The Betrayed Heir: Reborn To Rule The Star Domain

Chapter 7: The Sleeping Sovereign

His mother found him sitting on the garden wall that evening, bandaging his palm with the wrong end of a strip of linen.

“Give me that,” Seraphine Valerius said, and took his hand.

She did it the way she had done it when he was seven and fell out of the pear tree. Brisk, unsentimental, her mouth pressed thin. She smelled of rosewater and ink. He had forgotten she smelled of ink. She had kept the clan’s correspondence for twenty-six years, and nobody ever gave her credit for it.

Yulen watched her fingers wind the cloth. Strong, steady, a little ink-stained at the knuckle. In his first life, he had never seen his mother’s body. They had told him only that she had been taken.

He did not realize he was crying until she looked up.

“Oh, my heart,” she said, and stopped. She set down the bandage. She put both hands on his face and held it.

“I don’t know what you saw,” his mother said quietly. “Your father told me nothing, and I did not ask. But you look like a boy who has already buried me.”

He broke. There was no other word for it. He folded forward into her shoulder, a grown man with a clan on his back, and she held him exactly the way she had held him when he was seven, one hand moving in slow circles between his shoulder blades.

After a while she began to hum.

It was a small, wandering tune, the kind of melody a woman sings to a baby in a cradle. Yulen knew it. He had heard it his whole childhood and never thought about it. Mira had been rocked to it. It had no words.

He lifted his head slowly.

“Mother. Where did you learn that song?”

“My grandmother. She taught it to my mother, who taught it to me. The Valerius wives have always sung it.” She smiled faintly. “I was told it was a lullaby.”

“And now?”

“Now I wonder.” Seraphine drew a breath. “Your father is a good man, Yulen, but the Valerius men have always been proud of their swords. We women were left with the other things. The songs. The oaths. A sentence my grandmother said on her deathbed, which I have never repeated to anyone.”

“What did she say?”

“When the star-key wakes, take the heir beneath the first tablet. Let the blood choose. And whatever you hear, child, do not be afraid of the voice.”

A breeze moved through the garden. In the house, a lantern went on.

Yulen stood.

—

The ancestral hall was empty at night.

Three hundred tablets stood in tiers across the back wall, each one bearing a Valerius name in gold, and at the very top, taller than all the rest, was a plain black stone with a single word carved into it. Valen.

Valen the Unbowed. The first patriarch. Thirty thousand years dead, if the clan histories could be trusted, and the histories did not agree on a single other detail about him.

His father stood beside him with a torch. His mother stood at the foot of the dais with her arm around Mira, who was wrapped in a blanket and very, very quiet.

“I do not like this,” Dorian said, for the fourth time. “I am telling you now so you cannot say I didn’t.”

“I know, Father.”

“I also want it noted that I will be standing at the top of the stairs.”

“Noted.”

Yulen climbed the dais. At the foot of the black tablet, half hidden in carved clouds, was a small socket in the shape of a seven-pointed star. He had walked past it a thousand times as a boy and thought it was decoration.

He put the silver key in the lock and turned it.

Nothing happened for three breaths.

Then the floor beneath his feet shuddered, and a seam of pale blue light ran across the stone, and the whole dais slid soundlessly aside, revealing a staircase that went down into the dark.

Wind rose from below. It smelled of dust and snow and something very old.

“Brother.”

Mira had followed him up. Her small hand gripped his sleeve. Her pale eyes were wide and shining.

“It’s calling you,” she whispered. “But it’s not calling me. It’s sad about that.”

Yulen knelt in front of her. “I’ll come back.”

“Promise?”

He had promised that to Bram, and to his father. It was getting easier to say. That frightened him more than anything. “I promise.”

She let go.

He went down alone.

—

Seven hundred steps. He counted. The torchlight gave out at the two hundredth, but the walls took up the work with a faint, silvery glow, as if the stone itself remembered what light was. The air grew colder. His breath fogged. He thought of Aurelith Square, and kept walking.

The stairs ended at a door with no handle. It opened when he touched it.

Beyond lay a chamber larger than the ancestral hall above, a dome of black stone with no ceiling. Where a ceiling should have been, there was the sky. Not the sky over the Valerius manor, but something older and stranger, a vault of slow-turning stars so close and bright that he felt he could reach up and stir them with his hand.

In the center of the chamber, on a plain stone throne, sat a man.

He was very still. His hair was long and silver-white, spread over his shoulders like water. His robes had fallen to dust, but his skin was whole, pale as old jade, and there was a faint glow beneath it like banked coals. His eyes were closed.

He did not breathe. But Yulen could feel, in the way you feel a thunderstorm before the first drop, that he was not dead.

He was asleep.

Yulen took one step forward. The stars above him turned.

And a voice that was not a voice, that came from the stone and the air and the marrow of his own bones, spoke quietly in the dark.

You came back.

Yulen froze. His hand had already gone to the sword that was not at his hip.

I felt you fall, the voice said, slow and very tired, like a man speaking from the bottom of a well. I felt the whole world turn. I did not think you would be able to climb back.

“Who…” His voice cracked. “Who are you?”

The sleeping man’s lips did not move. The stars wheeled once above them.

Do not be afraid of the voice, child. A pause, long as an inhaled breath. Welcome home, Valen.