“Roof-walking? Yes. I’m not supposed to, though. My mother says even the mischief of the brood is too valuable to lose with a fall. But in Fin Panir—” He stopped abruptly as they passed two guardsmen. Then he resumed in a lower voice. “One time I got out an upper window in the schools, onto the roof, and then onto the barn roof, and from there I made it all the way to the main buildings without touching the ground. Someone saw me, and the Training Master was waiting in my room when I got back in—and fair tanned my backside—but it was fun.” He chuckled, then looked at Camwyn. “Why? Do you know a way to the roofs here?”

“Yes,” Camwyn said. “And I have the king’s permission to go up as long as I have a companion. Want to come?”

“Of course!” Aris’s eyes sparkled. Then he sobered “But if we aren’t both in class really fast, we’re both in trouble.”

Camwyn’s excuse calmed the Marshal-Judicar, and he endured yet another lesson on the Code of Gird without doing anything to attract the Marshal-Judicar’s ire.

His and Aris’s first expedition came two days later, just before dawn. Camwyn had a night’s respite from his hand’s spontaneous flares and actually woke with the first light. He was half dressed when Aris scratched at his door. He let the younger boy in. Aris, like himself, was barefoot and had put on not his palace livery but an old pair of trousers with scuffed leather patches on his knees and a gray shirt with several mended rips.

Once on the roof, the world seemed lighter; all the stars had faded, and the sky was a peculiar shade of dull blue, brightening to the east, where a bank of clouds showed red at the upper edge. Below, the city made a dim pattern of lighter and darker blues and grays. They had not noticed the palace air as stale until they came out; here the air tasted of distant fields. Tiny currents set in the breeze like coils of wire in jewelry brought them here a wetter scent—mint, was it, or moss?—and then a momentary wisp of oak or wheat.

Camwyn thought of the dragon, always in the air, always drinking the wind, smelling and tasting all this. “Buildings stink,” Aris said. They were sitting now, side by side, arms clasped around their knees. “Kitchens may smell good, but everything else—even the flowers they bring in and the herbs they strew—smells better outside.”

“You like stables,” Camwyn said.

“Horses smell better than people,” Aris said. Then he said, “Sorry … I didn’t mean you.”

“I don’t care,” Camwyn said. The sky lightened moment by moment. “We can see well enough now, though.” He stood. Under his bare feet, the roof was chilly and a bit damp.