The Hidden Princess (20 page)

In answer, I just pushed through the overgrown tangle of bracken and dog rose till at last we reached the back door, and I went into the tumbledown kitchen. I was so tired that I could hardly even move. My vision blurred, and I stumbled on the doorstep, and Nicolas reached out and steadied me, the touch of his long, suntanned fingers surprisingly cool against my skin. I flinched at his touch, trying to push away memories of Briar.

“You should rest. We’ll do well enough here for a while till the madness out there dies down a little.” There was something so old-fashioned about the way he spoke. He stepped silently across the torn-up lino floor, eyes flickering past a row of kitchen cupboards, one with the door torn off: a heap of empty Coke cans on the rotting sideboard. I stared at him, unable to forget the way Briar had pushed me to the ground ready to do whatever he wanted. The truth was I was too scared to let my guard down. It wasn’t safe to sleep.

If that’s what the Hidden boys are like
, I couldn’t help thinking,
then what does that mean about Lissy? Is she evil, too?

Lissy wasn’t dead. Everyone had lied to me. I couldn’t trust anyone.

Nicolas stared back as if he’d just read my mind. “I’m not like Briar, all right? Mortal girls like you don’t exactly hold that much appeal.”

Unsmiling, he followed me through the kitchen into a sitting room littered with ashtrays and old magazines. I’d spent pretty much every night out here with Blue, Kyle and the others last half-term, but that was weeks ago now. It felt like a different lifetime, those nights spent drinking Coke spiked with stolen wine and watching Jessie doing tarot readings, as if all that had happened to someone else.

If I hadn’t been in the woods at night, Dad would never have come looking for me. I may as well just have killed him with my own bare hands. It was my fault. My head churned and I couldn’t hold on to a single train of thought for more than a few seconds.
There are people who look almost human, but they’re not human
. And they were everywhere.

“How do you know so much about all this, anyway?” My voice shook as I sank down into the battered old sofa. The cushions stank of stale red wine.

Nicolas stood leaning in the doorway, watching me with disinterest. “Because I’m both, that’s why. I’m Hidden and mortal, just like your sister. Get some rest.”

He knew about Lissy?

“How do you know about my sister?” Why was I always the last to find out?

Nicolas smiled then, and it lit up his face, and suddenly he was so bright and beautiful, so completely different that I felt my misery lift by just the tiniest of fractions. “Go to sleep, little mortal girl.” And that was the only answer he would give me. The last I remembered before sleep came rolling in as I lay curled up on the sofa was Nicolas standing by the window, watching through the smeared cobwebby glass and overhanging tangles of ivy, almost like he was watching over me. Sleep swept over me in unstoppable waves, drawing me down into the deep darkness. I didn’t know Nicolas, and he didn’t know me, but he’d cared enough to stop Briar, and he cared enough to keep watch as I slept, which was far more than anyone else did. He was a stranger, but he was all I had.

I hurled myself through the trees, dodging the running, panicking kids all around me. Was it the Hidden they were so afraid of, or just the sirens getting louder and louder? “
Connie!
” I’d shouted her name so many times my voice was raw and ragged. The trees thinned out, and there was no one here except some guy lying crumpled at the foot of a huge oak. Hammered, probably. “Shit,” I whispered, and even though every instinct was telling me to run like hell and get to Connie before the Hidden found her, even though doing that was worse than looking for a needle in a bloody haystack, even so, I couldn’t stop myself walking slowly across the clearing to the drunken loser slumped on the ground. The least I could do was give him a shake, tell him to get home. He lay facing away from me, wrapped in a dark coat, pale hair standing out against the muck he was sprawled in, one arm flung out behind him at an odd angle. The coat was weird. I’d been to a lot of parties like this, out in the woods or up the side of a fell somewhere, and you didn’t exactly see people in sensible outdoor wear.

And as I stepped closer, my feet crunching through last winter’s dead leaves, I realized that the hair wasn’t just fair but actually grey, and that I recognized the coat: the waterproof jacket I’d seen Adam grab as we ran out of the back door just hours earlier.

Even as I called his name, I don’t think I really expected him to answer. I stepped closer and closer, knowing what I was going to see even before I looked down at Adam’s dead face, at the small trickle of blood emerging from the corner of his mouth. Kneeling at his side, I brushed one hand over Adam’s eyes, closing the lids. But even as I did that, I couldn’t resist following the direction he’d last been looking in. And there in the leaves I saw something glittering.

Getting to my feet, I forced myself to walk across the carpet of leaf-mulch and dry twigs till I was standing right above a swathe of shiny silver fabric, tangled and trodden into the leaves. Connie’s skirt, the one she’d worn that awful Christmas Eve, months before.

“Connie.” I whispered her name, reaching into my back pocket for my phone. But as I crouched down beside the torn remains of her skirt, I saw why she hadn’t answered any of my increasingly desperate messages. Her phone lay just an arm’s length away, instantly recognizable as Connie’s, covered in stickers, the screen now shattered.

Connie wasn’t just gone, she was unreachable.

—And I see the face of a boy who looks just like Lissy, just like my sister – the same tangled red hair and pale beauty. Larkspur. It’s funny – now I know who they both really are, I see echoes of the Swan King, the boy who haunted my dreams for so long. Except he wasn’t a boy: he was a king, a powerful, merciless king. Larkspur’s looking right at me; it’s as if I’ve glanced into a mirror and he has stolen my reflection, replacing it with his own like a cuckoo chick pushing little sparrows out of the nest. And his face is wet with tears—

I woke with a dull ache in my neck, sprawled awkwardly on the sofa, taking a good few seconds to regain my bearings. Early-morning sunlight streamed in through the filthy window: I was in the gatehouse. With Nicolas. My head was thick with agony – it hurt even to open my eyes. I’d been dreaming. Again. I was no longer in control of my own mind – I couldn’t stop it parting company with my body, travelling to strange and dangerous places, to the Hidden.

Get a grip, Connie
.

Dad was dead in the woods. Flies would be landing on him, beetles crawling over him…
Nicolas
. I turned, shifting onto my side – a coat had been spread out over me, soft folds of worn-in leather that smelled faintly of warm grass. At the sound of running water, I rolled over to face the door leading into the kitchen, the headache jabbing deeper into my skull every time I moved. I rubbed my eyes, my vision shaking as the headache pulsed. Nicolas stood at the sink with his back to me, leaning forwards to splash his face with water, dark hair curled about the nape of his neck. He wore a loose white shirt, and as I watched, he pulled it off over his head, letting it fall to the cracked lino tiles, washing his arms and his body, sending shining trails of water down his back. His body was long and lean and his shoulder blades jutted out like little wings.

I stared, massaging my throbbing temples and wishing like hell that I was carrying aspirin. Was it my blurred vision or was there something wrong with Nicolas’s back? I rubbed my eyes, trying to push away the jabbing pain: the skin was ridged all the way down to his waist, ridged and marked with faint silvery lines, like old scars. I couldn’t stop staring, even though I knew it was wrong, and I would find it seriously freaky if anyone watched me in the same way.

“Seen enough now?” Nicolas turned to look at me as he stooped to pick up the shirt and my face burned. He slid his shirt back on, his expression completely unreadable, before turning back to the sink to splash his face with water once more.

“What happened to you?” I asked, since he’d just called me out for staring. There was no point in pretending I hadn’t seen. “Are they scars?” The second I spoke, I was kicking myself for being so blatant and unsubtle, but Nicolas didn’t seem to care. He just filled a couple of ancient brown mugs with water and walked into the sitting room, dropping into the old armchair.

“Put it this way, mortal girl, when I was your age things were different. My stepfather and I were not the best of friends.”

“Did he use to hit you? That’s so wrong.” I couldn’t get that image of those scars out of my mind. And
hit
wasn’t even close to a strong enough word. Those marks hadn’t been left by someone’s hand. They’d been left by a weapon. “You had to live with someone who did that? It’s abuse. Your stepfather should’ve been sent to prison.”

“But he
was
the law.” Nicolas gave me this beautiful incredulous smile, as if he were laughing at me for being so concerned, and passed over one of the mugs of water. “It was just the way things were – take a step wrong and you’d get a whipping. But even for those days my stepfather was a hard man. I used to think that one day he’d go too far, that one day I’d just bleed to death.” He smiled again. “But I was wrong about that. I had a wild temper then. I used to like making him rage. He looked so stupid when he did it.”

“Well, your stepfather had no right to leave scars like that, whatever you’d done.” I held on to the mug with both hands, unable to forget those pale silvery marks, the damage that must have been done for the shadows of them to still be visible. I swallowed, trying to ignore the headache. Surely it hadn’t been acceptable for parents to hit their kids with whips for a long time – a hundred years at least? And what had Nicolas meant when he laughed and said,
But he was the law
. As if violence like that was nothing unusual. Seconds passed by in silence before I dared ask the question: “When you say it was a long time ago, how long exactly do you mean?”

“Is that really important?”

I took a sip of water – it tasted almost earthy, like the pipes had been corrupted with something, but I started to feel a little more human. “It matters to me. Look – there’s so much I’ve seen and heard over the last two days that makes no sense at all. I’ve seen things I never thought were possible – these creatures, these Hidden, and my sister is one of them. I thought she was dead – my own parents told me she was dead and she’s not. Everyone’s been lying to me for years. Have you any idea how that feels? I just don’t know what to believe any more. Give me the facts so I know exactly what I’m dealing with. Why did you save me from that Hidden boy in the woods? How old are you?”

Nicolas set his cup down on the stained brown and orange carpet, then leaned back in his armchair, dark hair falling away from his face as I watched him, long eyelashes lowered, brushing his cheekbone. “Do you really want to know?”

“
Yes
.”

“Very well, then. I was born more than eight centuries ago. My mother was the richest heiress in Europe, and before she was even married for the first time, her father sent her to the mouth of the cave at L’Anse aux Audes, riding on a white mare with cloth of gold spread over the saddle and lilac petals strewn all through her hair, like a hound bitch left tied out to a stake for the wolves.”

I stared at him. He had to be making this up. But even as the thought drifted across my mind, I knew that he wasn’t. He was telling the truth. “
Eight centuries ago?
” The day before yesterday, I would have laughed at this conversation. Not now.

Nicolas shrugged. “It’s a long time, Connie, to walk the earth alone. My mother was mated to one of the Hidden – the Swan King’s right-hand man. He was murdered not long afterwards – some say on the orders of my mortal grandfather, who was a powerful duke, the richest man in Christendom at the time. He didn’t want anyone else to lay claim to his immortal grandchild – and more than anything else, he wanted an immortal heir. My mother was fourteen years old, just like you. And when her father, the duke, kept Christmas that year at the great abbey at Fontevrault, I was born. And I survived, and I was concealed there as my mother was married off first to the King of France, then to Henry of Anjou, who inherited the English throne. Children of mortals and Hidden usually die, poisoned by their own blood. But I survived, and now, such a long time later, so has your sister.” He smiled. “The Fontevrault have always been so terrified of interbreeding, but it’s not exactly easy to achieve.”

“OK. So you’re like this hybrid. You and Lissy. OK. I get that now. You’re eight hundred years old. Fine, fine.” I half wanted to laugh – it was all so crazy. “OK. OK. Since you’re the one with all the answers, why did I keep seeing that boy – the Swan King?” I still saw him in the back of my mind, that shining black hair tangled in the white feathers of his cloak.

Nicolas looks at me over the rim of his cup, leaning back against the armchair. “Because you’re Tainted, and because he wanted to escape, and he used you.”

“
Tainted?
What’s that supposed to mean? That’s a horrible word – it makes me sound dirty.”

“You remember being ill? When you were a child?”

“Yeah. I was still in hospital when Lissy died –” I broke off, staring at him – “when Lissy disappeared. That must have been when she went to live with the Hidden.”

“When the Swan King claimed her, yes. He was Lissy’s father, Connie… She killed her own father.”

I watch him, uneasy. There was something different in Nicolas’s tone then – an edge of hardness that sent a cold sliver of fear down my back. I couldn’t get my head around it: my sister was a murderer. Nicolas just went on as if nothing had happened, and I was desperate enough for the truth that all I could do was listen. “When Lissy was born and she survived, Larkspur was ordered by his father to bring her home to the Hidden. Their father was the boy you saw, Connie, the one who kept appearing in your dreams, who told you to open the Gateway. The Swan King. Larkspur disobeyed, though, and returned Lissy to Miriam – to your mother – just a few days later. The Swan King granted them fourteen years together, though, but you and your brother were cursed to die unless Lissy was returned to the Hidden at the allotted time.”