The Hidden Princess (11 page)

“Let us out, Hawk Queen. Let us feel the wind in our hair, O Queen.” Hundreds of voices rise up as one. “Lead us to freedom. We’ll follow you. We’ll follow you, dear Hawk Queen.”

I turn to them. I don’t want to rule the Hidden. They tricked me and I hate every single last one of them. “If the Fontevrault come to Hopesay now, they’ll kill you all.”

“They won’t find us, Lissy.” So many voices, all making the same plea. “We’ll be so quiet, Lissy. So still. We just want to breathe clean air. We all need clean air, Lissy.”

And as one, before I can do anything to stop them, the Hidden begin to move forwards towards the Gateway, towards the open blue sky.

I leave the car parked in the market square. The hire company are expecting it to arrive in London tomorrow but what are they going to do about it? Kill me? I don’t even find this funny any more.

I’m following A-roads rather than motorways in case the Fontevrault have somehow picked up my trail already. I’ve been here before – it’s just another rainswept English town – but the last time I came was centuries ago. The town square used to be filled with rats and ragged children begging for scraps, but now it’s lined with neat little cafes, tables and chairs sheltered from the unseasonal rain by bright umbrellas branded with the logos of those who peddle beer and cigarettes, both of which I could kill for at this moment but haven’t got time to find.

Larkspur needs me.

He
needs me: the Swan King. He saved my mother’s life, all those hundreds of years ago when they struck the covenant at Fontevrault, and even though she’s been dust for centuries, the debt still holds. If the Swan King gets out, the Fontevrault will kill him, even now. They’ll hunt him down, and all I can do is pray to a God I’ll never meet that Larkspur will get to the Reach in time to intervene.

I don’t trust this half-mortal girl –
Lissy
. She’s too young, still mortal enough to miss the family she left behind, miss them so much that she’d do anything – anything – to see them again. I should know. After all Anjou did to me when I was a child, I was still the one with him when he died alone in that battlefield tent. He was King Henry of England then, but abandoned by all his own sons and daughters, and God, I’ve lost so many that I mourn those I hated almost as much as I mourn those I loved. Mortals feel so deeply for their kin. Memories crowd in again, overwhelming me with their force and colour – so many faces, whispered voices, all gone, all dust, all nothing. At the back of my mind three hundred years have tumbled away into darkness as if they never were and I’m not here any more, not sitting by this fountain in this busy little English town square, but kneeling before the Swan King in the White Hall, on the morning I chose to leave, the morning I saved Larkspur’s life; the morning he killed Iris’s mortal lover with a single arrow, and we were hunted—

The White Hall is utterly silent. Even the wild sound of Iris’s sobbing has faded; she’s been led away, her half-mortal baby now cold in the ground. Which leaves just Larkspur and me – and his father
.

I would rather be anywhere else on earth than here. My bloodsoaked shirt clings to my chest, but no matter how much I bleed, whether that mortal arrow pierced a lung or even my heart, I can’t die. It hurts, though. An unending ache
.

The Swan King does not even look at Larkspur. “Nicolas,” he says to me gently, “you took an arrow meant for my son. A worthless life, I will allow – but Hidden all the same. What is your price for saving it?”

“Make peace with your son.” I glance at Larkspur. He looks straight ahead, as if he can neither hear nor see us
.

“How can there be peace when he plots against me?” the Swan King replies. “Now, what will you have? What can I offer? He might be worthless, but he is my kin. I ought to give you something.”

“No,” Larkspur says, quietly. “Don’t say that. All we did – all we tried to do was help Tippy. She’s just a little girl. She wants to go home. Iris and I –” he breaks off, helpless with grief – “we didn’t deserve –
this.”

“Silence!”
His father raps out the order in a tone of such violence that Larkspur actually takes a step back
.

“I will not be silent!” Larkspur’s voice fills the White Hall. “You destroyed Iris. You gave her to a mortal knight, her child died and now her mind is broken. You took her away from me, all because we disobeyed you
. What did you expect me to do?”

The Swan King only smiles at him. “Did I order you to turn Iris away when she took her mortal lover? Did I command you to send her from your side as the half-breed child grew in her womb? No. That was your own jealousy, child. You made your own punishment. Did I even order you to kill the mortal knight? No. Nicolas is a more loyal son to me than my own child.”

As long as I am here, they will never be at peace, and that’s the bitter truth
.

Larkspur speaks in a furious whisper. “You made Iris suffer just because we tried to send Tippy home to her mother. You broke Iris’s mind, just for that—”

“Be quiet, both of you!” I can’t stand it any more. Cold fear shudders through me – have I really just ordered the Swan King into silence? But I can’t bear this any longer, the battle between these two. Nothing is ever forgiven, and nothing forgotten. I wonder if forgiveness is a mortal blessing. When you know that one day you’ll both be dead and gone, letting go of a quarrel makes more sense
.

“What have you to say, then, Nicolas?” The Swan King’s voice is so soft, almost gentle, but I know him well enough to be sure he is now almost as angry with me as he is with Larkspur
.

“I will go.” I keep my voice steady. I want no part in this damnable endless battle, this constant sparring. I only make it worse between them. If I were not here, the Swan King would have no favourite. For nearly six hundred years I’ve lived amongst the Hidden and these walls are closing in on me. It’s time to go
.

“Nicolas, don’t,” Larkspur whispers
.

The Swan King ignores him, just staring at me, not a hair changed from the day he found me broken and bleeding by the walls of Fontevrault. “Are you certain, Nicolas? Everyone you love in the mortal world will die. You will
watch
them all die.”

I nod. “It’s time.” We use no titles down here; never once have I called him
sire
or
my lord.
He’s been more of a father to me than I’ve ever had
.

He reaches out, taking my hand in his, and God, his touch is so, so cold. “The mortal world is a dangerous place for you now, Nicolas. Never stay in one place long enough for them to see you cannot grow old, or the Fontevrault will find you. Nicolas, they will hunt you down. Don’t spend eternity in their cells, my child. Don’t let them use you as a weapon, either. In the mortal world, these are dangers you must face. Is it what you want?”

“I want to see the leaves fall in autumn. I want to see frost on a spider’s web.” I look up at him. I want to say, too, that as long as I stay, Larkspur will never be good enough for him. That’s only the truth. And it’s not right. If I go, there’s a chance they might one day have peace. “I owe you all – everything,” I say. “I can’t repay it.”

I still remember waking, broken and bleeding, at the foot of the abbey wall at Fontevrault, the easy command in his voice as he ordered me to stand, then just as quickly bade me run
.

The Swan King smiles. “Go then, Nicolas de Mercadier.”

I nod, not daring to speak. He is wild and cruel, but I would do anything for him
.

I turn to Larkspur. He has lost everything: Iris, his father’s love. And now I’m about to go, too. We are like brothers, and I’m leaving him. “You know they are dead now, Nicolas?” he says. “Your mother? All your kin? Even their children?”

“I know.”

There’s no place for me here. It is only the Swan King and Larkspur. I step forward into the cold, cold waters of the Gateway. It’s time to go home, back to the mortal world
.

Beside the fountain, I draw in a deep breath, taking control of my mind once more. Too many memories. If I let them wash over me, they’ll wash me right away till there’s nothing left but an empty shell, and still no way to die, no way for it all to be over. No one to share this with. Even Larkspur will meet the edge of an iron blade one day, but I’ll be alone for ever. I listen to the water play; it splashes cool against my fingers as I scoop a handful to drink, so grateful for the cold relief of it. If I keep driving at this rate, I’ll be at the Reach in a matter of hours, but is that going to be too late? There’s no point in wondering. I’ve just got to keep going. There’s no choice.

I stare around the square, watching all the people sitting beneath the umbrellas despite the rain, eating, drinking and laughing with no idea of the risk. Not one of them has the smallest notion of the danger they’re all in – what the Swan King will unleash on the world if this Connie girl is desperate and foolish enough to open the Gateway. They’ll all be dead within days; Larkspur told me, and I can believe it. I’ve seen enough mortal plagues to know how quickly an immortal one will devastate them, and the Swan King has been waiting almost nine hundred years for this. Nothing will stop him: nothing will change his mind.

My throat’s still raging hot with thirst and I turn back to the fountain to scoop another handful, but as I look into the pool I don’t see the algae-stained white tiles lining the base but feathers, hundreds of feathers, twisting and whirling underwater.

No
.

The feathers spin in a white vortex until, gradually, they begin to thin out, to fade away completely, and in the water of the fountain I see an image of a black-haired boy lying on his back, one arm crooked beneath his head as if he’s only sleeping, and my heart lurches. It’s him, it’s the Swan King, but now there is just the faintest of dark blue lines down one side of his face.

Hidden blood.

A cold, wet breeze picks up, swirling through the town square, rippling the water, distorting the image. Even so, I have seen enough, and my heart swells with desperate sorrow.

He’s dead.

If you want to save your mother’s life, child, then you’d better run
. For centuries, the Swan King and Larkspur were all I had, more dear to me than any mortal family. How many times have I dreamed of him begging me to open the Gateway, begging me to release the Hidden? I stare at the fountain, at the image in the water, at the Swan King lying so still as the swirling feathers fade to nothing around him. He looks just the same as ever, so young and beautiful, but he’s gone, just gone, and I owe him so much, and it’s my fault. If I hadn’t refused to open the Gateway after Tippy de Conway’s brother had it sealed, if I hadn’t ignored the Swan King’s cries for mercy, his face in my dreams, century after century, he would not be dead. He would be free.

I only wanted to protect you, save you from an iron blade
—

And just as I’m the only one who could have saved the King from that iron knife, there is only one who could have wielded that weapon.

The girl. Larkspur’s sister: Lissy Harker.

The Swan King fades before my eyes till I’m only looking at the bottom of the fountain, and white-hot fury sweeps through me with the raging force of a forest fire. She killed him, and he saved me, and I betrayed him. I left the Hidden to their imprisonment, sure that was a better fate than being endlessly hunted through the centuries by the Fontevrault. I was too late to save him. I may not be able to kill Lissy Harker, but now thanks to Larkspur I know exactly how to make her suffer, how to make her feel sorrow that cuts this deep. The little golden-haired girl is her sister. Connie Harker might be bright-blooded and Tainted, but she’s still mortal. She can still die if I choose to make her.

I choose it.

I crashed along the path through the woods, feeling like the world’s biggest idiot. I just wanted to get as far from the Reach as I possibly could. Far away from Joe – God, how embarrassing, ogling him like that. And then the way he’d flipped when I mentioned Lissy. Stopping, I hurled the iron cross as hard into the bracken as I could, breathing hard. Nothing had happened when I moved it from the window above the kitchen sink, prising those nails out of the wall with a claw hammer from the DIY drawer. Of course nothing had happened.

What did you expect, you idiot? A beautiful boy in a cloak made of white feathers to suddenly just appear and whisk you off into the sunset?

I’d imagined the whole thing. Everything. He wasn’t real.
Obviously
. But he’d seemed so
real
in the classroom, though. Like I could have reached out and touched him. I must have been dreaming or letting my imagination run away with me. Either that or I was losing my mind. How unbelievably lame to have concocted a story like that all by myself – I couldn’t stop cringing just thinking about it. Now I was miles away from school and alone in the woods I’d known for years, the Dream seemed far less real. Of course I wasn’t going mad. I’d fallen asleep in maths: that was all. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean that there was something terrible and wrong with my brain. It was a dream, not a hallucination. If I were mad, I’d still believe the boy was real. I wouldn’t even be considering the possibility that the whole thing was just a dream.

A boy with a cloak made of white feathers? For Christ’s sake, Connie
.

And now Joe blatantly thought I was some kind of freak, dreaming about Lissy. He’d been so angry the truth was he’d scared me, just a little. Why didn’t he just get over her? Six years had passed. He and Lissy had hardly even known each other when she died, for God’s sake. He had no right to miss her so much. She was my sister – she’d never even been his girlfriend and yet he was obsessed. How was I going to face him now? We had to live in the same house for a whole week, and probably the worst thing was that, on top of everything, he knew that I still blatantly thought he was hot. The way I’d stared at him in the car? Oh, God.