And soon enough, through the silent, vacant land, they had come to the tower’s door, which was round and had no furnishing, not handle nor bell. The utter quiet seemed greater there, in the tower’s shadow, as though there was some sound the building itself was making, inaudible to the ear and yet loud enough to resound insensibly from every rock. Looking up the tower’s height towards its apex, Lyn decided that those old artists had the right of it after all. The tower was greater than its mere physical dimensions. It reached all the way past the sky to the stars.
When she’d seen the tower before, all those years and Storm-seasons ago, she’d felt nothing but excitement. The thrill of the forbidden, something made physically appreciable that had previously only existed in stories and ill-proportioned illustrations. Child Lynesse had just been thrilled that she’d made it so high, seen so far. The Tower of the Elder Sorcerer!
Child Lynesse had also known that her mother’s servants were right on her heels at that point. Obviously, she’d been ready to press onwards to the wizard’s very door. Obviously. An easy thing to swear to when you were thirteen heartbeats away from some harassed functionary’s hand landing on your shoulder to haul you back.
And here she was, and there were no court menials at her heels to restrain her. She was at the very portal to the sorcerer’s domain, where no other had ever stood since her ancestor had come, to beg the help of magic to fight magic. Just as she now needed to fight magic. She, the princess of the blood. The one whose duty it was to do such impossible things. Go to the forbidden places. Strike bargains with the unknowable.
I don’t think this was a good idea. And this was a poor time to have such a thought. In Lyn’s experience, that particular regret only slunk into sight after she’d done something her mother wouldn’t approve of. To find it turn up ahead of schedule was profoundly inconvenient because it meant she couldn’t just do and then lament in hindsight.
“Esh’，” she breathed, teetering perilously at the brink of a common sense decision. Let’s just go back. Except her friend looked at her, and there was just enough of We came all this way in Esha’s expression that Lyn reached out with the iron pommel of her knife and rapped hard on the metal of the circular door.
She had wondered if the sorcerer had servants, and what form they might take. No form at all, apparently, for a voice spoke from the air, or perhaps from the door itself. It used sounds she did not know, although the rhythm of them, and the questioning lilt at the end, told her they were words.
“A spirit,” Esha said, wide-eyed. “A spirit as his doorman.”
“Howe comyst vysitingen thys owetpost?” demanded the door, its tone the same but its words now halfway familiar, sounding like Lyn’s tutor when she read the old, old books.
“Did it ask who we were?” Lyn was hanging on to her nerve by a thread.
Esha shrugged, her hand on her sword hilt. “Just barble-garble to me.”
“Who has come to visit this outpost?” And now the words were strangely accented but fully comprehensible, as though the voice had been listening to their conversation and reminding itself how people spoke.
A moment, in which Esha’s look made plain that, of the two of them, it wasn’t her place to answer that. And there was strength to be had, in the reciting of names to an old formula. “I am Lynesse Fourth Daughter of the Royal Line of Lannesite,” Lyn declared. “I call upon the ancient compact between my blood and the Elder.” Because that was how you did it. The road of those words had already been trodden, so she could force herself to follow it.
A little mouth opened in the stone beside the door, round as a lamprey’s. “Substantiation of your heritage is required,” the door voice told them pleasantly.
“Shouldn’t have mentioned blood,” Esha cautioned. Lyn stared at the mouth, knowing that there was no good way forwards.
Why else did I come? The recklessness that had brought her to the door in the first place—that would have had her child-self ring the bell, if bell there had been—had put her finger in the opening. True to form, it bit her, a pinprick jab from its single tooth. She hissed and yanked her finger out, seeing a bead of the vaunted blood royal on the tip.
“Your heritage is acknowledged,” the door pronounced, and then opened, separating into six segments like triangular fangs that slid into its stone frame. The hall beyond was smaller than Lyn had expected, because surely a sorcerer could make great rooms within the bounds of a tower. Apparently, such grand chambers were not for casual visitors, though.