Chapter 92 - She Changed Him (1/2)

It took Charles four horribly undignified days of staking out the back wall for him to spot Alpheus and Catherine escaping. They were playfully squabbling about something he couldn't quite catch but it was clear that they were both amused.

His heart constricted. How dare she smile so prettily at that buffoon! How dare she jump into his arms to get over the wall! Had she lost her mind?

He followed them anyway. They held hands and talked as they walked away from the palace, though he was too far away to hear what was being said. Both of them were dressed like commoners so if you didn't already know they were royalty it would be impossible to tell.

Charles would have thought they would stop somewhere downtown but they kept walking. For miles. He was getting slightly winded from keeping up with them but pushed forward regardless.

Finding out what they were up to would put the final nail in Alpheus' coffin. He wanted to ensure that happened personally.

The two of them wandered into the poorer part of the capital, which was about as far from the palace as one could get while still being in the city. What on earth would possess them to come here?

On the very last row of houses in the slum, a small herd of black haired children greeted them with big smiles and showed them into the house. Charles had never seen so many people with black hair in one place.

His hair was dark too but that was only because his maternal grandmother had been a foreigner. Hair like this wasn't common in Annalaias. The only other person he had seen with it before today was Alpheus.

He dared to get close enough to the windows of the house to peek inside. A group of people—almost entirely with black hair—was crowded inside a tiny living room. Only Catherine's and one other man's golden hair were different.

Charles had no idea what they were talking about but the atmosphere was cheery. Everyone there seemed quite close.

Upon further inspection, he realized that all of the dark haired people in the room also had the same gray eyes as the prince. If they were all related to royalty, why were they in the slums? Something about this did not add up properly.

He needed to tell Sigmund what he saw right away. Perhaps he would be able to make sense of this.

***

Sigmund was as baffled as Charles had been. The only conclusion he could come to was that those people were all foreigners…but that did not explain why Alpheus looked like them. He was the son of the king and queen.

Members of the royal family of Annalaias frequently married foreigners in order to strengthen political ties—like Rosenia and Mariela—so it wasn't too suspicious unless you thought about how none of their other children looked like Alpheus either.

Charles had been young the last time he saw the princesses before they were married off to allied countries but they all had much lighter hair like Sigmund and Franz. This didn't make sense at all.