Chapter 80 - Somebody Important (1/2)

Franz stared at his little brother in utter shock. Usually Al was pretty passive-aggressive towards him so I could understand how that amount of straightforwardness would throw him off. Maybe I'd had more of an influence on Al's personality than I thought.

”Where on earth is this coming from? Of course we have the same parents. Who gave you the idea that the king isn't your father?”

Al glared at him and crossed his arms over his chest, looking surprisingly menacing. He was normally such a human puppy that I forgot how intense he used to be. Granted, that intenseness was more gloomy than scary but he still had the capacity for heightened negative emotions.

”I assume you know about the Kanta clan. Didn't you ever hear that they all inherit black hair and gray eyes? I'll ask again. Did your mother give birth to me?”

Mariela looked back and forth between the two men having a standoff with anxiety written all over her face. Did she think Al was going to attack her husband or something? To be perfectly honest though, he might.

”I didn't witness it personally but she was definitely pregnant. She had a difficult delivery and no one was allowed to see her but Father for about a week. That was when I finally met you.”

Al and I exchanged glances. A week. The king, queen, and royal physician were likely the only ones who knew the truth but I was willing to bet that Al was not the baby the queen gave birth to.

Did she lose her own child? It would explain why she went into seclusion. Maybe she was depressed about losing her child so the king went out to find a substitute. But why grab a baby from a war-torn area you're in the middle of conquering?

I imagined that babies were lost frequently in this world because of the lack of medical technology. I read about this sort of thing happening before the year 1900 in my world. Whichever baby Al replaced couldn't be the only one the queen had ever lost. He was on the younger end of all of the royal children.

Another suspicious thing is that with all of the issues of succession already going on that they would bother bringing in another male child. If the queen wanted a baby so badly wouldn't it have made a lot more sense to bring in a female who couldn't ever take the throne?

I felt like there was a lot more to this situation than met the eye. None of this made sense.