The Betrayed Heir: Reborn To Rule The Star Domain

The rotten pear hit Yulen Valerius on the cheekbone, and he was almost grateful.

Pain meant he was still here. Pain meant the broken thing he called a body still answered to the mind inside it.

“Traitor!” a woman screamed from the crowd. “Sold us to the Obsidian Empire!”

He had never met an Obsidian soldier in his life. But three years of telling the truth to deaf ears had worn the words smooth, so he said nothing. He knelt on the execution stones of Aurelith Square, wrists chained to an iron ring, and watched his breath turn to fog in the cold.

He was twenty-seven. He looked fifty.

His left leg had been broken so many times it no longer remembered how to be straight. Two fingers were missing from his right hand, a gift from a tavern keeper who caught him stealing bread. And beneath his navel, where his cultivation core had once burned like a small sun, there was only a scar. Cold. Hollow. A dried-up well full of stones.

Once, they had called him the Star of the Valerius Clan. Once, Royal Academy professors had stopped their lectures when he walked into a room.

Now children threw fruit at him and bet coppers on how long he would last.

“Quiet,” the executioner told the crowd, bored. “Prince’s orders. We wait for the bells.”

The bells. Yulen almost smiled. Of course.

Today the Sun Cathedral would ring for the wedding of Crown Prince Lucien Aurelion and his new princess consort. And Lucien, who had always had a taste for theatre, wanted a sacrifice to open the festival. Three years he had kept Yulen alive for this. A crippled beggar in the gutter was a better lesson than a corpse in a grave.

Yulen had counted his dead so many times the numbers had turned into a prayer. Father, at the ancestral treasury, a hundred arrows in him and still standing, they said. Old Bram, at the south gate. His uncles. The cousins who had been children. Mother, dragged away in chains, and he never learned where.

And Mira.

His little sister. Fourteen years old, the girl who had once sulked for a week because he forgot her honey cakes. Mira, who vanished the night of the slaughter. No body. No name on any list. For three years he had asked every beggar, every thief, every drunk in the Lower Quarter whether they had seen a girl with a crooked braid and eyes like winter water.

Nobody had. And that nothing was the only thread of hope he owned. He was holding on to it now, with the blade ten steps away, because the alternative was to let go.

A hush rolled through the crowd.

On the white-and-gold balcony of the Grand Pavilion, two figures stepped into the light. Lucien first, tall and golden in his crimson robes, one hand lifted to the cheering city like a man blessing his own reflection.

Then her.

Isabella had grown more beautiful in three years. That was the cruelest part. Yulen had spent a thousand cold nights picturing her haunted, guilt-ridden, hollow-eyed. She wasn’t. She wore a phoenix crown and she glowed.

She said something to Lucien. He laughed. And then, to the surprise of the crowd, she came down the pavilion steps, her train carried by four maids, and the guards parted for her like water.

She stopped in front of him.

White plum blossom. She still used the same soap. The night it rained at the Academy, she had shared a bowl of noodles with him under the eaves, her shoulder pressed to his, and told him nobody had ever looked at her the way he did. He had built ten years of his life on that bowl of noodles.

“Do you want to know something funny?” Isabella said softly, so only he could hear. “I did feel sorry for you. Once. For about a week.”

His voice came out as a rasp. Three years without a real conversation. “Why my family? You could have just left. I would have let you go.”

She tilted her head. Something crossed her face, and it wasn’t guilt, and it wasn’t triumph. It was impatience.

“You were never worthy of me, Yulen.” She straightened her sleeve. “Don’t look so heartbroken. You were so easy.”

Then she turned and climbed the steps and did not look back, and that was how Yulen knew, with total certainty, that she would never think of him again.

Lucien raised one hand.

The executioner stepped forward. The crowd leaned in. Yulen kept his eyes open, not because he was brave, but because he wanted the last thing he saw to be the sky.

Father. Bram. Mira. I’m sorry.

I gave my whole life to people who never deserved it.

If there is any god left in this rotten world, let me do it once more. Just once. I swear I’ll do it right.

The bells began to ring.

The blade fell.

Darkness.

Then, impossibly, the bells again. Louder. Brighter. Cheerful. Not tolling for a funeral but pealing for a celebration, and under them a sound he had not heard in three years: a man humming off-key on the other side of a door.

Yulen opened his eyes.

Red silk canopy. Sandalwood smoke. Sunlight on his face.

“Young master!” Old Bram’s voice, muffled and cheerful. “Three hours until the Dragon Hour! Rise, rise! A groom who oversleeps his own wedding is a groom who sleeps through his own marriage!”

Yulen stopped breathing.

The bells were ringing for his wedding.