The Hidden Princess (22 page)

Connie just sighs and pushes past me towards the door. I stand in her way and she turns back to face me, her face alight with anger. “You might have saved me back there in the woods, but you don’t get to choose what I do now, OK?”

God take her eyes, why can’t she just stay here? I let her go, swallowing the desire to slap her. Instead, I shoulder my bow and the quiver of arrows. I’m going to need every weapon I can carry. She stalks out of the door and away through the trees, golden hair shining all the way down her back, and it would be so easy to loose an arrow now, to watch her fall on her face like a felled tree. An arrow through the heart, through the lungs: she’d be dead before she hit the ground.

In the back of my mind, I still see the Swan King kneeling at my side when I fell from the tower at Fontevrault; I still hear the easy command in his voice when he told me to get up, those white feathers billowing around him, so pale against his black hair. He gave me a life worth living. Because of Lissy, he’s dead.
Patience
, I tell myself.
Let her die when Lissy can see her suffer
. Connie beckons me closer with an imploring look in her eyes, holding one finger to her lips. Connie has no idea how loud she is and here she is ordering me to be silent – I want to laugh.

I catch up, and Connie mouths at me, “
Listen
.”

And to my shame, she’s heard something that I’ve missed.
Control yourself
, Larkspur would tell me.
You are not concentrating
. I stand still, forcing all thoughts of murder from my mind, and I listen. There it is – the sound of sobbing almost eclipsed by the thin, relentless wailing of a mortal child.

I catch up with Connie and she grabs my arm with her hand, her mortal touch so warm against my bare skin. “It sounds like a baby,” she whispers. “Can you hear that?”

I’m here to hunt: I don’t care. But Connie is already walking off towards the noise. A wailing child, a sobbing woman. This isn’t going to be good. This is not something I need to be tangled up in, not now.

“Come back!” I hiss, but Connie ignores me. Damn Christ and all his angels, I should have killed her when I had the chance. She’s running now, and I keep pace. Connie crashes through a tangle of briar, bracken and dog rose. I follow in silence. I hear the child quite clearly now, but the woman has fallen quiet – all I hear is unsteady breathing and now I’m closer I recognize the unhurried beat of a Hidden heart, always so much slower than the hot racing rhythm of a mortal’s. I catch up to Connie and this time I hold her back; she flinches when I touch her, but she doesn’t struggle. Despite the Hidden mauling she endured last night she trusts me: more fool her.

“What?” Connie hisses. “Come on, that
is
a baby – we can’t just leave it—”

“Wait.” I hear myself say. “Let me go first – it’s with the Hidden, and the Hidden don’t have their own young.” And once the Hidden have hold of a mortal child, they become desperate; they become dangerous. I’ve seen this before, too many times before the de Conways closed the Gateway. And slowly, steadily I step past Connie, treading in silence across last year’s dead leaves. I weave my way through moss-covered oak trees, ash and thorn, and here in the green clearing before me is a wild young girl with ivy wound about the dark tangles of her hair, no girl at all but just Iris of the Raven Hair – Larkspur’s lost love – and I haven’t seen her for three hundred years.

Iris looks up, sensing my presence, her face glistening with tears as she tries to soothe the baby, rocking and rocking, but all to no good because mortal babies need to feed, and she is Hidden. She cannot feed it.

Her lips part in surprise when she sees me; she whispers my name. “
Nicolas
.”

The air is thick with the sour scent of fear and desperation. As I move in silence through the panicking mortal teenagers, who haven’t managed to find their way out of the woods, I notice older men and women pushing with brutal confidence amongst the straggles, dressed in the dark uniforms of mortal lawkeepers, circling ever closer around their target. Briar. It’s Briar. Backing away from them.

I send an order:
Run, Briar
. At least I’ve found him.

And even as I wonder why Briar doesn’t just turn and outrun these mortal lawkeepers as he so easily could, I hear his frightened voice in my mind. A single word:
Iron
.

I smell it now, too – like the hot scent of mortal blood, but far stronger, a punch of sickness to my stomach.

Larkspur
—

Briar backs up against an ash tree as the lawkeepers step closer, one of them turning to reason with the throng of mortal girls behind.

“It’s him!” one of the girls screams. “He did it! He attacked Tia Marshall and then Connie Harker, and now no one can find Connie!”

Briar’s always been a fool but it looks like he’s excelled himself this time.

Just stay still
, I tell him.
Don’t move
. Briar looks past the lawkeepers, never taking his eyes from my face: he trusts me to save his hide, the Swan King’s son, and just as one of the female lawkeepers edges the crowd of girls away, I hear the clink of metal on metal, and Briar’s eyes are stretched wide with fear.
Iron
. They have handcuffs. Steel handcuffs.

Don’t move
, I order.
Don’t struggle
. If the cuffs break his skin, he’ll die.

Just as I’m about to step forward and kill as many mortal lawkeepers as I have to, the air is rent with a high, wild screaming mingled with cries of astonished horror from the mortals. The rank stink of burning flesh fills the air, and as I watch, Briar disappears in a cloud of swirling, whirling dead leaves – he panicked, he struggled, and the steel cuffs must have grazed his skin, poisoning his blood with iron. The hot sharp stink of human spew fills the air as one of the lawkeepers crouches in the dirt, leaning forward, clawing the dirt as he vomits at the shock of it.

Briar has gone: I am too late, once again. Too late for my father, and now too late for Briar. Dead leaves whirl and drift and time seems to slow as if the air itself has thickened like stale milk, and even as I turn to walk away, useless now, I hear Lissy’s voice in my mind, a loud, savage roar as if she were screaming right into my ear, even though she is nowhere near me.

Larkspur, Connie is with him. Connie is with Nicolas. Please help. Please help
—

And I don’t know if I should, because she killed him. She killed my father. Maybe it is time that Lissy suffered, too, and I ruin everything that I touch, anyway.

The Hidden girl cowered away from us, cradling the baby close to her chest. It was crying, but the cry sounded so thin and weak. And I’d have known that patchwork blanket anywhere: I spent three months knitting it. This Hidden creature had Amy’s baby: she’d got little Mika.

“Stay back,” Nicolas said, standing beside me. “Iris?”

Was that her name? It made her sound so innocent – a flower, a wild yellow flower that grows by streams and rivers, but she’s a thief. A baby thief.
Mika
.

“That’s not your baby.” My heart pounded and for a second all I could hear was blood beating in my ears.

Iris backed away towards the trees, still rocking Mika from side to side, and all the time this thin, desperate wailing rang out through the trees. “My child,” she whispered. Her face is wet with tears. “My little son.”

Iris looked up, her eyes blurred with tears, and even though she was Hidden and I was mortal, her grief was sharp and clear. She was desperate. I shot a questioning glance at Nicolas, desperate to get Mika away from her, but I didn’t have a clue how to get close enough and still make sure that Mika didn’t get hurt. He was so tiny, so fragile. I remembered the warm weight of his small body in my arms just the day or so before, no heavier than a cat.

“The Swan King took a mortal child captive – her name was Tippy,” Nicolas spoke quietly. “Most of them died, but this one didn’t. She suffered, though, just a little girl, desperate to go home, trapped in the Halls of the Hidden. Iris tried to release her and the Swan King found out. As punishment, he made her lie with a mortal knight and bear a hybrid child. The baby died because they usually do. Your sister and I are rare exceptions, and Iris never recovered. It must have been three hundred years ago at least, but the Hidden don’t forget, Connie. Let me talk to her.”

“Please don’t let him die,” Iris whispered, looking at me with pleading eyes. “Please don’t take him away. I’ve waited so long to hold him again, and it feels a little better already, the hurting. But I don’t know what to do. He won’t stop crying.”

“She’s confused.” Nicolas sounded surprisingly gentle. “She thinks it’s her baby.”

“He’s not yours, that’s why he’s crying.” I tried to keep my voice calm, patient. “He needs milk. He needs his real mother.”

Iris looked down, crooning at Mika and stroking his dark hair, but still he cried and cried. “But I need my baby.” Her voice broke like she was just some normal girl, so sad and desperate. “You don’t understand. I need him. I couldn’t help him. I just had to watch as the life drained out of him, and there was nothing I could do, and he was in such pain, and there was nothing I could do to comfort him.” She wasn’t talking about Mika any more, I realized, but that other baby, long ago – her baby – but to her, it wasn’t long ago at all, and the grief was just as sharp and desperate as it had been on the day she’d lost her own child.

Nicolas stepped forward, very careful, arms at his sides, deliberately unthreatening. “Iris, the mortals won’t let you keep this child. Briar attacked a mortal girl and now they’re hunting us through the woods. They’re afraid. Listen. The Hidden are free now – maybe one day you’ll find another mortal to give you a baby – a bright-blooded mortal, and the baby won’t die. It’s not too late for that to happen, is it?”

Iris just cradled Mika, crooning and crooning. “It is too late,” she whispered, gazing down at him with hungry desperation. “I know that, really. The mortals will come for me now, won’t they? They’ll punish me.”

“It’s not too late. Let me take him back,” I said, trying to sound gentle even though every instinct was telling me to run at her and grab Mika. “I’ll take him back home, and no one ever needs to know it was you who stole him. Go back to the Hidden – you’ll be safe with them. Go back to Lissy.”

I stepped towards Iris, but Nicolas grabbed my arm, and I sensed a terrifying and enormous strength: he wasn’t going to let me get near her. I was slowly starting to realize that my assumption I’d been rescued by some kind of hero was a big mistake. Another one.

“You’re not going anywhere. Bring Lissy. Ask her to come.
Find her
: you’ve done it before.” There was something different about Nicolas’s voice then. He sounded hard and cold, not like he was on the verge of laughing at me the whole time any more, but a lot like he was going to hurt me if I didn’t do as he asked.

Iris backed away, rocking and crooning, rocking and crooning, and all the time Mika just wailed and wailed.

All I could hear was Iris, sobbing, begging, lost in the past again, trapped at the moment her child died three hundred years before. “Don’t take my baby. I can’t bear to lose him again. I can’t bear it. Please don’t take him, oh, don’t take him, oh please don’t—”

“Do it, Connie – call Lissy.” Nicolas’s voice was cold and alien, like he was a completely different person.

I needed Lissy, and I needed her now. I shut my eyes, trying to shut out Iris begging Nicolas to let her keep the baby. I reined in my fear and pictured my immortal sister again, her cloak of golden feathers, her wild red hair – so far away from the kind, quiet Lissy who had been just my big sister so long ago, never quite fitting in at school, always a bit different. Now she was a queen. Now she wasn’t even human any more. I couldn’t hear her voice in my mind, couldn’t even summon a mental image of her that felt real. Wasn’t I meant to be powerful; wasn’t I meant to be Tainted? I was nothing – just a stupid little girl.

This time, nothing happened. Nothing at all.

I soar high above the woods, wings spread, hunting for my sister. I saw her face in the water. She needs me. She needs me and I can’t find her. Oh, Larkspur, I need your help. I need you now.
Forgive me, forgive me
…

Lissy’s still my sister
, I told myself, desperate, and instead of the wild queen I’d met in the woods, cloaked in feathers, I thought of Lissy as I really remembered her, my big sister curled up next to me on a huge double bed with a white duvet spread out all around us like fields of snow, reading me story after story. She never seemed to get bored of that.
Oh, Lissy—

And just at that moment agonizing pain tore through my skull and my mind completely emptied like an upturned pan of water, leaving behind only the clear blue image of a wide open sky, blue and endless, punctuated only by the silhouette of not one bird soaring high above us, but two, wings spread, banking and swerving – a hawk and a falcon, hunting side by side.

Lissy
—

“Damn it, they’re coming!” I heard Nicolas cry out, and I opened my eyes to see the entire clearing whirling with feathers, brown, black and gold. Lissy and her brother Larkspur stepped out of the raging cloud of feathers, a furious red-haired queen and her brother, and then I was the one who was flying, so far from feeling like a failure and a screw-up that I wanted to shout with victory: I’d done this – I’d called them here with my mind, this wild creature Larkspur and this queen who had once been only my sister.
There’s nothing I can’t do now
. I’d done it after all.

And through the storm of feathers, falling, tumbling feathers, I see the flash of Connie’s golden hair, and stepping forward at my side is my brother, still at my side despite everything I’ve done.

“Larkspur—” He came. He answered my call.