The Hidden Princess (5 page)

My sister’s not really dead. I know she’s not
.

What makes you think that, Connie?
I could still see the carefully manufactured look of concern on Deborah’s face.

I don’t know. I just know, that’s all
.

No one had understood then. No one would understand now, and now it was even worse – Lissy was actually talking to me in my sleep, the tip of her finger so cold against my face. So real. Who could I talk to about this? Who could I tell? Nobody would believe me.

“Face it, Connie –” I switched off the lamp, whispering to the darkness – “you’re in this alone.” I don’t even know how long I sat leaning against my pillows, watching the moonlight slant into my room through the diamond-leaded window, tipping a silver puddle onto the floorboards. My eyes travelled to the iron cross nailed above the curtain rail. There was a crucifix above every window at Hopesay Reach, and one above every single door, black iron.

Why don’t we just take them down?
I’d said to Mum one day.
They give me the creeps
. And Mum told me that if we did, no one from the village would ever come here to do the cleaning for us, which was enough of a deterrent for me. I didn’t care what rubbish the zombies in Hopesay Edge believed – if it meant I didn’t have to scour rusty old bathtubs and brush cobwebs from every corner of a house big enough to get lost in, the freaky iron crosses could stay. There was something strangely reassuring about them, anyway, solid and ageless in the cold moonlight. With the headache still pulsing behind my eyes, I kept my eyes on the crucifix till at last I knew I was falling asleep again, as if in some stupid way an old iron cross might offer protection.

It’s just a dream, Connie
, I told myself, fierce with anger at how much it had frightened me, like a little child scared of a nightmare. But no matter how much I tried to convince myself, I knew the Voice was more than just a dream.

In my heart, I knew the Voice was real, that someone was desperately trying to get me to listen. And that was why it scared me so much.

Halls of the Hidden

Connie. I stare at the black water, but she has gone, as if she were never there, as if I imagined the whole thing, and perhaps I did. Perhaps I have been a prisoner so long that my mind is starting to crack right open. Six years would be long enough, would it not, with the threat of my father’s revenge hanging over me the whole time? An unravelling mind is a danger the Hidden fear almost as much as iron – they’re so old and they have so many memories it is only too easy to get lost in the past, to lose hold of reality completely. Perhaps that’s what is happening to me. Already.

I sit back on my heels, allowing my gaze to drift upwards and away from the silent waters of the Gateway, relentlessly drawn up the glittering white wall of the cavern till I’m looking right at it: a silver vial no bigger than my hand, resting in a crevice in the rock face fifty metres above my head. The vial contains just a spoonful of my hybrid blood, transfused with a Hidden song of such virulence and power that the contents are enough to spread an unstoppable plague across the face of the earth. An immortal plague.

I’m the only one trapped down here with the power to open the Gateway – with my mortal blood, I’m immune to the power of the iron magic that seals it – but if I let my father out, he’ll release the plague. If my father sees Connie, if he can somehow communicate with her as I just did, a mortal girl immune to the touch of iron, he’ll use her to get out of here.

Why did no one think to warn Connie not to meddle? They must have lied to her about me. About what happened. If I put a foot wrong now they will all die: Mum, Nick, Rafe, Dad – even Joe, never mind his stupid bravery and all that
honour
. It will not matter. He’ll rot just the same along with the rest of them once my father’s plague spreads. And it won’t just be my family, either.
Everyone will die
. They’ll all pay with their lives for the death of Larkspur’s mother so long ago: every single last man, woman and child on earth. He loved her so much.

Oh, Connie. I must tell her the truth, I must stop her
—

“Lissy?”

I turn to face the intruder, cold with terror.

It’s Iris, not the Swan King, thank God, just mad Iris, and she’s standing right behind me, a crown of ivy tangled in her dark hair, her pale face still beautiful even though her mind is broken, shattered into pieces by the terrible punishment my father exacted on her three hundred years ago. It might only be Iris, but how can I have let down my guard in such a foolish way? She might have been standing behind me for ages. What did she see?

“What are you doing here? This is a royal chamber, Iris.” I do my best to sound stern and imperious, hoping to scare her away, praying that she didn’t spot Connie’s image in the waters of the Gateway.

But Iris doesn’t cringe, and neither does she run away, back past the guards who have waited outside the White Hall for millennia. Odd how they let her in, but I’ve no time to worry about that now.

Iris just crouches down beside me, her dark, silvery eyes meeting mine without hesitation. “Lissy,” she says, again. “Who was that girl in the water?”

The quartz cavern floor beneath me falls away, and I’m tumbling through empty space. Iris reaches out, placing one white cold hand on my arm, and her touch is so cold it brings me back to the present, and I cannot help shivering. “Lissy, what are you doing?” Iris goes on, urgent and afraid. Justifiably. “Who is that girl? It’s not safe to communicate with the mortals, you know. The Swan King will find a way to punish you. He’ll find a way to hurt you.”

All I can do is stare at her in shocked, silent horror.
She saw
. She saw Connie. Iris starts to shiver, wrapping her slender arms around her body, fingers digging into the silver-white silken dress that clings to her ribcage: Iris is so
fleshless
, even for one of the Hidden. Her eyes seem to lose their focus, as if she is not really looking at me any more, but at something – or someone – else that I can’t see. She’s losing her hold on the present, falling through cracks in time, back through the centuries to the day her hybrid baby died.

“You need to be careful, Lissy. He punished me – the Swan King punished me,” Iris goes on, skeletal fingers now digging into the spare flesh of her arms. “
You led Tippy to the White Hall so that she might escape us
, he said to me, and his voice was so cold, so terrible, Lissy.
You betrayed me, Iris of the Raven Hair. If you love the mortals so dearly, take a mortal knight for yourself and lie with him till you bear him a half-breed child, and if you die lying with a mortal knight then so be it, and if your child dies, then so be it.”

I take her cold hands in mine, trying to rub in some warmth, to bring Iris back to the present. “You did what was right, Iris. You were the only one who dared to help Tippy. It was wrong of Rose to steal her, wasn’t it? To bring her down here? She was just a little girl, missing her mother, her father.”

“My baby,” Iris whispers. “I couldn’t keep him alive—” Her eyes are wild and unfocused.

“
Listen
. What my father did was unforgivable. He should never have punished you the way he did, forcing you to bear a hybrid baby when he knew that it would most likely die. But it’s not your fault that he
did
die, Iris.”

All I know is that because Iris tried to save Tippy, she’s the only one of the Hidden I have any interest in. Having Iris as my only true friend amongst the Hidden is lonely enough, but the rest of them sicken me – too afraid of their king to help a terrified, desperate child.

And God, I can’t bear to think of Tippy and how she sacrificed herself to release me and Joe from the Halls of the Hidden. How it was all for nothing, because the Swan King always wins in the end. “Iris—” I reach out, resting one hand on her freezing-cold shoulder, trying to bring her back to now, but her mind is lost in time, and her face is wet with tears.

“And the one I loved, the Hidden boy, he never forgave my betrayal of him – lying with a mortal knight. He was so angry,” she whispers. I can’t even count the number of times she has told me this tale. “I bore the half-breed child as I was ordered to do. I held my little baby till he died in my arms, and still my love would not forgive me. Oh, Lissy, I lost him, and my baby, everything, with no one to comfort me. I think the Swan King knew what would happen, how I would suffer. Don’t let him do the same to you. He will find a way to make you suffer.” She looks up at me, her beautiful face bone-white. “There were only two, ever, in the world that we knew about. Only two. Why not my baby?”

I’ve no idea what she’s talking about now –
Only two? Two that we knew about?
“Iris,” I say, firmly, “please listen. It’s really important you don’t tell anyone about the mortal girl you saw me looking at, the girl in the Gateway. Never mind what dreadful punishment he might dream up, if the Swan King sees her there, he will try and contact her, use her to open the Gateway and get out of here. And you know what he’ll do then – the plague. You’ll never have a chance then to find another mortal knight, to have another hybrid child of your own.” All I can rely on is Iris’s hatred of my father and her desperate longing for another baby to hold, one who might live. She’s said before now that my very existence gives her hope.

Iris stares up at me with a swift, sudden movement that reminds me of a hunting cat. She has returned from the past; she is back in the present. “Of course I won’t say anything, Lissy. But you’re playing a very dangerous game. You must remember that he will show no mercy if he believes you have wronged him. No mercy at all.”

I nod, slowly. It is always so disconcerting the way a conversation with Iris veers through time. Her broken mind skids from century to century. “I know. Listen, I don’t have any control over when she comes. All I can do is warn her to stay away—”

“You don’t know why I came, do you?” Iris interrupts. She might be my only friend amongst the Hidden, but it really is impossible to hold the course of a conversation with her. I would give a lot just to
talk
to someone again, someone not my father.

Perhaps that is why, in my true heart, I was glad to see Connie’s image in the waters of the Gateway, to hear her voice again. I’m lonely. And if I am lonely after six years amongst the Hidden, how will I feel after six hundred? Perhaps I’ll forget about Tippy one day, or forget that she mattered. Perhaps I’ll dance and sing with the rest of my father’s tribe, not caring that for three hundred years they did nothing to help an abandoned child.

“Why are you here, then?” I’m grateful that Iris has lost interest in Connie, for now at least. It
is
unusual to see her in the White Hall – she’s so afraid of my father, after all. It must have taken all her courage to come here looking for me, but she just smiles like it’s Christmas morning, and it is heartbreaking to see because this is the real Iris again, who she was before my father punished her and broke her mind: a bright, smiling, beautiful Hidden girl and, not for the first time, I wonder who her Hidden lover was – the boy who never forgave Iris for having the baby of a mortal knight. In six long years, I’ve never managed to hold track of a conversation long enough to make her tell me. “Lissy,” Iris says. “Lissy, I’ve found a corpse.”

I swallow, all questions forgotten, desperate to ignore the chilly sensation spreading across my back, between my shoulder blades. Her eyes glitter with hard, bright excitement, and still she smiles.

“A mortal corpse.” Iris reaches out and takes both my hands, and God, she’s so cold, all the Hidden are so, so cold. “Just bones, Lissy, but the bones reek of iron.” She smiles at me, her teeth shining. “Iron. You could kill him, Lissy. You could kill the Swan King. That would solve everything, would it not? Even if your sister opens the Gateway, how could the Swan King release the plague if he was dead and gone?”

“Well?” says Nicolas, watching me beneath the desert night. “What in Hell’s name does it mean? Who is she?”

“It’s Connie Harker.” I can’t shift my eyes from her image. Gradually, ripples appear from nowhere and spread until she is gone, and all I’m looking at is an iron pot full of dirty water. “It’s Lissy’s sister. She’s the one I healed when Rose gave her a Hidden sickness.”

“You
healed
a mortal girl of a Hidden curse?” Nicolas glances across at me, one dark eyebrow delicately arched, and then at the glistening surface of the water. “It looks like that’s not all you did.”

“Insolent wretch. She’s Tainted, wedded to the Hidden world – she’s able to pass between the two places in spirit when she sleeps. When she dreams.” I frown at the black, glistening water in the pot. “My father told me about Taintings a long time ago but I’ve never actually seen it before. Connie must be bright-blooded, as your own mother likely was. It’s probably why Miriam was able to bear Lissy, why neither of you died. Somewhere in Connie and Lissy’s mortal family, there’s a line of bright blood, I’m sure of it. When I healed Connie, she
changed
, her blood set alight. Now she’s older, her link to the Hidden is growing even stronger.”

“What does that mean, anyway,
bright-blooded
?” Nicolas runs his fingers through his dark hair, raking it back from his face. Unhooded, he never seems to feel the cold as I do.

“The bright-blooded mortals are more akin to the Hidden than the rest of their kind, that’s all – less like water and oil than the others.” I shrug. “That’s why your mothers weren’t destroyed bearing half-Hidden children. Why you and Lissy survived as hybrid babies when no others did – or none that we know of. Maybe there are more somewhere, hiding in forgotten corners of the earth.” I look away, out at the silvery sand spreading away from us beneath the night; I can’t quite bear to meet his eyes. “Remember Iris?” It’s hard to say her name: the hollow sourness of my desperation seems to rise again: how I loved her, and how she left me at my father’s orders when he punished her for trying to release Tippy. Iris never even looked my way when I was exiled amongst my own kind, when he forbade all the Hidden from even speaking to me. My father broke her. He broke the one I loved, and if I hadn’t been such an arrogant fool and shown Iris some mercy when she needed it most – if I had forgiven her for bearing that half-breed child – perhaps she might one day have been mended. Perhaps she might have shown me mercy, too.