Chapter 20: The Sky Wall

Grant found the bribe at two in the morning, because he had made a timetable for it.

He had drawn the steward's tower on the back of a lecture schedule.

He had marked the junior clerk's lodging and the clerk's usual hours.

He had marked the one hour a week the clerk left his door unlocked.

It was Tuesday, so the door was unlocked.

Inside, in the second drawer, under a pair of socks, lay a leather purse.

Forty gold, minus a few coins for a good dinner.

Beside it was a sheet of rough paper covered in practice scrawls of James's signature.

Every g had a loop.

Grant read the sheet twice.

He folded it and put it in his breast pocket, next to the eleven notes he carried everywhere now.

He did not feel triumphant.

He felt that he had been standing in the wrong line for years.

He climbed to the roof and looked at the steward's tower.

It stood over the capital, narrow and black.

A faint shimmer ran around its top, a ward set to stop anyone flying in.

The Sky Wall.

Grant had read about it once, in a manual written by his own grandfather.

It did not stop people who were already inside the sky, only people who came from below it.

He rose on Skyfold, climbed into the clouds, and let himself fall through the wall from above.

It tore at his skin for a moment.

Then he slid in through the cell window, bloody at the wrists, and landed on the stone floor.

James was sitting on the cot with his boots off, eating a stolen roll.

"You're late," he said. "I said nine."

"You said no such thing."

"I thought it loudly."

Grant stood in the middle of the cell with his chest heaving.

The cell was small, cold and clean, with a single narrow cot and one lit candle.

James's hands were folded around the roll.

They were long, lazy, ink-stained hands, and Grant had spent four weeks learning every one of their habits.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Took the Heirs' Emblems, Then Became Their King from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.