Early the next morning, they were up high in the palace, this time in the library wing, looking for a way out that would give them easy access to the north side roofs. One little windowless stair after another emptied only into attic storerooms, servants’ quarters, or promising niches that might have been doors before having stones set firmly into the arch or square-cut gap. Once more, repair debris helped point the way: a stack of slates by a closed door in a blind passage.

By the time they made it up a ladder and out the trapdoor at the top, the sun was well up. The ladder, they discovered, had been on one side of a chimney stack that now hid them from anyone on the south palace roofs. They were dizzyingly high even for boys who liked to climb on roofs. Camwyn’s stomach seemed to writhe inside him. Aris looked paler than usual.

“We’re here,” Camwyn said. Sitting down with his back to the chimney and one hand clasping the last rung of the ladder seemed a good idea. The roof here, shadowed by the chimney stack, was still damp; he ran his fingers over it. Yes, slippery.

“I didn’t know it was this high on this side,” Aris said. He looked straight out to the horizon, not down.

Ahead of them, the city roofs made jagged shapes out to the north wall; from up here, the places it had been breached in Gird’s war showed clearly. Beyond were the pastures and then the forests and then higher hills and forests beyond. Up there somewhere, Camwyn reminded himself, was the northernmost part of the kingdom, the North Marches, where the dragon had come from.

He looked east and west along the ridge of the roof, trying to spot the skylight of the treasury. It should be … there. He forced himself to let go the ladder and scoot on his backside around the chimney stack to the ridgeline, telling himself he was less likely to be seen than if he stood up.

“Won’t he be expecting you at breakfast?” Aris sounded scared. Camwyn turned to look, surprised. Aris was still sitting by the chimney stack, now more than his body’s length away. “The king, I mean. Don’t you have breakfast with him?”

“Usually,” Camwyn said. He looked at the sun, then the distance to the skylight he thought was the right one. It would be quicker with just one. He looked back. “It will just take me a flick of time, Aris. You don’t have to come.”

Aris reddened. “I’ll come. I’m not scared.” He stood up; Camwyn could see at once that Aris had moved too quickly. His foot skidded on the damp roof; he grabbed for the ladder but raked his hand on the stone chimney instead and—his balance completely off—began the fall that could be nothing but fatal.