The Hidden Princess (16 page)

My phone bleeped and I glanced down at a text from Blue.
Are you crazy? We can’t stop it now
. I’d known all along that there was nothing I could do, that they’d all just come, but I had to try something, and I’d been texting Blue all day saying we should call the whole thing off, but I couldn’t give him a believable reason why not. The woods were full of creatures. Not-human things. Lissy-things. How was I supposed to explain that?

She’s not human. She’s not dead but she’s not human either
.

I couldn’t just let all my friends and half my school and probably most of the teenagers in the county walk into the woods expecting a party and find those creatures waiting for them. In the back of my mind I could still see the boy who touched me – the curve of his lips, those weird dark grey eyes glittering like cold metal.

I heard the stairs creak: footsteps. Someone was coming. My mouth was so dry. I honestly felt like my blood had been replaced with frozen water. My heart raced as I stepped across my bedroom floor, tugging clothes almost at random from the heap by my bed, pulling on a long glittery skirt over my leggings, the one I’d worn on Christmas Eve, that time when I’d drunkenly tried to seduce Joe. I cringed at the memory of his horrified face, grabbing a stripey T-shirt and red sweatshirt. Just as I reached for the door handle, someone knocked, and I couldn’t stop myself jumping. Taking one long breath as I pulled the sweater on over my T-shirt, I said, “
What?
”

There was nothing Joe could say to me now. He’d lied to me just as everyone else had done. He’d had his chances to tell the truth about Lissy and he’d never taken them. But when the door creaked open, it wasn’t Joe standing in the hallway, it was my dad, and he didn’t look happy. Cold horror trickled through me.

Dad
.

“Elena let you out, then?” I snapped, suddenly flooded with white-hot rage, not caring why or how he was even at the Reach. They’d all lied to me. Everyone in my family. My mother, my father. Rafe. Joe. Every single one of them.

“Connie, don’t,” Dad said, quietly.

“Oh, shut up!” I roared, unable to control my rage. “What do you want, anyway? Why are you even here?”

Mrs Anderson must have phoned him after all. Traitor. I wondered if he realized how much I knew.

Dad stepped into the room, forcing me to step backwards and away from him. But instead of turning round and tearing strips off me for not taking the exam, he just sat on my unmade bed as if he’d run out of strength to stand. “Con, we really, really need to talk—”

He knew that I knew
. I’d found them all out, unwrapped all those carefully placed lies.

“You could have fooled me!” My voice filled the room again, loud and ragged with rage, so huge that it scared me. Suddenly I couldn’t stop crying, tears spilling uncontrollably down my face. And just at that moment, Dad looked up, as if he’d only just seen me properly for the first time.

“You don’t understand, Connie – just let me explain—” I couldn’t face this now. More lies, probably. His excuses would just have to wait.

“I don’t want to hear it. Just leave me alone.”

“No. We really need to talk about this, Con. About Lissy. About what happened. You must have a lot of questions – you must be really confused—
Please
.”

And so he’d decided that finally I was allowed to hear the truth about my own sister. After all the lies they’d told me. After letting me think I was going crazy for refusing to believe that she was dead.

For a second I was burning, then freezing. The words just boiled out of me. “You don’t get to choose!” I screamed. “You don’t get to control when I just sit down and listen. You all lied to me,
you made me think I was going crazy
, now go away. I don’t want to hear any more of your bullshit. You’re a liar and a cheat, and I never want to see you again.”

“I’m sorry, Connie. We did what we thought was best. All we wanted was to protect you.” Dad just turned around and walked silently out of my room, closing the door behind him, leaving me feeling deflated and even weirder than before. I listened to the creaking floorboards as he walked along the landing, down the stairs, and the silence once he’d gone seemed bigger than ever before, filling the entire Reach as if it was separate from the rest of the world, lost in its own silent universe.

I hauled myself back up onto my windowsill seat, wrapping both arms around my knees because my hands were shaking so much, and late-evening light slanted in through the leaded window, leaving a bright puddle on an Indian rug that had belonged to my great-grandmother. My eyes were dry and hot with anger, but I refused to let myself cry. I was already late to my own party.

How the hell was I going to get up to the woods without Dad or Joe noticing? I glanced out of the window. I’d got out that way before, hanging on to the ivy and praying that it wouldn’t tear off the side of the house. I was already dressed and ready to go, except for the fact the only footwear in my bedroom was a pair of fluffy slipper socks I’d had since I was twelve. Not ideal for a stand-off in the woods.

Pretty much my entire school was heading up to the Reach, and only I knew what was out there waiting for them.
Who
was out there… What were they, really, those people? All so tall and beautiful. Almost human, but not. I did the only thing I could do, under the circumstances: I texted Blue and then Amy, begging for wellies, and I climbed out of my bedroom window.

I had to go. There was no choice.

I stretch my hawk-wings in the summer evening sky, rising above woodland that spreads like a swathe of rumpled green cloth right beyond Hopesay Reach. The Hidden are roaming free amongst the trees, and God knows how much further beyond them. Have they strayed into the village? Have they been spotted? I must get them to the churchyard – to the shelter of the ancient yew trees. I wish flight wasn’t the royal gift of the Hidden, that we could all take bird-form, but even as the thought crosses my mind, a childhood memory drifts through my head: Dad and Rafe traipsing off over the fields every January, guns on their shoulders, relentless dull explosions ripping apart the clear winter skies, and dead pheasants lying on the kitchen table, their bright feathers drooping sadly. Even in bird-form, the Hidden would not be safe from the Fontevrault for long.

I can’t stop thinking of Iris, imagining her drifting from cottage to cottage, silent as a shadow, listening outside each curtained window for the rapid, brand-new heartbeat of a human baby. Larkspur is on the wing, searching too. I can’t get Adam’s words out of my head:
If the Hidden are seen, I can’t help you, Lissy
. For now, thanks to him, it isn’t even the Fontevrault I need to fear, not immediately, but the Hidden crossing paths with the mortals of Hopesay Edge once more. It never ends well.

It’s only now that I realize the price of freedom will be to never stop running. We’ll have to go far, maybe even across the sea, looking for those wild places where mortal people hardly ever go. There aren’t many places like that left in the world. Untouched. Safe. And given how much force I spent tearing Briar away from Connie, I don’t even know if the Hidden will listen to me … if they’ll follow.

Larkspur’s words roll around and around in my head like cold stones:
Then let us hope that the mothers of Hopesay Edge close every window tonight, Lissy. Let us hope that they bolt every door
.

I turn my hawk-gaze to the forest floor, and looking down, I realize with a breathless jump that one of the Hidden is right below me, stalking through the trees in complete silence. He’s certainly Hidden – a dark-haired boy I don’t immediately recognize – I would have noticed any human long before now, purely because of the noise. True quiet is a Hidden trait, and I’ve got to begin somewhere, even with just a single Hidden boy. I land in my girl-form, kicking up a swirl of dead leaves, the feathered cloak still an unfamiliar weight at my shoulders as it billows out around me, golden and brown, the cloak of a queen. I expect the Hidden boy to back away in shock, but he only stands and watches with that peculiar Hidden stillness, just a few metres away, his dark hair cut unusually short for one of the Hidden, hanging over his eyes as he looks me up and down from head to toe, taking in my royal cloak of hawk-feathers in total silence. His eyes are so dark I can’t read their expression at all.

I’ve never seen him before
.

He’s not from the Halls. And as that realization dawns, so does another. He’s not pale enough. His skin is golden-brown, almost suntanned, just like a mortal’s. But everything else about him is Hidden – his height, his slender build, the graceful cheekbones. After six years trapped in the Halls, how can there be one Hidden face I don’t recognize? There’s something wrong. I don’t like this.

“Who are you?” In answer, the boy only stares at me with undisguised contempt; I try again, unease rising up within me like nausea.
Who is he?
“Go to the churchyard and wait for me there – tell the same to any Hidden you meet on the way.”

He smiles, but it’s a vicious smile. “I only take orders from the Swan King.” The smile disappears, and the golden-brown light seems to drain from his skin, leaving him whiter than old bone, and now he looks unmistakeably Hidden – there is no way he could ever be taken for a mortal now.
Who is he, who is he?
“But the Swan King is dead, isn’t he, little girl? Dead and gone. Just feathers on the wind.”

“It’s what he wanted.” The words fly out of my mouth so quickly. Why am I defending myself? “Who are you?” I repeat, keeping my voice steady now, ice-cold and regal.

Iris’s words in the White Hall begin to make more sense.
Why not my baby?
I know now what she meant. I wasn’t the only hybrid to have survived.

Why has no one ever told me?

And slowly, slowly, the half-breed boy steps towards me, totally unafraid. He knows what I am, who I am, because he’s the same – a face on the other side of the same coin, another who can’t die. Immortal like the Hidden, he will never be a victim to age or disease, but like me, he is also immune to the fatal touch of iron. And now I can feel it – red-hot hatred rolling across the clearing towards me, searing from his eyes, expressed in the cold rigidity of his shoulders, his stance. Hatred and utter, utter fury. It slams into me with the force of a blow, and I’m breathless, my cloak of golden feathers hanging at my shoulders, a weight I can’t shake off.

“Who are you?” I demand again, my voice rising, and I can’t disguise my panic.

“You don’t need to know who I am, little girl.” His voice shakes with rage – another mortal trait: there is too much raw emotion here for a pure-blooded Hidden. He’s now standing so close that I can feel the warmth of his breath in my face, and I can see that although everything else about him is Hidden, this boy’s eyes are still the bright brown of a new-ploughed field in autumn sunlight. Mortal eyes. The rest of the world seems to fall away, and all the woodland around me is silent.

“Why didn’t they ever tell me there was another?” My voice is shaking.
I’m not the only one. Not the only hybrid
.

But the boy only gives me a hateful, bitter smile. “Maybe you just didn’t need to know, little girl. If I were you I’d get your people away from here before the mortals kill them one by one. They do die very easily, you know, when struck with an iron weapon.” He steps even closer, half a head taller than me. “Is being Queen harder than you thought, Lissy Harker?”

He knows my name.

I could lift one finger and hurl his body hard across this clearing just as I did to Briar. But I don’t. There’s another one like me.
A boy
. What was it the Swan King had said, the reason why he hadn’t just taken my blood and brewed the plague when I was a prisoner of the Hidden as a baby, before Larkspur took me home?
Your blood needed to take on the richness of a grown woman’s
. It’s because I’m a girl, female. This boy, he’s nothing but a failed experiment with the wrong cocktail of hormones in his blood. Whoever he is, why I was never told about him, it makes no difference now. He’s just an outcast. A reject.

“No one told me because you don’t matter,” I whisper, but loud enough for him to hear – our faces are still just inches apart. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but it’s no concern of mine.”

He’s still smiling as I turn and walk away through the trees, hunting for the Hidden, for my people. I feel the heat of his gaze upon my back, burning through my cloak of feathers as he watches me go, and all I can do is pray he has no idea that had I not clenched my hands into fists, my fingers would be shaking.

The woods were quiet, tall trees pointing up at the sky like spears, bracken and nettles tangled below, catching around my legs as I walked; the soles of my feet raw with pain now after the barefoot walk up from the Reach. Early-summer evening light shafted down through gaps in the green canopy of leaves and branches, but I couldn’t hear a single bird in the trees. At this time of year the woods around the Reach were normally echoing with birdsong, cuckoos calling and calling, such murdering careless birds, shoving blackbird eggs out of their nests and replacing them with their own. Young cuckoos are changelings just like Lissy – a not-human girl growing up in the heart of my own family, with a starring role in all my earliest memories. The day I started school, I went into the classroom with Lissy holding my hand.