Chapter 10: Top of Highspire

The written half of the Emblem Trial ran for three hours, and James slept through the middle of it.

The hall held two hundred desks in neat rows.

Each first-year had a paper of a hundred questions, a pen and a glass of water.

The examiners paced the aisles with their hands behind their backs.

At the front, the Dean sat under a banner with a painted clock.

James read the first forty questions in twenty minutes.

He answered them in thirty.

Then he looked at the clock, saw that it was a quarter to three, and laid his head on his arm.

"Mr. Phoenix," an examiner hissed. "Mr. Phoenix."

"I'm resting my eyes."

"They are closed."

"That's the method."

"You may not sleep in the Trial."

"It's the nap clause," James said into his sleeve. "Please check clause nine."

The examiner left to check clause nine.

Nobody in the hall had ever heard of a clause nine.

The host's memory had supplied it in the middle of the night, from a dull book of family law.

The examiner came back a short while later, pale and sweating.

"It exists," he told the Dean in a whisper. "It is in the founding charter."

"What does it say?"

"The Phoenix heir is entitled to one rest hour in any formal proceeding."

"Why?"

"I am told the first Phoenix king fell asleep during a war."

The Dean looked at James's sleeping back for a long time.

"Let him rest," she said.

He woke at four with the imprint of his sleeve on his cheek.

He answered the last sixty questions in twenty-five minutes.

When he handed in the paper, Felix, two desks over, was still on question eighty.

Felix gave him a small, despairing thumbs up.

The practical half was held in the Trial Court, a long stone yard behind the academy.

It had three obstacles in a row, marked with banners.

First, a chasm of mist that dropped away into nothing.

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