The Hidden Princess (24 page)

I hug Connie in the abbey car park, wrapping my arms around her as we stand by a black glossy hire car arranged for us by the Fontevrault. All the tourists have gone for the day, leaving only us – and them: the Fontevrault, watching us from the three nondescript SUVs parked by the entrance. Waiting to make sure I keep my promise. Larkspur and Nicolas are waiting for me, concealed in the shadow cast by the huge, looming wall of the ancient abbey. The feathers of my hawk-cloak pool in the dust at my feet. I can never walk in the open again, not if I’m going to keep my side of the bargain. Not if I want to keep the Hidden safe. It’s so strange to think how none of those hundreds of tourists swarming through the abbey today ever knew how close they all came to dying, how much the Swan King wanted to obliterate them. It’s over now. It’s done. I glance over to the car park exit, to the SUVs parked like sleek black seals sunning themselves on a rock. The Fontevrault are ready. It’s time.

“You should go,” I whisper into Connie’s ear. Her golden hair smells stale, unwashed. She and Joe could both do with a shower, a change of clothes, but at least the Fontevrault didn’t hurt either of them once they were prisoners.

Connie pulls away, her face shining with tears. If we ever see each other again, it’ll have to be a secret from the Fontevrault. And after the way they caught Joe and Connie at Hopesay, I’m not sure it’s even
possible
to keep secrets from the Fontevrault. This might be the last time. The very last time I see my sister.

Connie pulls away, looking up into my face. “Don’t do anything stupid, OK?” She glances at the hire car. It’s dark, but I can see Joe sitting behind the steering wheel, leaning back against the seat. I think his eyes are closed. “Lissy,” Connie goes on, quietly, “he waited a long time.”

For me. “I know,” I say.

I’m so conspicuous out here with my cloak of feathers. All it would take is a car full of French teenagers looking for a place to hang out, and the Fontevrault would end all hope of freedom for the Hidden. I can sense Larkspur’s unease from here, even though he and Nicolas are waiting metres away, concealed in shadow.

Giving me a bright, brave smile, Connie opens the passenger side door, releasing a wave of vanilla-scented air-freshener, one of those smells from my past that reminds me with such horrible force of the time when I was just an ordinary mortal girl. Connie slides into her seat, ready to go. It’s time to watch her leave, time to say goodbye. Joe starts the car, the engine hums, and I can’t help myself. I run to his window, but he doesn’t open it. He does look, though. He turns to look at me. When the Swan King first took me to live amongst the Hidden, Joe was the only one who tried to stop him. The only one who dared to believe that there had to be another way, even though there never was.

“Thank you,” I say, mouthing the words through the darkened glass, knowing it can never be enough, that Joe lost so many years of his life to missing me, and there’s nothing I can do to mend that but let him go.

Joe turns slightly, glancing at me through the window. He nods, as if in silent agreement, and all I can do is stand in my cloak of feathers, watching as the car pulls away. I was once mortal. I was once one of them.

Now I’m Hidden, and it’s time to run.

Northern France, one day later

We drove north and the window on my side was filled with glaring light as the sun went down, spreading pink and red and yellow all over the sky, way too bright to look at, so I had to look at Joe. He’d hardly said a word since we left the abbey, since the Fontevrault let us go free. I tried to block out the memories of the room I’d been kept in, those uncountable hours, the terrifying overnight journey, bundled in and out of unfamiliar cars, into a plane, and finally to the ancient abbey where all this started, where Nicolas had grown up so long ago. I pushed the hysterical phone call with Mum out of my mind, or tried to. I wasn’t ready to think about Mum yet. I definitely wasn’t ready to see her. So many lies. I stared out of the window at the motorway flashing past. “No one’ll ever find out what really happened, will they?”

Joe just shrugged. “If the Fontevrault are good at one thing, it’s a cover-up. To be fair – how much will they have to do if Lissy keeps to her word and the Hidden stay out of the way? Who’d believe it?” At least there was nothing they could do to my dad now, still lying cold and dead in a hospital morgue. “It’s over now. It doesn’t matter any more, Connie. We’ve just got to hope that the Hidden keep to their side of the deal, that’s all.”

He drew in a long breath, and I looked up to see that his face was wet with tears, and I knew they were all for Lissy.

“Where do you think they went?” I closed my eyes, partly because it was so awful to see Joe crying, and partly because I could picture Lissy that way much better. She seemed more real as I remembered her in our old life – just a mortal girl curled up at my side on the sofa, reading
Harry Potter
to me.

Joe just shrugged, and I knew he was thinking of the moment we’d been herded out of that cold stone room at Fontevrault Abbey, and how Lissy had been standing at Nicolas’s side: two of a kind, the only two in all the world. I knew then that I would never be enough for Joe, always just a reminder of Lissy and what he could never have.

“Maybe it’s not over.” I forced out the words, anything to make it so that Joe wasn’t driving me north, back to England, back to his grandad’s till I was ready to face Mum, just driving along with tears streaming down his face. He’d always been there to pick up the pieces for me, for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. The least I could do was try and do the same for him. “I know Lissy’s gone, Joe, that we can’t see her again. But maybe that’s not the end of everything. Why can’t it be the beginning? You’re free now. She doesn’t own you any more. And she did, didn’t she? Lissy really owned you for six whole years – she didn’t mean to, but she did. Well, she doesn’t any more.”

Joe turned to me, half smiling. “Nice try, Con. It’ll take more than that to fix me.”

I raised both eyebrows. “Well, obviously. I
am
dealing with a screw-up of monumental proportions, after all.”

And this time he really did smile.

“Listen, Joe. You didn’t talk to Nicolas: I did. Lissy’s just like him, and it’s only going to be a blink of an eye for her before you and me are both old and then dead.” I couldn’t get my head around that at all, but I knew it was true, and I’d never forget the look on Nicolas’s face when he talked about his family, all dead, all gone, their little lives just over so quickly, so insignificant compared to the Hidden. I couldn’t sit there watching Joe get ready to watch the rest of the time he had slip past, dreaming about a girl he could never have, a girl who didn’t really exist any more. Lissy was still Lissy, in a way. But she was also Hidden, and their queen. “We’ve got to make the most of it, OK? We’re hardly here on earth at all compared with them. Don’t waste your time, Joe. Promise me you won’t waste it.”

Joe leaned back in his seat, holding the steering wheel with just one hand. I could tell he didn’t really believe he’d ever get over her. “I’ll do my best, all right?”

I reached over and grabbed his hand, and he held mine, too. It was enough. “Promise?”

“I promise, Con.”

“Good.” And I let go of Joe’s hand. Life’s too short to waste on hope alone.

The Dancers, four years later

Iris and I sit apart from the others, watching the moon rise above the fells as we lean into each other. One of my tribe is singing the ancient songs of our people, songs of the rivers and mountains we left behind, of the dark halls we called home for so many centuries. The dancing has started, too, lean Hidden figures twisting in the moonlight by the old standing stones, free under the sky, but this time I feel no cause to dance and I’d rather watch, because Iris is with me, she has forgiven me, and that is enough.

“Do you hear that?” she says: the swift beat of mortal hearts. “They are coming.”

This time there’s no need to call our tribe to arms, to walk away into the sea, into the trees. There is laughter, too, a young mortal couple talking in low voices, laughing as they make their way up the hillside. I see them now, a mortal girl and a boy, hand in hand, silhouetted against the light of an almost-ripe moon.

They stop when they see us, and she smiles. “Hello, Larkspur.”

I can’t help smiling back. “You found us, then.”

She shrugs. “It wasn’t so hard.”

And the boy is just looking on in wonder at the rest of my tribe dancing by the standing stones.

“How’s Joe? Isn’t he with you?” Has he forgotten Lissy at last?

Connie glances at Iris, then looks down the fellside at the tiny mortal dwelling nestled against the hill – a stone cottage with square windows lit up against the night. “Back at the smallholding with his girlfriend. They’ve got a baby, a new baby.”

And Iris does not flinch, because now there is a life inside her that grows with every new moon. A miracle. A one-in-two-thousand-years’ chance: worse even than the Fontevrault’s worst nightmare. Not a hybrid child, but a Hidden child, and it’s mine.

I smile, and I remember my father, what he once said:
On the day that you were born, and I held you red and bloodied in my hands, I knew such joy as I had never known
. And in the next breath he’d banished me, and that was the last time we spoke, and all I can do is hope that I don’t make the same mistakes. “On and on, Connie Harker. On and on,” I say, glancing at the mortal boy at her side, who is still staring in undisguised wonder at the dark, lithe figures dancing beneath the moon, twisting and spiralling around the standing stones. “What about your side of the bargain, Connie? Can he be trusted?”

She shrugs. “Yes. He saw, Larkspur. He was there in the woods that night. Lying only makes it all worse, doesn’t it? Where’s my sister?”

I watch Connie’s face, hoping that she is right, and that this mortal boy won’t betray us to the Fontevrault. “She’ll come.”

And Connie turns to the boy at her side, still holding his hand. Two have broken away from the dancers, walking towards us both together. Lissy and Nicolas. “Look, Blue,” she says, and the boy just watches with that same silent wonder written across his face, holding Connie close as she leans into his shoulder, waiting as Lissy and Nicolas cross the tangled moonlit grass. They’re side by side, her cloak of feathers billowing out around her, wild hair tangled in the warm wind blowing in off the sea, Nicolas with his shirt loose around his neck, walking with a sense of freedom and ease that has only come to him lately.

And, laughing, Connie breaks away from the boy at her side, and she runs across the windblown grass towards her sister.

Acknowledgements

I am so very grateful to the tremendous Daisy Jellicoe, who never forgets a single plot detail, and also to Hannah Love, who will stop at nothing to make sure you love books as much as she does. Thanks are due of course to Catherine Clarke for her unending support, for which I’m always so grateful.

I am really indebted to the wonderful UKYA book bloggers who showed their support for
Hidden Among Us
and who spread the love for books with such passion. In particular I must single out Vivienne Dacosta, Sister Spooky, Clover, Hannah Mariska and Raimy Greenland, who all were kind enough to let me loose with guest posts on their blogs. Thank you so very much, guys.

I must also say another big thank you, this time to Mr Dart and Class 7Y1 at Ivybridge Community College in Devon, who brought my knowledge of school life up to the twenty-first century and explained the use of interactive whiteboards. I owe big, big thanks to a certain crew, last but never least, who shall of course remain nameless (Chatham House Rule, my dears).

THE COMPANION TITLE TO THE HIDDEN PRINCESS:

HIDDEN AMONG US

When Lissy uncovers a dark secret in the village of Hopesay Edge she finds herself fighting the Hidden and their powerful magic. Unknowingly bound by an unbreakable bargain, Lissy is in danger, because if they catch her now, they will never let her go.

“A winning combination of mystery and magic.”
Celia Rees

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