Chapter 08
“…I admit that what I just said was a slip of the tongue. Anyway, leave my room immediately. What on earth were you thinking, sneaking in here?”
“Of course I’d come to check. You have a record, after all.”
“You damn—”
The Great King stopped for a moment, glanced at me, and then continued.
“Your behavior is extremely irrational.”
The Clown King replied, “You’re the one acting completely irrationally—”
It was a truly impressive argument skill.
The two adults continued their bickering without end. I had already guessed it from the state of the room, but these two really did seem to have a terrible relationship.
“Don’t do this in front of a child!”
I shouted without realizing it.
The two men flinched and turned their gazes toward me.
“Um… fighting is scary. Big Uncle, I was about to leave anyway. I’ll be going now. Clown Uncle, let’s go together.”
“Yeah, you shouldn’t do this in front of a child, Hulag.”
The Clown King smirked triumphantly as if he had won. Meanwhile, the Great King’s face became even redder in contrast.
“Wait.”
He grabbed my hand and stopped the Clown King, who was trying to leave with me.
“Where are you going?”
“Uh…”
“I’m going to my room to drink milk and read storybooks. Right? The child likes the milk I make.”
I don’t particularly like it.
And if he meant honey milk, I only drank it once on my first day and never touched it again. This man had completely forgotten where he put the teaspoon. Later, I found it sitting on top of the ceiling fan, but I deliberately didn’t tell him.
How does a spoon even end up on top of a ceiling fan?
“There are many more storybooks here. Very educational ones.”
“Wow, that’s great. Then you can read a lot. You need to develop your emotional intelligence. I’ll be the one reading children’s books to the child, so good luck. You said I was the best at reading them, right?”
The two kings now simply stared at each other without saying a word.
I have a bad feeling about this.
What am I even doing here?
When I came to my senses, I was preparing a picnic in the backyard with the two kings.
Do these kings really have nothing to do? Aren’t they political leaders?
“Child, try this on!”
“You have no sense of aesthetics whatsoever. Anyone can see that this one is better.”
Before the picnic, the two adults were choosing my clothes.
I only realized it now, but the large door beside my bed—the one I had never opened—was actually a closet.
So that was where the clothes someone brought me every morning came from.
Though I wondered if I should even call it a closet. It was large enough for a person to enter. Shouldn’t it be called a dressing room instead?
If this was a closet, I could at least be relieved that if I ever got locked inside, I would have plenty of space.
“All of these clothes are mine? Who prepared them?”
“I, with thorough preparation and—”
“Most of them were prepared by the Thunder King. He always wanted a daughter. He had been getting things ready even before he knew you existed.”
“I prepared them.”
“You only paid after Mungkbatt asked you to buy them.”
“That is true. But what does that matter? It still means I prepared them.”
The childish bickering of grown adults showed no signs of stopping.
“Try this one. It would look great with a cloak.”
“This outfit is of higher quality.”
The one the Clown King offered was a flashy outfit with tiny bells dangling from the hem. With its sparkling embroidery, it looked exactly like the Clown King’s own clothes.
The one the Great King chose was made by cleverly folding and draping a large piece of fabric. It was the same color, but patterns were woven using threads with slightly different textures, and whenever the light hit it, faint flower patterns appeared.
“Pretty, right? It’s a matching outfit with mine.”
“How are you supposed to play outside wearing that?”
“It has bells! Running around while wearing this will be fun. Your clothes, on the other hand, look like they’ll fall apart if you move too much.”
The Clown King shook the clothes in his hand up and down, making them jingle-jingle-jingle, and asked:
“What do you think, child?”
Finally, they were asking for my opinion.
“I don’t really know…”
I didn’t want to take anyone’s side.
But I once again focused on the words that had been appearing in the corner of my vision for a while.
[Scary.]
[Liar.]
It wasn’t only the Great King.
At some point, similar annotations had started appearing above the Clown King’s head as well.
Or at least, it felt like they were appearing.
I wanted to ask again, but if even the Clown King treated me like an idiot, my pride would be so hurt I might die of embarrassment.
I had already become friendly with the Clown King, so for balance, perhaps I should side with the Great King today.
“I like gray.”
“Excellent taste. As expected. I suppose you aren’t his daughter.”
“Why? This one is prettier. It has more colors and more patterns! Doesn’t it look like a princess dress?”
“It looks like a princess dress chosen by an uncle with no sense of style who tried his best.”
“I’m not an uncle.”
The Great King made a strangely delighted expression, as if he was about to die of happiness.
The letters above his head shimmered faintly.
“So you went to help the Great King? How admirable. But next time, you don’t have to help him. This man has a fit whenever someone enters his study. He once told me that if I crawled in there one more time, he’d shove a bookmark into my eye.”
“When did I ever say that… Ah, I did say that. Well, I dislike my belongings being disturbed.”
After a short silence, the Great King continued, as if he had made a great decision.
“But you should tell me beforehand. Don’t sneak in and get hurt for no reason.”
“You’re desperately trying to earn points.”
“Be quiet.”
“Can you handle that? If I stop talking, can you keep the conversation going? Hm? I’ll really be quiet. Do you want to try walking together in silence?”
“…Trying to earn points. You are doing the same thing.”
“Yeah, I’m totally desperate. What about it? I’m working really hard to impress the child. What? You weren’t even trying to look good in front of the child? That’s terrible, isn’t it, child?”
The Great King seemed to realize once again that he could never win a verbal battle against the Clown King, so he closed his mouth.
The smug-looking Clown King became even noisier, turning everything he saw into a topic of conversation.
The weather, seasonal flowers, buildings, even grains of sand.
By the time we crossed the lake in the courtyard, he had naturally started talking about the lake.
“—and that’s how the lake over there was made. It looks like that now because it’s the dry season, but once the rain starts falling, it becomes quite beautiful. There are crayfish inside. Though technically they aren’t crayfish, they’re actually scorpions that drowned in the water, and if you fry them—”
“Who is that child?”
“Child?”
Perhaps because the weather was nice, we weren’t the only guests taking a walk through the courtyard.
A young woman holding a parasol and a child were walking together along the edge of the lake a short distance away.
“Ah… Chagatain.”
“She is your younger sibling.”
“My younger sibling?”
The woman holding the parasol noticed us and turned her head to greet us.
The child also turned toward us, then smiled brightly and ran over.
Olive-colored skin and slightly sharp eyes.
The child looked exactly like the Thunder King.
“Hello!”
“Greetings. Are you taking a walk?”
“I was checking because it seemed like the lake was starting to smell. The rain is late this year, so it’s becoming a problem. What brings you here, Great King?”
“I just finished investigating the study. I was taking a walk.”
Chagatain was an incredibly adorable child.
The child had the Thunder King’s straight, high nose, though the tip was rounded like a young child’s. And just like the Thunder King, the child had a loud voice—but because the voice itself was pleasant, it only sounded clear and bright.
I know a little about children.
From when I was around six years old, I used to feed, bathe, put to sleep, and read books to the landlord couple’s babies back home.
Compared to the children I had seen then, there was one strange thing about Chagatain.
‘Why does she still talk like a three-year-old?’
The sentence Chagatain said was actually closer to:
“Why did you come here, Great King?”
The pronunciation was closer to childish babbling.
It could simply be that her tongue was still developing, but while she could pronounce certain sounds perfectly, she strangely distorted simple vowels and final consonants.
It bothered me.
“Child, you’ve talked with me in my room before, right? I told you I had a younger sibling. This is her. Chacha, the child of the Rock King. She’s eight years old, so she’s two years younger than you.”
“Hello.”
The little child pronounced it like “An-nyeong-ha-de-yo.”
A younger sibling!
I almost jumped in excitement.
I had heard that I had a blood relative, but I never knew it was a younger sibling.
And one this cute.
A younger sibling.
Not a baby belonging to someone else’s household that I had to feed, bathe, and put to sleep.
A real younger sibling of mine.
Along with my happiness, my concern about the child’s strange pronunciation grew even stronger.
Eight years old.
If she was older than five and still spoke like that, there was definitely something wrong.
I decided that I would talk to her carefully later, so she wouldn’t get hurt.
“Great King, my fa… father said that if you found anything in the study, you should tell him.”
“I didn’t find anything significant. Still, tell him I’ll stop by before dinner.”
“The Thunder King called you?”
The moment I joined the conversation, silence fell.
The Clown King, who had been strangely quiet for a while, glanced nervously at the little child before speaking.
“No, no! Not the Thunder King! The Rock King called me. This child belongs to the Rock King, you know.”
“Oh, really? She looks exactly like the Thunder King—”
A large hand covered my mouth.
“Mm, mm. She is the Rock King’s child. Right?”
“…Yes. My father lives in that palace over there.”
Feeling the smell of perfume from the Clown King’s hand, I thought for a moment.
Ah.
So that was how it was.
I roughly understood the situation.
If there was one mother and several fathers, then something like this could happen.
