The Betrayed Heir: Reborn To Rule The Star Domain

Chapter 4: The Valerius Clan Does Not Kneel

The first receipt was already in his sleeve.

Yulen drew out the handkerchief and unfolded it on his palm, and the jade fish lay there on the white cloth, small and green and innocent.

“Elder Quill,” he called. “Would you examine my engagement token?”

In the second row, the Valerius clan alchemist raised his eyebrows. Elder Quill had treated half the clan for forty years and had never once been asked to evaluate a gift. But he rose, adjusted his spectacles, and took the jade between two fingers.

He froze.

Then, very carefully, he pressed a thumb against the fish’s belly and channeled a thread of Qi into it. The jade pulsed. Faint green veins crawled across its surface like roots.

“This,” Quill said hoarsely, “is a Hollow Vine Talisman.”

A murmur rippled through the cultivators in the room. Several envoys sat forward.

“A parasitic sigil. It drains the wearer’s Qi, a little at a time, over years, and feeds it to whoever holds the paired stone.” His voice shook. “The Seven Seats banned it three hundred years ago. The wearer wouldn’t feel anything. They would only slow down. Weaken. And blame themselves.”

Yulen watched Isabella’s face. The tears had stopped. She stood very still beneath her pearl veil.

“I bought it from a street stall!” she said. “I didn’t know what it was—”

“Then you won’t mind showing us the paired stone,” Yulen said. “You’ve worn it on your left wrist for four years, under that bracelet.”

She didn’t move her hand. She didn’t have to. The hall had seen where her eyes went.

The silence that followed was a different silence. The first had been shock. This one had teeth.

“Slander,” Lucien said lightly, but there was an edge in his voice now. “Even a banned sigil proves nothing. Anyone could have—”

“Then let’s talk about money.”

Yulen turned to a middle-aged man in the third row, silk robes, round face, sweating. “Master Fang. You represent the Jade Crane Moneyhouse, I believe.”

Fang went the color of old rice. “Lord Yulen, I’m here as a guest—”

“Over four years, the Valerius Trading House sent twelve transfers to the Rowe Charity Fund. Two point four million spirit stones, for Madam Rowe’s illness, which I was glad to pay.” He kept his voice even. “The fund keeps its books at your Window Seven, Master Fang. I want you to read the first line of the outgoing ledger for that account. Not confirm. Not explain. Just read.”

“I can’t possibly— The privacy of our clients—”

“The Valerius Clan holds sixty percent of Jade Crane’s reserves,” Yulen said pleasantly. “I would hate to withdraw them on the day of my wedding. It would look so unfestive.”

Someone coughed. Someone else very quietly choked on a laugh.

Fang looked at the Prince. The Prince looked at Fang. And in that half-second, Yulen saw what he had spent three years wanting to see. Not fear. Calculation. The Prince was working out the cost of stopping him.

He had come here to watch a family die. He had not planned to be forced to open his mouth.

Fang’s hands trembled as he closed his eyes and recited. “The Rowe Charity Fund… outgoing transfers… converted nightly into spirit crystals… deposited to Account Nine. The beneficiary seal…” His voice dropped to nothing. “The Eastern Palace.”

The Eastern Palace. The Crown Prince’s own residence.

A noble in the back row stood up so fast his chair fell over.

“That is a lie,” Lucien said, and for the first time his voice was not smooth.

Yulen ignored him. He was looking past him, at the old woman standing alone in the front row with both hands twisted in her sleeves.

“Madam Rowe.” He walked to her and bowed, and that bow was entirely genuine, because none of this was her doing. “I’m sorry to ask this in front of everyone. How many doses of Heartroot Pearl has the Charity Hall sent you each month?”

The old woman blinked. Her mouth worked. “Heartroot… Oh, no, young master. Never. Isabella said it was too costly. Only river-herb tea, from the market. The same I’ve had for six years.” She looked at her daughter, puzzled and frightened. “You told me the Valerius were paying for my treatment. You told me I mustn’t ask for more, that we were already so in debt…”

“Mother, be quiet—”

It was the first honest thing Isabella had said all day.

It came out of her like a slap. Ugly, raw, without a trace of tears. Madam Rowe flinched as though struck. Three hundred people heard it.

The pearl veil had slipped. Underneath it, Isabella’s face was white and furious and, for the first time Yulen could remember, entirely real.

“What did you want me to do?” she hissed at him. “I was born in the mud, Yulen! My mother coughed blood in a cold room while you sat in the Academy library complaining that the lecture was boring. I had nothing. Nothing. You never even noticed what I was standing in!”

He looked at her for a long moment.

The worst part was that she was not entirely lying. That was what he had never let himself see. There had been a girl in the rain, once. She had been very hungry, and very alone, and she had wanted a way out.

“If you had asked me,” Yulen said quietly, “I would have given you everything.”

Isabella opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

“That’s the part I can’t forgive,” he said. “Not the money. Not the talisman. That you were so sure I would have said no.”

For one breath, her eyes shone. Then she looked away, and the moment closed.

A ringing silence filled the hall. The Crown Prince was no longer smiling. He stood with his hands loose at his sides, and Yulen realized that the man he had hated for three years had no plan for this. Lucien had known every move in his own script. He had not expected the actor to refuse the stage.

Then the great doors boomed open.

“IMPERIAL MESSENGER!”

Trumpets. Armor. A column of black-and-gold Imperial Guards marched down the red carpet, boots crashing on stone, and at their head a captain with a scroll raised above his shoulder like a banner.

The guests scattered to the walls. Minister Harrow was already on his feet, color rising in his cheeks. Not surprise. Relief.

“By order of His Majesty!” the captain barked. “Lord Dorian Valerius, patriarch of the Valerius Clan, stands accused of high treason against the throne. By the Emperor’s command, he is to be taken into custody at once, to answer before the Court of Judgment!”

A hundred swords left a hundred scabbards.

Yulen did not turn. He stood in the middle of the hall with the jade fish in his palm and his heart beating slow and cold as a funeral drum.

Dusk. The warrant had said dusk.

They weren’t waiting for dusk anymore. Which meant, for the first time in either life, the Valerius Clan had changed the script, and the people holding the pen had just panicked.

Behind him, his father rose from the front row and drew his sword.