The Betrayed Heir: Reborn To Rule The Star Domain

Chapter 6: The Treasure I Once Gave Away

He told his father the truth at dawn.

Not all of it. Not the beggar years, not the iron ring, not the sound his own leg made when the soldiers broke it. Just the shape of it. I died. I came back. I know what happens.

Dorian Valerius listened without speaking, sitting on the edge of the training platform with the first light gold on the stones. When Yulen finished, there was a long, wet-eyed silence, and then his father said:

“How did I die?”

“Standing,” Yulen said. “At the treasury door. They had to shoot you a hundred times.”

“Good.” His father wiped his face with the back of one scarred hand, as if it were sweat. “Good. I’d have hated to go any other way.”

Then he laughed, short and cracked, and pulled Yulen against his shoulder with a grip that hurt. “A dead man wouldn’t have tied his sash that neatly. You’re my son. What do you need?”

Yulen had rehearsed a speech. He forgot it. “The Starfall Marrow.”

“The old relic? That lump of dead crystal in the vault? Nobody has been able to wake it in three hundred years.”

“In my first life, I gave it away,” Yulen said. “Isabella asked to borrow it for her mother’s treatment. I handed it over like a loaf of bread. It ended up in the Eastern Palace by winter.” He swallowed. “I never asked myself why a dead crystal was worth that much trouble to the people who took it.”

Dorian’s eyes sharpened. “Then we’d better get it first.”

—

The Valerius treasury lay below the east wing, down four flights of cold stone, behind a door of black iron as thick as a man’s arm. Its steward, a thin, polite man named Corvin Lash, was waiting at the bottom with the key ring already in his hand.

“Young master. My lord. I heard about last night.” He bowed with exactly the right amount of concern. “Terrible business. If there is anything I can do.”

“You can open the vault,” Dorian said.

“Of course, of course.”

A small hand tugged Yulen’s sleeve.

Mira had followed them down in her nightgown, with a blanket over her shoulders and her braid half undone, and nobody had had the heart to send her back up. She stood on tiptoe and whispered in his ear, so low he barely caught it.

“Brother. That man is quiet too.”

Yulen kept his face still. He had spent three years of his life learning how.

Corvin Lash had served the Valerius Clan for nineteen years. He had been at Yulen’s coming-of-age ceremony. He had carried Yulen’s books when he was six. And, Yulen now remembered with a long, cold slide of his stomach, he had been the one who held the keys on the night the treasury fell. The treasury door had been opened from the inside.

He had never once suspected the steward. Why would he? The man was part of the furniture.

“Corvin,” Yulen said pleasantly, “the southern warehouse manifest is overdue. Would you fetch it? We’ll manage the vault ourselves.”

A flicker, very small, in the steward’s eyes. “Of course, young master.”

He handed over the key ring. He walked up the stairs without looking back, every step perfectly steady.

“He’s still quiet,” Mira whispered.

“I know,” Yulen murmured. “Not yet. When we know who is on the other end of the string, we’ll pull.”

The great iron door swung open, and the cold of three hundred years rolled out to meet them.

—

It was not much to look at.

On a stone pedestal in the center of the vault sat a black lacquer box no bigger than a loaf of bread. Dorian lifted the lid, and inside, on a bed of faded silk, lay a lump of dull grey crystal the size of a fist. It looked like a river stone. Tired. Ordinary.

His father shrugged. “I told you. Dead.”

Yulen reached for it.

The moment his fingers touched the crystal, it burned.

A shout tore out of him. His skin hissed, and he tried to drop it, but his hand wouldn’t open. The heat ran up his arm like a river of molten metal, into his shoulder, into his chest, into the golden wheel of his core. It was not the pain of being burned. It was the pain of being recognized.

“Yulen!” Dorian grabbed his wrist.

“Don’t,” Yulen gasped. “Don’t touch it. It’s… It’s reading me.”

His palm had split open on its own. Blood welled up and ran down the crystal’s surface in thin red threads—and the stone drank it.

In the center of the dull grey surface, a point of light appeared. Then another. Then a hundred, a thousand, a slow, silent spiral of stars blooming out across the crystal until the whole stone shone like a window into a night sky.

The vault hummed.

Every weapon on every rack began to ring, a low trembling note that rose through the floor and shook dust from the ceiling. Behind him, Mira gave a small, stunned gasp, and Yulen glanced back to see his sister standing perfectly still, her braid lifting from her shoulders as though underwater, her pale eyes glowing the faintest shade of silver.

“Mira?” Dorian said sharply.

“It’s singing,” she whispered. “Did you hear? It’s singing the song. Mother’s song.”

Then the crystal cracked.

It split along a thin bright seam with a sound like ice breaking on a spring river, and Yulen’s breath stopped as a shell of grey stone fell away. Inside lay a key. Small, silver, no longer than his finger, shaped like a seven-pointed star.

And as he stared, a thread of light drifted out of it, painting a faint glowing line in the air. A line that pointed up. Through the ceiling. Through four floors of stone. Straight toward the ancestral hall.

Dorian had gone very pale.

“That key,” he said slowly, “was never in any record I’ve read. Three hundred years of Valerius patriarchs have kept that stone in a box because the founding oath told them to. We never knew why.”

He looked at his son. His voice dropped.

“What did you do?”

Yulen stared at the key lying in his bleeding palm, and a quiet, terrible understanding rose in him, cold as the vault air.

In his first life, Isabella had not asked for the Marrow because it was valuable.

She had asked for it because someone had told her where to look.