book 2 of Terec of Lund, to be read after Terec and the Wild.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria Goddard
• Release date: Apr 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781998133178

Victoria Goddard

Victoria Goddard is a fantasy novelist, gardener, and occasional academic. She has a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto, has walked down the length of England, and  is currently a writer, cheesemonger, and gardener in the Canadian Maritimes. Along with cheese, books, and flowers she also loves dogs, tea, and languages.

Book preview

1

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