The Hidden Princess (12 page)

You’re such a loser, Connie Harker
.

I strode on through the woods. It had to be almost lunchtime by now, but the idea of eating anything made my stomach churn. At least I wasn’t sitting in geography. At least Mrs Anderson had stopped short of calling Mum and summoning her home from France. I’d almost reached the beech coppice where me and Blue would be helping Amy’s boyfriend, Nye, set up his sound system in just a few hours. What was Joe going to make of the party? I pushed on through the bracken, furiously batting the green fronds away from my legs with an old branch.

Which was when I heard the drumming.

I stopped, branch hanging loose by my side.
Drumming?

Oh, shit
. News of the party had clearly spread much further than I’d realized. There were people up in the far woods already – the kind who enjoyed impromptu drum circles. Who, in my experience of tagging along to illegal outdoor parties with Amy, Nye and Blue, were also very often the kind of people who had their own vans, their own generators, a lot of hair and a lot of dogs. They definitely weren’t going to listen if I told them that tonight was strictly invitation only.

This was getting way out of control. The drumming was growing louder every second. I could hear singing now, too – a high, clear voice, brighter than the stars on a clear winter night. I couldn’t understand a word: it was all in some other language I half recognized, as if from a dream. It sounded almost like hissing. There were far too many “s” sounds. It was completely freaky.

I walked on through the tangle of bracken, trying to be quiet. Even if these guys were pretty much just going to laugh in my face if I asked them to move on, I might still be able to get some kind of an idea how many of them there were. If it looked really bad, I could always tell Blue not to bring the sound system. Without music, even if people from school did turn up, maybe they wouldn’t stay long, especially if word got round that we’d cancelled.

Yeah, right
, I told myself.
A free house is a free house. Who’s going to care if there’s music or not? It’s not exactly like there’s a hundred other entertainment options around here on a Friday night. If there’s no music up here, they’ll just descend on the Reach instead
.

Oh, God.

I could hear laughter now, too, and people talking – all in that weird hissing language. There was something
familiar
about it, similar to Welsh maybe – we were pretty close to the border. But it wasn’t Welsh. I pushed through the last of the trees until the clearing finally opened out before me, filled with shards of sunlight knifing down through the trees – and people. There were
hundreds
of them. Hundreds. For ages, all I could do was stand there, just staring. They were all so tall, so tall and strange and beautiful. They were just like the boy in my Dream. Just like the boy in his cloak of white feathers. He’d begged me to free him, to move just a single iron cross from the Reach.

A wave of hot nausea washed through me.
Connie, what the
hell
have you done?

Who were these people? They were all so ridiculously gorgeous and yet their clothes were just absolutely ragged – filthy scraps of silk and animal hide. It was like walking into some kind of freaky fashion shoot. They all looked like models. They were exactly like Lissy, I realized – Lissy and the boy from my Dream. She looked just like him – different colouring, but now I knew why he’d seemed so familiar:
he was like Lissy
, their faces echoed each other. Why the hell had I been dreaming about a boy who looked exactly like my dead sister? And now the woods were heaving with people just like both of them.

I left the safety of the trees and walked closer. I couldn’t help myself – I was drawn to them all. I just kept putting one foot in front of the other even though every instinct was screaming at me to run. They were dancing, writhing to the beat of the drums, laughing and calling to one another, all so pale and so beautiful. None of them seemed to pay me any attention – it was like I wasn’t even there. Before I’d given it any thought at all dancing figures surrounded me completely, lithe as snakes, dirty hair flying out around them. They spun and twisted among the trees, their beautiful faces upturned to the sky, teeth shining as they laughed and sang in their strange language.

And then the nearest ones just stopped, standing dead still and staring at me, all smiling. All boys – but tall, beautiful boys with wild hair and such pale skin it was as if they’d never seen the sun. The one closest to me stepped a little nearer – his hair was the rusty brown of dead bracken in winter, and the buckles on his boots clinked a little as he walked.

“Hello, little girl,” he said, and then he laughed. They’d known I was there all along. They’d been playing with me, just like a cat toys with a mouse: they’d let me walk right in among them thinking that no one had noticed.

Idiot, idiot, idiot
.

As one, all the boys suddenly seemed a lot closer without me even seeing them move. I could smell the stale, unwashed scent of their clothes, the sweetness of their breath.
Oh, God
. I wished like crazy that Blue was there to make some sort of dumb remark that would make it all seem like a joke.

“So will you dance with us, Connie?” the rusty-haired boy said, reaching out to let one long, white finger trail down the side of my face, shuddering with pleasure the second his skin came into contact with mine. His touch was so cold that I gasped, and he knew my name. I couldn’t move. He’d called me Connie: he knew who I was. I couldn’t speak. He took my hands in his, and God, he was just so unbearably cold.

“Such warmth,” he whispered, and his beautiful lips parted, letting out a sigh. “Such beauty and such warmth, little girl.” It was obvious what he wanted, pulling me towards him, closer with every breath, running his freezing-cold hands all over my body, sliding them up inside my school shirt, his thumbs pressing into my bare belly as he pulled me closer still, so that all I could smell was the stale, musty stink of the ragged skins he wore. It was like I’d been frozen. And it was at the moment he pulled me hard up against his lean body that I realized he wasn’t human. There was something alien about him, just too different. Not human, but something else – something with enormous strength and power. Different, like Lissy in my dream, just like Lissy.

Run
, I screamed at myself.
You’ve got to run
.

I screamed, and when my scream died, fading into the branches of the trees above, he was still there, his breath in my face, and a single voice cut through the silence, cold and utterly chilling in its fury.

“
Let her go
.”

I knew that voice. I knew it.

Lissy
. It was Lissy. And I knew I had to be already dead, or dreaming, because Lissy was gone and there was no way I’d hear her voice in the waking world ever again. She was gone, she was gone—

“
Now
.” Her voice. Lissy’s voice, but so angry—

And the rusty-haired boy was torn away from me by a force I couldn’t see, jerked free of my body as if snatched by a giant hand, his eyes wild with rage and fear. I sat up, breathing hard, watching as he flew across the clearing just like a doll hurled by a child having a tantrum, landing hard in the shadows. And the rest of them did nothing but watch in silence. Sobbing, I scrambled to my feet, spinning around. I was surrounded: they had all gathered in a circle around me, silent. Watching. I sensed someone right behind me and whirled back to face them, heart hammering, sweat pouring freely down my back.

I came face to face with a girl.
No, not a girl. Something else
.

She was immensely tall, towering above me, and wrapped in a cloak of golden-brown feathers that swept to the ground all around her, a pool of shining feathers at her feet. A girl with tangled red hair and a face I’d known since the day I was born, because she was the second person in the world to hold me.

“Lissy.” I could hardly speak with enormous relief and shock. It was her. Not dead. Living and breathing right in front of me. My sister. But she’d changed. She was different – even more so than she’d been when I saw her in my dreams. Taller, and somehow like a cat that had once been a pet but that was now wild, ruthless and powerful.

She’s not dead, she’s not dead, she’s not dead
…

“Connie.” Lissy stepped towards me. “Didn’t I warn you? Didn’t I tell you to stay away? You should never have opened the Gateway. I had to kill him.”

What was she talking about? This couldn’t be happening. “You’re not really here,” I whispered. “You can’t be here.”

She smiled, the anger fading as she reached out to take my hand. “It’s really me, Connie. I promise.”

We reached out, holding each other so close I could hear the slow beat of her heart as I pressed my head against her chest. She was so tall.

“It can’t be you. Oh, Lissy, it can’t be you.”

She laughed, like we were the only two people in the whole world, not at the centre of a crowd of freakishly tall and beautiful creatures who were all watching us like some kind of street theatre performance. “It’s really me, Connie. But you shouldn’t have opened the Gateway—”

“You’re dead,” I whispered, and she let go of me like I was burning her. “You can’t be here because you’re dead.”

And for a second she looked just like the old Lissy again – so vulnerable. “
What?
I’m what?”

They laughed. The rest of the creatures started to laugh, watching and smiling.

“Let us have the little girl, O Queen,” one called. “Come on, let us take her. She’s so warm and we’ve been so cold for so long.”

“Let us have her, Lissy. You can never go home now. Let us keep her, Lissy – to play with.”

She turned to face the crowd in a whirl of golden feathers. “Be quiet!”

“Let us take her. She can never be yours again. Why not let us take her?”

It was clear that Lissy was no longer in control. We were alone. And what the hell had they called her?
Queen?

“Stay close to me,” Lissy whispered, and her face was streaked with tears. “I’ll manage this, Connie.” Her voice rang out across the clearing. “I didn’t ask for this and I never wanted it. Perhaps next time you ought to be more careful what you wish for. If I’m really your ruler, you’ll have to learn to obey me.” She hardly lifted her voice, but it carried right across the clearing, slicing through the rush of rising chatter. “Leave my sister alone.”

On the far side of the group, the rusty-haired boy was standing again, leaning forward, straining against the grip of those who were holding him back. He laughed. “What right have you got to deny us the heat of a mortal girl?” he demanded. “We’ve waited so long, Lissy. You released us: bear the consequences.”

“Do you want to keep your freedom or not, Briar?” Lissy’s voice carried effortlessly. “Take yourself another mortal girl if that’s what you’re so desperate for and see how quickly the Fontevrault come running. We’re here to negotiate our freedom. Unless of course you want them to come after you with weapons of iron? Unless you want all the Hidden to be completely wiped out?”

“Lissy?” I hissed. “What are you talking about? What’s the Fontevrault?”
The Hidden? Weapons of iron?
None of it made any sense. I felt like I was dreaming again or even hallucinating – this simply just couldn’t be the real world, not with my dead sister in it, talking about all these crazy things that made no sense at all.

Lissy turned to me, her bone-white face so alien, somehow. “Listen, Connie. Everything you’ve ever been told about me? It’s a lie.”

And that was the first time the truth really sank in. It wasn’t what she said, but the dead-white glow to her skin, her height – she wasn’t just model-tall now but freakishly tall, cloaked in all those shimmering golden feathers, that dirty silver gown clinging to her legs.

Lissy wasn’t dead, but just like those other beautiful creatures, she certainly wasn’t human, either.

I sprinted out through the boot room and into the yard, half blind with panic, my vision blurring. Slamming into the fence, I saw fresh boot prints on the muddy lane that twisted away up the hillside, soon hidden by trees. Connie had been running, and the missing crucifix had just disappeared – it wasn’t in the kitchen or the hallway or anywhere obvious at all. I couldn’t put it back, which meant I had no way of sealing the Gateway. All I could do was find her, quickly. What if the Swan King had already crossed back over into the mortal world? Connie had no idea what she was dealing with, what she had unleashed. Not a clue.

I sprinted up the lane, skidding in the wet mud, yelling her name over and over again, but apart from my own voice, the woods were quiet. I stopped, panting: I knew I had to give myself the chance to listen, to assess the situation. It was the wrong kind of quiet. I couldn’t hear any birdsong, no soft shuffling and crackling as small creatures moved through the undergrowth, either. Dead kind of quiet, like you get when the rest of nature knows there’s something wrong and runs for it.

I’d heard that kind of silence before. Six years ago, the day I stepped out the back door at Hopesay Reach and saw Connie talking to a young girl with hair as white as snow.
Rose
—

The further into the woods I got, I heard voices, drumming, even. And then it all stopped, just nothing but complete thick silence again. I tore on through the trees, and then all of a sudden there they were, the Hidden, walking all swift and silent towards me with sunlight in their hair, cloaks swirling about their legs. There must have been six or seven at least, weirdly tall and dressed in those scraps of silk, leather and fur, just walking silently towards me between the trees like fish slipping through fronds of seaweed. I stopped, heart pounding. I couldn’t look away from their faces: their dark, glittering eyes.

The Hidden only smiled at me, each and every last one of them – like I was the best joke they’d ever seen – and it was only knowing that Connie must have ventured further into the woods that stopped me running like hell in the other direction: I just knew that as a member of team
Homo sapiens
I was in the presence of a higher predator. And as the Hidden smiled, their white teeth glistened, and I couldn’t help wondering if the whole death-by-iron thing extended to the haemoglobin in human blood and how hungry the Hidden really were after their incarceration.