The Betrayed Heir: Reborn To Rule The Star Domain

Chapter 5: The First Person to Die

“Put it away, Father,” Yulen said, without turning. “Please.”

There was a long, terrible second in which three hundred people watched the patriarch of the Valerius Clan decide whether to trust his son.

The sword slid back into its sheath.

Yulen stepped forward to meet the captain, and the black-and-gold line tensed. He kept his hands open and visible. He had one weapon in this room, and it was not made of steel.

“Captain. May I see the warrant?”

The man hesitated. Harrow nodded from behind the Prince.

Yulen read it, taking his time. The ink was real. The seals were real. But there was something it didn’t have, and he had known it wouldn’t, because in his first life the same scroll had been delivered hours later, with a patriarch already dead and no one left to object.

“This warrant,” Yulen said, “is signed by His Majesty and countersigned by the Minister of Rites. It does not bear the seal of the Seven Seats.”

“The Seven Seats have no authority here—” Harrow began.

“Article Nine of the Guardian Charter,” Yulen said, and the hall went still, because it was a law older than the dynasty. “No patriarch of the seven guardian clans may be seized, tried or imprisoned by any court of the Empire without a quorum of the Seven Seats’ consent. Signed by the First Emperor himself, who needed the Guardians more than they needed him.”

He turned to the front rows, where six envoys sat in their clan colors, frozen like deer.

“My lords and ladies. Is the quorum present?”

No one moved. Everyone in the room understood what he was asking them to do: to stand against the throne, in front of the Crown Prince, on nothing but the word of a bridegroom who had just humiliated his own wedding.

Then a dry, cracked voice said, “The Mo Clan consents to hear it.”

An ancient woman rose from the third seat, leaning on a staff carved like a heron. Lady Mo Shuhua, eighty years old, and she looked at Yulen with eyes like chips of flint. “I have been waiting forty years for someone in this hall to read that Charter aloud, boy. I had begun to think I would die first.”

A second chair scraped back. Then a third.

Not all of them. Three of the six. A bare quorum. But enough.

The captain’s jaw worked. He looked at Harrow. Harrow looked at the Prince.

Lucien said, quietly, “We will withdraw.”

The Imperial Guard filed out in confusion. Harrow followed with a face like curdled milk. At the doors the Crown Prince turned and gave Yulen a long, level look, not rage, not yet, but the careful look of a man re-measuring an opponent.

Then he was gone. Isabella went with him, her pearl veil in her fist.

She did not look back. Yulen noticed, with a distant surprise, that he had been waiting for her to.

—

“You are going to tell me how you knew,” said his father.

They stood in the empty study, the guests dispersed, the red lanterns still swaying in the hall beyond. Dorian had not asked a single question for three hours. Now he held a cup of untouched tea and looked, for the first time in Yulen’s memory, like a man who was afraid.

“Tomorrow,” Yulen said. “I promise. Tonight I need you to do something that will make you angry.”

“Good. I have been wanting to be angry all day.”

“Sleep in my room. I’ll take your study.”

“No.”

“Father—”

“I am the patriarch of this clan, and I will not hide in my son’s bedroom while—”

“Then be the patriarch,” Yulen said, “who lets his son bleed first.”

Silence.

Dorian looked at him a long time. Whatever he saw in Yulen’s face, it ended the argument. He set down the tea. “I will be in the next room with a spear,” he said, “and if anything touches you, I am going to take that as a personal insult.”

“Yes, Father.”

—

They came at the third hour past midnight.

Yulen sat in his father’s chair in the dark, one lamp burning low, a plain practice sword across his knees. He had been sitting that way for four hours. He was not afraid. He had already died once. The strange thing was how quiet it made him.

The window latch clicked.

No sound. Not even a breath. Grey cloth, grey masks, six shapes slipping over the sill like smoke, and the first one was already moving, a short blade angled low toward the chair’s back, toward the place where a man’s heart would be.

Yulen turned the chair.

His sword went in under the man’s ribs, and his Qi surged behind it, and the assassin’s eyes widened above his mask. It was a very small expression. Surprise. A boy’s surprise.

He was dead before he reached the floor.

Yulen stood with the wet blade in his hand, and waited for the horror to come. In his first life, he had never killed a man. He had assumed he would feel something.

He felt his hands. Steady. That was the thing that frightened him.

Then the other five were on him.

It was not elegant. Foundation Establishment Qi against six trained killers in a room too small to dodge. A blade slashed his shoulder. A kick cracked a rib. But he knew these movements, because he had watched the Imperial Guard’s own assassins at the execution square for three years, and nobody watches the killers more closely than a man waiting to be killed.

Two fell to his sword. One went through the lattice screen with a cracked skull. The door slammed open and a spear came through it like lightning, and Lord Dorian Valerius, in his sleeping robes, roaring, finished the fourth.

One left standing. The leader, scarred hands, slick with someone else’s blood. Yulen put a blade to his throat before he could reach the window.

“Who sent you?”

“…Prince…” the man coughed, then, strangely, he laughed. “The Prince? Boy, the Prince doesn’t even know the Gray Herons exist.”

Dorian froze mid-step. “What?”

“We don’t take orders from the Eastern Palace.” The assassin’s eyes slid to Yulen, glassy with something like amusement. “We take them from higher. From inside the Palace walls. Someone who’s been watching your family a very, very long time.”

“Who?”

The man’s jaw clenched. A faint, bitter smell of almonds. Yulen grabbed for him, too late, and the assassin slumped against his arm, foam on his lips, tooth cracked.

But as the head rolled, Yulen saw it.

Behind the left ear. A tattoo, small, black, no larger than a coin. A nine-pointed star.

Yulen stared at it until the lamp guttered, and his father said his name twice, and he realized he had been holding his breath.

The Crown Prince was not the hand that held the knife.

He was only the glove.