The Hidden Princess Read Online Free

Hall even though I can’t see him. My father. Impossibly, he is also now behind me.
    I whirl around again, and now I’m face to face with him – he’s taller than I am, dark, silvery eyes watching me, the white feathers of his cloak brushing his cheek, so pale against the black hair spilling around his shoulders. Quick as a snake, he reaches out and takes hold of my wrist, pulling me closer. I gasp at the chill of his touch and we both look down at the blood, so bright against my skin. The wound is already healing, broken flesh knitting itself back together, my skin smooth once more, stained with a faint silvery scar and dark blood which is neither truly human nor truly Hidden. Not that this stops it hurting. I heal, but that does not lessen the sting.
    He gives me a faint, incredulous smile. “I caught you. Why did you let me?”
    I grant him no reply; I fling the dart straight at his face instead. Smiling again, he holds up one hand and it simply drops clean out of the air and clatters, harmless, on the cold white rock at our feet. He reaches out to me and I flinch in anticipation of the blow, but instead my father only touches my face with gentle delicacy, as if brushing his fingers against the cheek of a newborn child.
    “You’re a fool,” he whispers. “When it comes to the last battle, win the fight, Lissy. If my hand fails and the Fontevrault catch you, you’ll know imprisonment worse even than this. You’ll never receive the gift of death. If you would have mastery over yourself, use it as you ought to. Try again, Lissy.”
    I feel the chill of hard metal against my neck. My eyes shift to the left, and he’s holding the bronze knife from the scabbard at his waist right against my bare skin – he can move so very, very fast. With every last shred of willpower, I glance up at the dizzying white reaches of the cavern far above us; I focus my mind, forcing myself to forget the possibility of being held prisoner by the Fontevrault if I ever free myself from here, the threat of escaping one form of imprisonment only to find myself trapped again.
    Fly
.
    An electric tingling spreads across my skin as I take on my hawk-form – and I am no longer standing, no longer even touching the ground at all but beating my hawk-wings, soaring hard away till at last I’m looking down on the Swan King, a black-haired figure far below, his cloak of white feathers trailing on the ground at his feet, face upturned as he watches my flight. He holds out one arm – the command for me to come – and for just a few seconds I allow myself the dangerous liberty of disobeying him, circling and soaring around the cavern under the illusion of freedom.
    I’m no fool. I descend at my father’s unspoken command, landing on his outstretched wrist, my hawk-talons scoring lines of silvery-blue Hidden blood against his pale skin that fade to nothing in the time it takes for me to shape-change again and step to the ground, a girl once more.
    He smiles again. “Better. I have lost count of the times I’ve wished that flight was not only the royal gift of the Hidden, that all our tribe could fly free from mortal danger. Lissy, if the Fontevrault ever catch you, you’ll be their prisoner till the world crumbles into dust and you are the only one left alive. If the mortal race find out what you are, Lissy, that you are even possible, they will drain every drop of your Hidden blood for a taste of immortality. The Fontevrault will use you as a breeding machine, as an experiment. So don’t fail me again, daughter. I have lost so many already. All those I loved so very much. Don’t be amongst them.”
    Fury flashes through me. “You’re no one to talk about using girls. What about Tippy?” Grief punches through me as I recall the day I first found her, just a little mortal girl-child kept prisoner by the Hidden, running around the endless tunnels in the ragged old nightie she’d been wearing when Rose stole her three hundred years before,