The Hidden Princess (6 page)

Nicolas gives me one of his long looks, half smiling. “How could I forget Iris? I took an arrow in the chest for you the morning you murdered her mortal knight. As I recall, his liegemen had no intention of allowing his death to go unpunished. It’s not something I’ll forget. It hurt.”

“I did not ask you to take that arrow, Nicolas.” I hold his gaze. “My father would likely have been more pleased if you’d let me have it.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Nicolas says, quietly. “Anyhow – Lissy Harker is cursed just as surely as I am.” When I first told Nicolas about Lissy I thought he’d be pleased he wasn’t alone, that he won’t be the only person left on earth after the last mortal has withered and died, when the last of the Hidden has been struck down and killed by iron. I was wrong. He frowns. “It makes sense, given what happened to Iris and all the others who tried to bear mortal children – the lovers they chose weren’t bright-blooded and the babies didn’t survive.” He turns to look at me. “What does this Connie girl
want
? Why do I keep seeing her?”

“You know how it is to grieve – more than any man on earth, Nicolas. Connie wants her sister. She wants Lissy. She misses her so much she’s drawn closer to the Hidden every time she falls asleep. Each and every one of us, Nicolas, including our brethren still imprisoned with Lissy in the Halls.”

“You mean this Connie girl doesn’t
know
?” Nicolas whispers, furious. “She has no idea of the danger? What if Connie appears to the Swan King? He’ll ask her to open the Gateway.”

“Why do you think I’m here? We must act, Nicolas.”

“Act
how
?” he demands, hot-headed as ever. “I didn’t betray your father and leave him a prisoner of the mortals just so some idiot of a girl could let him out. Dear God, Larkspur, if you only knew how many times in the last three hundred years I’ve dreamed of him begging me to release you all.” He curses, looking away into the fire. “If I hadn’t been so sure the Fontevrault would slaughter every last one of you, do you really think I’d have kept the Gateway locked when I had the power to open it?”

“Hush. Have all those centuries not been long enough to cool your temper? Keep your voice down, Nico.” I glance at the tents spreading out behind us, but no one stirs. “My father’s never going to listen. He won’t be stopped. Connie could open the Gateway any moment now. I’m starting to fear there’s only one way of ending this.”

He frowns, murderous as ever. “Before you ask, I’m not doing it. I’m not going to kill your father.”

I sigh, seeing the Swan King at the back of my mind once more, the white feathers of his cloak so pale against his black hair, the cold rage in his eyes as he banished me for the second and final time.
You will never be by my side, child, always away
. I’ll hear those words in my mind till my last day on earth, till the day an iron blade finds me at last. I hate him. I hate his cold cruelty and the ruthlessness that keeps the Hidden race imprisoned in the Halls, the mortals too afraid to grant our freedom. A cold ball of misery sits heavily inside my belly. I hate my father but I love him beyond words. I don’t want him to die, and yet I can’t see another way of ending this. He’ll never change his mind. Even if he did, the Fontevrault would never believe he was no danger. They don’t trust us, and we will never trust them.

“If Connie lets my father out and he releases the plague, do you really think the Fontevrault will just allow it to happen? Don’t be a fool, Nicolas. You’re right, the Fontevrault don’t need any encouragement to attack the Hidden. If my father has his way, they’ll destroy us one by one till we’re nothing but a memory, just as they destroyed my mother. There’ll be no one to even remember us except you and Lissy. All the mortals will be dead too. I’m afraid that the Fontevrault will only leave us alone if he
is
dead, and no threat to them. Save Lissy, you’re the only one who can kill him.”

I can’t believe those words left my lips.
You’re the only one who can kill him
. My father.

Nicolas mutters a curse. “Unless your father’s plague destroys the Fontevrault first, before they have a chance to retaliate. Knowing him, it’s probably rather potent. In that case, the Hidden will have the earth to themselves once more.”

“Are you willing to take that risk?”

“I’m not going to do it, Larkspur. I’m not going to kill him. You know what I owe your father: he gave me a life worth living. What’s wrong, are you hungry for the Swan Throne after all these centuries of waiting for it?”

I’m on my feet in a second, hauling him up to face me. “I don’t want the throne. I’ve never wanted that and you know it.”

“
Let go of me
.” Nicolas takes my wrists in his hands, but I’m still a little stronger than he is and we stand locked together, holding on to each other. He lets out a long breath, controlling his anger, a feat that I can scarcely help but be impressed by, but even so, I don’t let him go. “Look, I’m sorry,” he says at last. “I know you don’t want the damned throne. What you want is for him to forgive you. Isn’t it?”

“He never will, and I can’t see another way.” If I had not wept every tear I had years ago, I would be weeping now. “As long as my father lives, so does the risk he might release the plague.”

“You should have let the girl die and you know it,” Nicolas says, his voice harsh. “If she hadn’t become Tainted we wouldn’t be in this damned mess now. What if she’s appeared to your father already? He’ll use her to get out of the Halls. Jesus Christ, did you
look
at her, Larkspur? A girl that age, with a face like that? When she sees the Swan King, she’s going to think he’s all her idiotic dreams come true – without a clue that he’s actually her worst nightmare. She’ll do anything he asks. Mary, Mother of God, Larkspur – you should have known better.
You should have let her die
.”

I let him go, turning away. He’s right. “She was just a little girl when I saved her. Only eight years old. Mortal lives are short enough as it is.”

Nicolas gives me one of his narrow-eyed looks, and whispers another curse in a native tongue that no one else even speaks any more. “You’re exasperating, Larkspur – do you know that?”

I sigh. “You’d have done the same and saved her if you could. Don’t try and tell me otherwise.”

He stares into the fire again. “Why are you so sure? I’ve killed more mortals than I can count.” I know he never forgets their faces, though. Still staring at the guttering flames, he speaks again: “I’ll kill her too if you ask me. But I won’t kill him. Not your father; I owe him too much.”

“Connie’s just a girl. She doesn’t deserve to die. None of this is her fault. We’ll have to find another way.”

“Like what? The girl – she’s
connected
to all of us, Larkspur. If you see her and I see her it’s a fool’s bet we’re the only ones. And if your father persuades her to open the Gateway and he escapes the Halls we both know the cost: not just the mortals’ lives but his and all the Hidden. We’ve held stalemate long enough. It can’t go on, not now it’s come to this – she’s blown it all wide open. There’ll be a fight, a bloody fight.”

“No one’s warned Connie,” I say, quietly. “Her family must have lied to her about everything. You know what mortals are like: they conceal the truth. I’m going to warn her, tell her to stop meddling. We might be able to keep this under control ourselves. We just need to reach her before she does anything stupid. Before she makes contact with my father.”

Nicolas looks at me from the tail of one dark eye, still facing the campfire. He smiles. “What? It’s you and I who will stop this?” And then he laughs, bitter and so tired. “God! Would that there were someone to wish us luck.”

I wish more than anything that we could go north together, Nicolas and I, just like that long-ago time when we went everywhere, always together. But I need to be where the mortal world meets the Halls of the Hidden: I need to be at Hopesay Reach. I’ll have to go on the wing, and I’ll have to go now. “Follow me, Nico.”

Nicolas reaches out and we clasp hands, his fingers twined about mine for a heartbeat in the moment before I transform and climb up into the sky in my falcon-form. It would be fruitless to try counting how many times I have wished that flight was not just the gift of the Hidden with royal blood, but that all of my people could fly, safe from mortal arrows and knives, for if that had been true, then my mother would have flown free of her mortal attackers all those centuries ago, and my father would not be what he is now: ruined by the need for revenge. Broken just as surely as Iris. I rise and rise, warm desert air beneath my wings, looking down on my hearth-brother below, standing now to watch me go, the dark robe blowing back from his face. Nicolas is alone once more, just as he has always been.

He is right. It’s all about to blow open, wide open, wide as the sky.

I was totally asleep when the Hopesay bus groaned to a halt outside school, shaken awake by the shuddering of the ancient brakes as we stopped. For a moment all I could do was sit leaning against the window.
Lissy
. She’d seemed so real last night, when the Dream came. So close. I could still hear the anger in her voice:
You must not pass
.

She’s not dead. She’s not dead
.

I pushed the thought away.
Lissy’s alive. Somewhere. They’re just hiding her. Everyone’s hiding her from me. It’s all a trick
. It felt like such a cold, dead-weight of a certainty, like the knowledge that one day
I
was going to die. But I’d made the mistake of stepping into territory like this before, and where had that left me? Eighteen months of counselling with B.O. Deborah and a lifetime of nervous, wary looks from Mum, like she’s waiting for my mind to blow at any moment. And who could blame her?

“Con?” Blue was standing over me, thumbs hooking in the belt loops of his trousers, the familiar tangle of twisted leather bracelets sliding down his wrist. “What’s wrong with you? You were completely out of it.”

“Thanks a lot for waking me up.” I glared at him, elbowing past and knowing I was being vile and unfair, but unable to stop myself. I stumbled down the steps leading off the bus, just so tired I could hardly think straight, let alone successfully place one foot in front of the other.

“Aw, come on, Connie, give me a break!” Blue called, but I ignored him and walked quickly across the scrubby, tired grass, wrapping Mum’s huge Indian scarf around my neck and shoulders. I felt so cold and so, so tired, and the last thing I wanted was to be followed, not even by my best friend. I was starting to seriously regret our plans for that night, anyway. Was it really such a great idea to have half the local population under twenty descending on the woods outside my own house? Either way, I had no way of backing out of it now. Even so, I couldn’t shake the sick feeling that I’d made a huge mistake planning the party – that something was going to go very wrong.

We had a supply teacher in maths and I made my way right to the back, ignoring the weird looks Blue and Jessie Mayhew shot at me from the front row as I collapsed onto the chair, hunched over my bag. Why did it feel so heavy? I usually sat next to Blue, but couldn’t face being first in the line of fire today, and judging by the look of poison Jessie sent towards me she’d decided to make it pretty clear that I was getting in the way so far as Blue was concerned.

“Connie!” Tia Marshall whispered, far too loudly, from her place three seats away. “Connie, I’ve managed to get my sister to buy loads of vodka for us. Tonight’s going to be so, so amazing—”

“Your
sister
?” I couldn’t help snapping. Tia’s sister was the biggest blabbermouth for miles around, and she was at sixth form in town. I shut my eyes, despairing. Were we now going to have the entire sixth form college descending on the woods as well as half the school?

“She won’t
say
anything, Connie. There’s no need to be like that.”

“The party is meant to be by invitation only,” I hissed down the table. “
My
invitation, Tia.”

Ignoring Tia, who was now going on and on relentlessly about how I should have been grateful for the supply of vodka, I opened my exercise book and tried to follow the supply teacher’s explanation of quadratic equations. I actually didn’t need the explanation – I’ve always just understood maths the same way some people absorb foreign languages with no obvious effort.
Like Lissy used to
. Tears started and I had to look down. If anyone saw I’d never hear the end of it. I stared down at my book and started to work through the examples on the whiteboard. I could hear Kyle Ayrshire and a couple of his mates giving the supply teacher hell, pretending they didn’t speak English, but I didn’t care. Numbers and letters aligned, all in perfect balance, and my pencil scratched confidently against the paper. Numbers always made me feel peaceful, which I knew also made me a geek of epic proportions, despite my reputation. I still couldn’t get Lissy out of my mind, though, sitting with her at the kitchen table doing my maths homework when I was eight years old, and Lissy saying,
You’re better at this than I am, Con-con
.

Let me out. Oh, please
. The Voice cut straight through my memories, as if I could hear someone speaking inside my own head.
I’ve been in darkness so long. I’m lost, Connie. Lost at the Reach
—

His voice.
The
Voice.

And now I wasn’t even asleep but hunched over a desk at the back while a supply teacher attempted to ignore the idiots in my class as she droned on about quadratics. And yet I could still hear
him
. The Voice. The hidden boy.

My dreams were leaking through into the real world. Again.

Stop it
, I told myself furiously.
You’re overtired, Connie. Imagining things
.

I fixed my gaze on the list of equations on the board but I couldn’t balance them. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t make sense of the numbers.

He’s here. Somewhere. He’s here
.

I leafed back through my exercise book instead, painstakingly tracing the way I’d worked out the last few equations, but even my own handwriting was just a meaningless muddle, numbers and letters drifting across the page like the time I’d smoked a tiny bit of spliff with Amy and Blue and then tried to read my book once I got home. My fingers shook uncontrollably like Uncle Miles’s used to when he hadn’t had a drink. That’s all I really remember about him – his shaking hands – and now mine were just the same.