Chapter Text
Okay. Conner may have been jumping the gun, there. A lot.
He’d have to find Sir Lampton first, which was going to be hard since the man had refused to step foot in the palace the whole time they were looking for the Masked Man. Which was like six whole months of camping out in the woods near the Great Troblin Lake instead of sleeping in the softest beds Conner had ever seen.
Conner had asked why , obviously. (Well, technically Alex had asked and Conner had been hovering over her shoulder, feeling just as confused, and they were basically the same person sometimes anyway so it was like he had asked.)
“Oh, it’s the smell,” Sir Lampton had said. “It puts them onto you.”
Conner, at that point, had wanted to ask more questions like, what smell? who’s ‘them’? what does any of that mean? and what the hell are you talking about, man? but Sir Lampton had moved on from that conversation in the span of negative five seconds and was asking Alex what time they were leaving in the morning.
(And he kept bringing up horrible times like four. In the morning . And Alex had been nodding . It was at that point that he had determined that he was surrounded by crazy people.)
He meant to bring it up again but he'd been too distracted with keeping Alex from blowing people up to care that the man was worried about smelling like fairies or something.
Considering what he knew now, he maybe should have been paying more attention (and thinking less about his Pokémon deck).
Conner probably wasn’t going to find Sir Lampton anytime soon. Now that he was remembering stuff, he could recall very vaguely overhearing Sir Lampton telling Froggy that he was being called out “somewhere up North”, with a promise to be back for his wedding.
That would be a great place to full-body tackle Sir Lampton ( metaphorically ), actually. He couldn’t leave if Conner confronted him, he couldn’t make a scene– he’d be trapped by societal convention. This would require a subplan, of course.
He’d do some brainstorming when everyone else got back from the Witch’s Brew. Five heads were better than one, as the saying went (though it’d be more like four since Red would probably be busy with the wedding planners, like she had been for the last three months).
After Alex disappeared, he’d suggested that they all split up to cover more ground– Goldilocks, Jack, Froggy, and Red (and the wedding planners, he guessed?) would go back to the scene of the crime and Conner would go to Grandma’s room to see if he could find anything there and also sulk a little bit.
They’d left three days ago (Conner had spent most of that time avoiding the Fairy Council), agreeing to meet back up in his room five days from now.
…That was way too long, he realised. At this rate he’d die of boredom poisoning before they got back. He could only do so much spywork before it stopped being entertaining. Or he’d get lost and die of starvation or something.
That one seemed the most plausible.
“Dude. Where am I?” Conner squinted at every flowery off-white pillar and arch he passed, trying really hard to recognise just a little bit of where he was. He was pretty sure that he had walked through at least nine hallways to get to the garden where he found Skylene, but they were all majorly identical, which was majorly unhelpful.
Couldn’t they put signs up or something? ‘This way to Skylene’s garden’ and ‘To avoid passing through the same hallway six times, go this way’ would really come in handy right now.
Seriously. It was like a maze in here. How many hallways could one building fit? He’d seen the palace from the outside, and there was no way it could fit that many hallways. God, he did not have time for all this magic crap.
Conner stopped in the middle of hallway number two, which looked exactly the same as hallway number one.
It was tall and kind of cream coloured– very on par with what they had going on here. Parts of the wall jutted out towards the ceiling and curled together like tree branches to make arches. The walls were decorated with a gold flower pattern that made Conner think of Alex. The Fairy Kingdom actually reminded him of this architecture style he'd learned about from Bree in Germany. What was it called? Jugend– jüg band ? Junderbal, maybe? Something like that. It all seemed very Alex , anyway.
Man, he hoped she was okay. (She didn't even leave a note. A year later and she still couldn't run away right.)
The hallway curved off somewhere flowery and bright he couldn't see but there was a fancy golden door to his left.
No signage because of course there wasn’t, but as he veered closer he could see that it was slightly ajar, a soft light creeping out from between the door and the frame.
Conner looked around. Actually, how was the hallway so well-lit? There weren’t any windows and there definitely weren’t any overhead lights. And the inside of that room was definitely not brighter than out here, so how was he seeing it on the floor?
Why couldn’t this stupid palace make any sense–
“One of our falcons intercepted their message; he’s in the North.” Conner paused just outside the room, holding his breath. “He was last seen heading West with a small number of Cadre hunters, towards Ghost’s Point.”
(Conner realised that holding his breath was a dumb idea and he’d probably pass out before they heard him, so he decided to start breathing again.)
“With no intentions of doubling back? This event is very important to him, I doubt he would miss it.” Was that Xanthous ? Was Xanthous having clandestine (he’d skimmed a thesaurus once– be impressed) meetings in a presumably secret room with a mysterious individual?
It had been a mistake to watch a James Bond movie in his hotel room before this whole mess started.
“Ghost’s Point is several days from Red Riding Hood Kingdom,” Said mysterious individual told the fairy. Xanthous’ conversation partner actually sounded sort of familiar. “If he was going to start in that direction, one of the tails would notice and alert me long before he got there.”
“Very well,” Xanthous said stiffly. “I trust your judgement, Sir Benedictine.”
“And I trust yours.” There was a long pause and Conner imagined some very intense eye contact. “I’ll be seeing you.”
Vaguely, Xanthous replied, “Keep your eyes and ears aware, Alonso. We’ll be in contact.”
What the heck was any of that supposed to mean? And whose name was Alonso Benedictine ? He probably got bullied for it in school. If school was even a thing, here. Froggy had said that in Charmingdom most people aged twenty-five to forty couldn’t even write their own names. (Something about how his dad had banned schools from teaching kids anything important so they wouldn't realise they were being oppressed. Froggy's dad was one seriously messed up dude.) Oh, man, if this kept up he’d never have to go to school again. Why did he have such mixed feelings about that? If this was two years earlier, he would’ve–
Conner heard a chair scrape against the floor and absently registered that someone was coming out of the room after having a private conversation and he was right outside the door .
Frantically, he threw his body in every direction physically possible as he tried to figure out what to do with it. He couldn't run down the hallway, because they'd definitely hear that. He couldn't turn invisible, because he wasn't Alex, and he definitely couldn't use Jedi mind powers to convince them that “this is not the eavesdropper you were looking for” because he wasn't Obi-Wan Kenobi. He couldn't even grapple to the ceiling because he didn't have a grappling hook and he wasn't James Bond.
Without invisibility or grappling hooks, Conner settled on leaning against the wall and pretending like he was really casual and really focused on the lack of hinges on the door. It was by far the dumbest plan he could have come up with.
The door was pulled (re: yanked) open and Conner stiffened, prepared for all his “planning” to go to waste, but the guy who stalked out of the room and into the hallway didn't even notice he was there.
Probably because all that hair was in the way.
The man who Conner assumed was Sir Benedictine was tall, but not like too tall– like 5’9 tall. He was wearing those same big, thick gloves Conner had seen a lot of in Charmingdom; the most common colour being orange, which Sir Benedictine was wearing.
(Sir Lampton’s gloves were black, the least common colour. Maybe it was a Royal Guard thing.)
He got a bizarre sense of deja vu watching Sir Benedictine walk purposefully down the hall, sword clanking against his chestplate and curls bouncing around his head. Had they met before? Conner had met a lot of people here, so it’s not like it was totally impossible .
Well.
There was really only one way to find out.
(And if he was lucky maybe he’d get out of here, too.)