The Hidden Princess by Katy Moran Read Free Book Online

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?”

9
Larkspur
    “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