The Betrayed Heir: Reborn To Rule The Star Domain

Chapter 8: The Crown Prince’s Greatest Mistake

The first blow fell at the end of the week, and it did not come from a sword.

It came in a stack of papers on his father’s desk.

“Imperial Revenue has frozen every Valerius account,” said Elder Harlan, reading from the top page in a flat voice. “Three moneyhouses have called their loans due within ten days. The Merchants’ Guild has suspended our trade charter pending an investigation. And Lord Fang’s letter informs us, with regret, that Jade Crane is no longer able to extend us credit.”

Silence in the council hall.

Seven elders of the Valerius Clan sat around the long table. Dorian sat at the head. Yulen sat at the foot, because he was the heir and nobody had yet decided what that meant.

“There is more,” said Elder Harlan. “The rumors in the capital are that Lord Dorian’s heir lost his mind at his own wedding and accused the Crown Prince of treason in front of three hundred guests. There are verses in the taverns. One of them rhymes ‘Valerius’ with ‘delirious.’”

A dry cough somewhere. An uncle smothered a laugh and was glared into submission.

“We have until the end of the month,” Harlan went on, “before the clan is insolvent. I propose, with the deepest respect, that Lord Dorian consider stepping down in favor of—”

“No,” said Yulen.

Seven heads turned.

He stood. He was twenty-four years old, with a bandaged hand and a bruise on his rib, and the sleeping silence of a buried star-chamber still ringing under his bones. He had learned something in that chamber that he had not yet told anyone, and it made him unreasonably calm.

“Give me two weeks,” he said. “Then decide.”

—

His first stop was a moneyhouse that had never made any list of importance.

Half a dozen shop windows, a failing sign, a clerk sleeping at the counter with his face on an abacus. The only person awake was a thin girl of nineteen at the back desk, sorting bad debts into three piles by color of ink. She had ink on her nose. She looked up with the expression of a woman who had been told by everyone, all her life, that she was not worth hiring.

“Miss Su Linwei?” said Yulen.

She stared at him. “I don’t sell loans to the Valerius family,” she said. “The whole city knows you’re about to be—”

“I know.”

He put a thick leather purse on her desk.

In his first life, Su Linwei had become, within ten years, the richest woman in the Star Domain. They had called her the Golden Abacus. She had bankrolled the Frost Legion’s long winter. She had broken three empires’ treasuries with a pen. And in this life, she was nineteen, in a dying shop, sorting bad debts for forty copper a week.

“I have a problem,” said Yulen. “Every moneyhouse in the capital wants its loans paid, and the people who hold them have promised to sell my debts to the Imperial Treasury at a discount. I need someone to buy them first. Quietly. All of them. Before the end of the month.”

Linwei looked at the purse. She looked at him. She was nineteen, not stupid.

“That is not enough money to buy a fraction of those debts.”

“No,” said Yulen. “But it is enough for a down payment on every debt Crown Prince Lucien owes to the same houses.”

She went very still.

“He’s borrowed heavily,” Yulen said gently. “Against a harvest that doesn’t exist. Against a convoy that has not yet left. His creditors are going to be very interested to learn the convoy is a fiction.”

“How do you know about a convoy that hasn’t left?”

“Because,” said Yulen, “in twelve days, I’m going to make sure it never arrives.”

—

The Winter Grain Convoy left Aurelith three days later: two hundred wagons, eight hundred Imperial guards, bound for the Frost Legion’s northern wall. The proudest charity of the Crown Prince’s year. The posters said so.

Yulen remembered it very well. In his first life, he had read about it from a gutter, in a newspaper someone had used to wrap fish.

The grain had been rotten. Not all of it. Just enough. Under the top layer of every cart, sand. Lucien had sold the real harvest to fund his private ledger, and sent worthless filler north in its place, and the Frost Legion had starved on the wall for three months while their general wrote begging letters that no one answered.

In the spring, the Obsidian Empire had crossed the weakened border. The Imperial Court had needed someone to blame.

He had been the answer.

So on the evening before the convoy left, Yulen sat in his father’s study and wrote a short letter, unsigned, and sent it north with a courier who rode three horses to death.

It read, in full:

General Gao Wen. In the third cart of every tenth wagon, dig down two feet. Then decide who your friends are.

The convoy reached the Frost Legion’s wall nine days later.

General Gao Wen was a famously dour man, an ex-peasant who had been promoted for refusing to retreat. He had a drawer full of letters to the capital that no one had answered. He had also, apparently, a very short temper for a man who had spent a winter eating boiled leather.

He opened the third cart of the tenth wagon. He dug down two feet.

Then he opened the third cart of the twentieth.

Then, according to the courier who brought the news south, General Gao stood in the courtyard in front of two hundred wagons and eight hundred Imperial guards, picked up a handful of grey sand, and said, quite calmly, “Gentlemen, I believe you are lost.”

The Imperial escort had a choice. They could fight the Frost Legion, which had four thousand veterans and nothing left to lose. Or they could hear what their commanding officer had been told to do with the real grain.

They chose the second.

On the morning the news arrived, the Crown Prince of the Star Domain sat in the Eastern Palace, ready to sign the order that would seize the Valerius Clan’s final accounts. His hand was on the brush. His advisor was already pouring ink.

The door opened.

“Your Highness,” said a pale-faced messenger, on his knees, “the Winter Grain Convoy… It has… vanished.”

Lucien’s brush stopped above the paper.

A single drop of black ink fell from the tip and spread across the Valerius Clan’s name like a wound.