Chapter Text
Herbert left the castle grounds on horseback, carrying his few belongings as he left, riding out into the snow.
His face was a cold mask, but underneath it, he was furious. His plan had failed.
In the snow, where no one could see him, he stepped off his horse, and took out his staff. He wasn’t going back to the kingdom of Lom at all. The name of Herbert, prince of Lom, was just an identity that he had borrowed for his plan. The real prince of Lom was some kind of cousin, not even old enough to shave yet.
He was the son of the Old King, the once crown prince of the Great Realm. Reduced to a disgraced prince of a fallen dynasty, forgotten by the world. Oh, but he would make sure the world would remember him, after he was done. The lying cheats who had unlawfully taken the throne would all meet their downfall.
He would make sure of it.
He grabbed a little box with holes in it from a travel bag, and drew a circle in the snow with his staff. Stepping into it, he was gone, saying his goodbyes to this starsforsaken kingdom. His horse and other belongings disappeared into thin air, like they had never been there at all.
When the darkness receded, he reappeared inside his study in a palace drifting at sea. Seething, he swiped stacks of books off his desk, clattering to the ground. He carefully set the little box with holes down on it, then threw his staff full force into a corner of the room, hearing it crack. Anger and rage bubbled inside his chest.
His first part of his plan had been a total failure. Everything was going right, he had everything under his control, and then…
The princess, that he was soon to be married to, gone. Disappeared off the face of the earth.
Wretched girl had run away, from him, from everything. Even those hounds hadn’t been able to turn anything up.
And so his plan had automatically fallen apart, his ticket to the ice throne gone, and with that, his path to that piece of silver too.
At least he’d been able to save face. No one knew what he was really after, who he really was. Everyone just saw him as the poor young lad who had saved the princess and was repaid like this.
He dragged a hand through his hair, now long and black, trying to calm his breathing. Freaking out like this was wasting time. He should figure out how to go from here.
His Herbert gig was up. That trick had run its course. He could return under a different guise, see if anyone else knows anything about the spell piece, but time needed to pass first before returning there. His tracks were still too fresh. Besides, maybe the runaway princess would turn up soon. That would make everything easier. He could come back there later. There was enough time.
For now, his next step would be to choose a different target, try his tricks somewhere else. His little beetle friend had overheard that Haldorr would be going to pay the Coral Princess a visit, and the man who had to be the reclusive gardener was paying the Shadow Princess a visit. Their presence could interfere with his mission, though the risk wasn’t certain. The librarian couldn’t know who he really was, what was really going on here, and the gardener had never even met him in disguise. Still, they posed pesky interfering variables.
A plan formed inside his mind. He himself could go to the Forest Princess, and he could send Rubin out to the desert. He knew the disgusting place well after all. And targeting two places at once would speed things along. The faster he acted, the less time for his targets to figure anything out or act on anything. Leave them confused and scrambling. The less traces, the better. A false smile formed on his face again. This was sounding like a good plan. Time to make his preparations.
He gave the hypnotized boy his instructions, and had him depart at once. Towards the desert, and the princess who lived there. He himself walked to the enchanted mirror, summoning visualizations of the people of the forest in the mirror, letting them pass by his eye to find the perfect target to steal their identity. No courting anyone this time. That ship had sailed, and sunken. He would instead make use of the chaos that the ongoing tribal war in the Forest Kingdom was causing, and quietly slip through the cracks to get what he wanted.