Nobody climbed the mountain beyond the war-shrine. The high passes led nowhere and the footing was treacherous. An age ago this whole side of the mountain had flaked away in the great shelves, and legend said a particularly hubristic city was buried beneath the debris of millennia, punished by forgotten powers for forgotten crimes. What was left was a single path zigzagging up to the high reaches through land unfit for even the most agile of grazers, and killing snow in the cold seasons. And these were not the only reasons no one climbed there.
Lynesse Fourth Daughter was excluded from that "no one." When she was a child, the grand procession of her mother's court had made its once-a-decade pilgrimage to the war-shrine, to remember the victories of her ancestors. The battles themselves had been fought far away, but there was a reason the shrine stood in that mountain's foothills. This was where the royal line had gone in desperate times, to find desperate help. And young Lyn had known those stories better than most, and had a game attempt at scaling the mountain which myths and her family histories made so much of. And the retainers had chased after her as soon as people noticed she was gone, and they'd had cerkitts sniff her trail halfway up the ancient landslip before they caught up with her. That had been more trouble than she'd got into in any five other years combined. Her mother's vizier raged and denounced her, and she'd been exhibited before the whole court, ambassadors and servants and the lot, made to stand still as stones in a penitence dress and a picture hung about her neck illustrating what she'd done. Her mother's majordomo, still smarting from when she'd stolen his wig, had overseen her humiliation. And her sisters had mocked her and rolled their eyes and told one another, in her hearing, that she was an embarrassment to her noble line and what could be done with such a turbulent brat?
And her mother, in whose name all those functionaries had hauled her back for public punishment, had just watched, and Lynesse Fourth Daughter had looked into her eyes seen . . . not even anger but sheer exasperation. Lynesse, a child with three Storm-seasons behind her and one more to go at least before anyone might consider her grown, had done a thing nobody else cared or dared to do. Disobedient, yes; irresponsible, yes; more than that, her mother's look said, I cannot understand what would even kindle such a thought in your head. As though Lynesse was not badly behaved but actually sick with something.
That had been two Storm-seasons past. The sting of it had faded; the memory of that ascent had not. Which means it was worth it, the now-grown Lynesse Fourth Daughter decided.
They had only caught her that time because she had stopped climbing. She had only stopped climbing because she'd finally seen fo what was up there: the Elder Tower. She had been the first human being to lay eyes on it for a very long time.
