The Hidden Princess (23 page)

And as the feathers clear, I notice Larkspur isn’t looking at me, but at the dark-haired boy I met at sunset. The hybrid who will never die and he is holding on to Connie.

“
Nicolas!
” says my brother, and the ferocity of his tone is our father’s – it is exactly as if the Swan King is here in the woods with us, and I find that I cannot move, that I cannot speak, that at exactly the point I need most to act, I am utterly frozen with fear.

Nicolas pulled me back so I was trapped, his arm pinning me back against his body, and I could feel his chest heaving with emotion as he dragged me round so we both faced Lissy. Iris sank to her knees, still cradling Mika, rubbing his back, whispering in his ear. The sound of his wailing was getting thinner and thinner, and Nicolas hadn’t wanted to help me at all. He’d only wanted to hurt me. And just by my left ear, I heard a soft hissing sound and looked down to see the bright edge of a knife held against the side of my throat; I even felt the chill of it grazing my skin.

“Let her go,” Lissy said. “Please—”

“Nicolas, my father is dead,” Larkspur cut in. “Nothing can bring back the Swan King, not even this.”

“I’ll do anything,” Lissy whispered. “I swear I’ll do anything if you just let Connie go. None of this is her fault.”

“You killed him!” Nicolas’s voice rang out across the clearing, and as he shouted he held me tighter, and the knife quivered against my throat so that I could hardly breathe, and I felt a trickle of warm liquid running down my neck. “He’s dead because of you.” Nicolas drew in a deep, sobbing breath. “I’m going to make you pay.” He paused, his voice cracking with misery. “I’m going to make you pay for what you did, Lissy Harker.”

The Swan King. He was talking about the Swan King, the boy from my Dream – the one Lissy had killed.

“Release her, or it will be you that pays.” Lissy’s voice was ice-cold as they faced each other.

Nicolas just laughed, and the blade of the knife flashed and glinted at the edge of my vision, and I knew my neck was bleeding. “There’s nothing worse you can do to me now, Lissy.”

I felt like the world was spinning too fast and I was caught in a strange stillness in the middle of it all.

“Nico,” Larkspur said, gently now, “she’s just a girl—”

Nicolas didn’t move – the knife stayed. I could feel the chill of cold metal right against my throat, and God, how much was I going to bleed if he increased the pressure just a fraction more? Iris still didn’t move; she just sat with Mika cradled in her lap, rocking backwards and forwards, staring at each of us in turn.

“I don’t care. Lissy killed him!” Nicolas said, his breath warm in my hair. “She killed the Swan King. She deserves to suffer.”

“Oh, let her go,” Lissy sobbed, her face now wet with tears. “Just let her go, please. He wanted to die, Nicolas. I promise you he asked me to do it. He wanted it.
I didn’t ask for this
. It wasn’t my choice. Iris, tell them”

Iris looked up from cradling Mika. “My baby,” she whispered, and despair washed over me. She wasn’t going to help. All she cared about was Mika.

And then Larkspur spoke to her, very quietly in that hissing, rushing language I’d first heard in the wood less than twenty-four hours before. She looked up at him, watching his face. He dropped down to her level, making no sound, not even stirring a single dead leaf from the forest floor. And when he spoke again, it was easy to guess what he was really saying:
Please
.

Iris stared at Larkspur, her eyes lingering on his face for what seemed a very long time. And finally – finally – she turned to Nicolas and spoke in a rush, words crashing into each other, just tumbling out of her mouth. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s true. I showed Lissy the weapon, but the Swan King chose to die. Nicolas, you mustn’t hurt the girl. It’s not her fault. You had your freedom – the Hidden wanted theirs. Can you blame them? The Hidden
chose
me, Larkspur. Your father’s time was done, and he knew the truth of it. I was the only one Lissy trusted – your father’s own people chose me to find Lissy the right weapon.” Iris shook her head. “She thought she could leave the Halls. She thought she could go home. We tricked her.”

The silence continued for ever and ever, and for the longest time all I could hear was Nicolas breathing, ragged and desperate, until the cold chill of the knife against my neck fell away, and Nicolas shoved me out of his way. I ran to Lissy, who caught me in her arms, hugging me so close that I couldn’t breathe. Holding my sister, I turned to Iris as she clung to the little blanket-wrapped bundle that was Mika, her face white and frozen with misery, her cheeks speckled with tears. The Hidden cried just like anyone else. Not so different after all. Nicolas dropped to his knees, head bowed, the knife lying abandoned among the tree roots.

“Thank you,” I whispered, and I didn’t even know which of them I was really talking to. These strange and beautiful murderous creatures.

Lissy just said my name over and over again, the feathers of her cloak brushing against my cheek as Nicolas bowed his head over the knife that would have killed me, the blade glinting in the early-morning light. In silence, Larkspur went and stood at Nicolas’s side, laying one hand on his shoulder as he knelt in the mud and the dead leaves.

“Get up,” he said, so gentle. “Can’t you hear the mortals coming?”

“They want the baby, Iris,” Lissy whispered, holding me even tighter, even closer to her body. “They’ll kill you to get him back. Don’t let them.”

Nicolas got to his feet, and his face just looked hollow, and all that bright burning beauty just drained away. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, despite the way he’d used me, despite the congealing trickle of blood on my neck. The woods were alive with noise – people shouting, leaves crunching underfoot, branches cracking, and all he said was, “We are running out of time.”

I stepped away from Lissy, untangled myself from her embrace as I crouched in front of Iris. “I know what happened. I know what the Swan King did to you. But Mika isn’t your baby. You remember what it’s like to lose one, don’t you? To never see him again?”

Iris just stared at me and I swear I could actually feel her longing, her desperate longing. And in silence, she held Mika up to me like an offering, like a sacred gift.

“Take him,” she whispered. For a moment, her eyes lingered on Lissy, then finally on Larkspur. “I have done enough wrong.”

I did the only thing I could do. I bundled Mika up as close to me as I could, his warm, tiny body in my arms, and I ran, leaving them all behind, zig-zagging through the trees. I couldn’t trust any of them, not even Lissy: all I could do was run. I had to get Mika back to Hopesay Edge. I had to get him home to Amy, no matter how much it cost me, and no matter if I was blamed for taking him.

It was hot in the car even though it couldn’t have been long past eleven in the morning. I couldn’t call her: they’d taken my phone straight away, and Connie’s was smashed in the woods. All I could do was sit in the back of the locked SUV parked up on the drive at the Reach, knowing the driver and her passenger were waiting inside for Connie. All I could do was just wait for it to happen. As I watched, a single police car pulled up beside the SUV. I caught sight of Connie’s fair hair as the car door swung open and a policewoman climbed out.

They must still think I’m there to look after her. Waiting inside
. The police would have made Connie call Dad and Miriam by now, but they were a day’s travel away. I lifted my hand to bang on the window – anything to give her a warning, a few seconds’ advantage, even just the tiniest chance of running – but the woman at my side just shook her head.

“Do you want her to get hurt? It’s best if you don’t interfere, Joe.”

And all I could do was wait, a prisoner of the Fontevrault at last, trying to forget that one hundred years before, a boy younger than me had been shot for knowing too much about the Hidden. And now they had Connie.

Fontevrault Abbey, France

Sunlight pours through that window high in the tower where almost nine hundred years ago I crouched in bloodstained clothes. I remember the sweat in my hair dripping down my face and how loud my heart beat. The walls are naked stone now, those tapestries are long gone, long since crumbled to dust, just like my mother’s bones, Anjou’s bones and the earthly remains of all those who gathered here long ago to hold court with the Swan King: dust and worms. I feel as if I might have just stepped outside for a few moments and then stepped back in, except that so many centuries have passed – I am the knight in the old story who followed his lover into the fairy hill and stepped back out into daylight to find his mortal bones crumbling, except that for me, there is no escape into dust. No release from the world, no release from grief.

It’s different at Fontevrault now. The room is bare save for the simple wooden table and chairs, never visited by the crowds of mortal tourists who spill through the courtyards and corridors where I grew up. It was so long ago, but if I shut my eyes and just listened I might easily mistake the crying child being dragged around the abbey by parents with cameras for one of the kitchen brats. I might easily imagine that I had only walked the earth for thirteen summers and had hardly ever left the confines of the abbey, always waiting for my mother to return with her glittering court, until one day she returned with a new husband, with Anjou, and I could tell straight away that he hated me. I can almost catch the scent of her – rosewater and hot lavender. But she is gone. They are all gone, so long ago.

Connie and her stepbrother sit apart, flanked on either side by men of the Fontevrault, separated by a Fontevrault woman who looks as if she might work in a bank – a crumpled grey suit, short, neat hair. The others gathered are no more noticeable – just the kind of men and women you might walk past in the street and ignore. The Fontevrault have changed just as the world has changed – descendants of those who sat here almost nine hundred years ago they may be, but there are no furs, no glinting jewels, no visible signs of exceptional wealth and power. And just as last time, I was not invited, but I still came, still I’m sitting at a table with them; I have evaded the Fontevrault for more than eight centuries. They will not take me now.

Gathered for only the second time in a thousand years, Hidden and Fontevrault together, we wait in silence as Connie stares at me across the table, still in the clothes that Briar tried to strip off her, days ago now. Her green eyes are cold and hard like river-bottom pebbles washed clean by the water:
You betrayed me
. And I wish I could tell her that I am sorry, but how do you begin to apologize for holding a knife to the throat of a fourteen-year-old mortal girl?

And even as Connie watches me, even as I absorb the hatred I know I deserve, the air fills with a million tumbling feathers, gold and tawny-brown, hawk-feathers, falcon-feathers. The faces of the gathered Fontevrault go slack with shock, and I realize most of them have never even laid eyes on one of the Hidden before – they have been driven underground for so long. No one really believes in fairy tales these days, not even the Fontevrault. But even though no one believes in fairy tales, when the feathers settle and wink out of existence, one by one, like stars blinking out of the sky at dawn, Larkspur and his sister, the Hawk Queen, are standing side by side in a room at Fontevrault Abbey, all the same.

Larkspur’s eyes rest on me immediately. “I forbade you to come here.” He is seriously angry, which always amuses me. “They would keep you prisoner till the end of time, Nicolas.”

I shrug. “Do you really think I’d let them?”

Larkspur gives me a furious look, but turns to Lissy. She scans the face of the gathered Fontevrault as if there is someone here she expects to see, but does not. And when she speaks, her voice is that of a queen: “
Let them go!
”

The woman sitting between Connie and Joe just smiles. “I’m not sure why you think we’re able to do that. Both of them have seen far too much of you, Lissy. Far more than those teenagers in the woods at Hopesay Reach—”

“Harm them and you will pay,” Lissy interrupts. “If you kill my sister and Joe, or even if you only keep them as prisoners, the Hidden will keep appearing. You will never be able to catch us, not all of us. We will always be too fast, too secretive. We both know that the mortals of Hopesay Edge saw too much this time. Police officers. Hundreds of people up in the woods. Too much to write off. Too much for you to cover up if it happens again – people will talk. There’ll be rumours and theories that even you cannot contain. Release my sister, release Joe, and I swear that the Hidden will remain out of sight until what happened at Hopesay becomes nothing but a rumour, just a story that no one really believes.”

Joe glances sideways at Connie, but she doesn’t move her eyes away from the table. Brave girl. “Do what you want to me, but leave her alone,” Joe says, quietly. “Just leave it.”

The Fontevrault woman only smiles again; the others simply watch, allowing her to lead.

“If you kill them, we will never go away,” Larkspur says, quietly. “You might slaughter all the Hidden one by one, but till the last of us is dead we will appear to the mortals, we will seduce them, we will try again and again and eventually we will give them immortal babies till the race you feared might one day come into being walks the earth in their hundreds, just like my sister and Nicolas de Mercadier. We will punish you if you kill Connie and Joe.”

And the whole of the world hangs waiting in the silence until the Fontevrault woman sitting between Connie and Joe speaks again: “Then go,” she says, and turns back to Lissy and Larkspur. “We will always find them. If you don’t keep to your side of the deal, don’t forget that we will always find them. Don’t let anyone see you, Lissy Harker.”

Another bargain, another covenant, and I don’t know who will break it first but we need to leave this place before the Fontevrault try. We made the mistake of staying too long in this place once before. It is time and more that we went.