The transition from the twenty-first century to the thirteenth was not a gentle drift; it was a violent, bone-snapping collision. One moment, Julian Thorne was buried under three tons of limestone in a tomb near Xi’an, his lungs screaming for air as the “Nameless Prince’s” sarcophagus crushed his chest. The last thing he saw was the glowing green pulse of a jade disk.
The next moment, he was gasping for air in a room that smelled of sandalwood, expensive incense, and the sharp, metallic tang of blood.
“He breathes! The Prince breathes!”
Julian’s eyes snapped open. He wasn’t under a mountain. He was lying on a bed of gold-threaded silk. A young woman with a high-waisted Hanfu dress and trembling hands was leaning over him, a silver bowl clattering to the floor. Julian tried to speak, but his throat felt as if it had been scrubbed with glass. He reached for his throat, and his heart nearly stopped. His hands—usually calloused from excavation and stained with modern ink—were pale, slender, and covered in dark, purplish veins.
Poison, his mind whispered. As a historian, he knew the symptoms. Aconite.
“Water,” he rasped. The word came out in a dialect of Middle Chinese he had only ever heard in his linguistic reconstructions.
As he drank, the memories hit him like a physical blow. He wasn’t Julian Thorne—or rather, he wasn’t only Julian. He was Zhao Kai, the third son of the Emperor. A man history dismissed as a drunken lecher who died of “excess” at the age of twenty-two. Julian realized with a jolt of terror that today was the date of Zhao Kai’s recorded death.
He looked at the bowl the girl had dropped. The liquid was black and viscous. “Who gave me this?” Julian demanded, his voice gaining strength.
The girl, a maid named Meilin, fell to her knees, her forehead hitting the floor. “The Grand Chancellor said it would cure your fever, Your Highness! He said it was the Emperor’s own gift!”
Julian leaned back, his mind racing. The Grand Chancellor Qin. The man history remembered as a “loyal servant” was, in reality, a cold-blooded assassin. The Song Dynasty was a nest of vipers, and he had just survived their first bite.
He stood up, his legs shaking. He looked into a polished bronze mirror and saw a stranger—a young man of royal beauty, but with eyes that now held the cold, cynical weight of an eighty-year-old scholar.
“The Grand Chancellor wants a corpse,” Julian whispered to his reflection. “But he’s going to get a king.”
