I looove getting four reviews when I wake up, so here is your update. Thanks for the support! This story is turning out to be waaay longer than it was meant to be, but never mind!

CALLUM

We stood in front of my parents later that morning. Helen's eyes were still shadowed with the pain she clearly felt at the loss of her family, but she looked as if she'd come to terms with it a little more.

My father was the first to speak. "How are you, Helen?" I was surprised at the kindness in his voice – not because it was unusual, but because I hadn't realised that my parents did genuinely care about this girl. Just as I did.

"I am well, thank you, your majesty," she answered. "Though the news was a shock to me."

"I understand, and I am sorry to bring this up now, but we must decide what to do next. The summer will be over soon, and in winter it would have been Elena's twentieth birthday, and the day on which she would have married Callum. If you are indeed she, then we must attempt to find proof of it before then. And we must notify her parents now. They would be angry with us if we did not, and rightly."

Helen bowed her head in agreement and I wondered what she was really thinking. She remained silent as my father called in a scribe and dictated a letter to the Tanezian King and Queen. Since it was little more than two days' hard riding to their palace, they would be expected within the week. They would almost certainly come. There was no way they would let any chance pass that might lead them to their missing daughter.

I did not see her for the rest of the day; I suspected that she was still trying to come to terms with the news, and preparing herself for the ordeal of meeting Elena's parents for the first time. I missed her. I wanted to talk to her about how she was feeling, and how my day had gone, and share all the little things we'd been sharing since she'd arrived at the palace. Somehow I felt that everything I had experienced hadn't happened unless I told her about it. But instinctively, I avoided her, feeling that when she did meet the Tanezian royal couple it would be a resolve of all the questions. Surely they would recognise their own daughter.

I felt restless once I had come to this conclusion, wanting to be with her while also knowing that she needed to be alone. I felt that we hadn't finished our conversation this morning. I liked to think that I had convinced her of my good intentions, but I had to admit that my situation hadn't looked great. In order to get the nervousness out of my system, I took my favourite horse, Lightning, out for a good gallop; and then as an antidote to the rush of adrenaline that gave me, went to my father and spent three hours helping him sort paperwork and settle various small disputes between his subjects. By the time I'd finished, I was sore and exhausted, and it was all I could do to stumble upstairs and along the corridors to my rooms. I wondered if Helen was in bed. I wanted to go to her, almost went and knocked on her door, but decided against disturbing her. Perhaps… particularly considering the circumstances of our last meeting… I should let her come to me, instead of going to her room at night.

To my astonishment, my sitting room was occupied. Lydia was curled up on the sofa, reading for the millionth time one of her favourite books.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, a little ungraciously. My relationship with her was good as far as it went, but I'd never been amazing at talking to her, particularly since my rift with Marcus. She was so young, and had such different interests to me, other than books. And her friends tended to be giggly young ladies from noble families who never failed to eye me up in case they could bag themselves a prince.

"Sorry," she said, putting the book down but, I noticed, not standing up to go. "Come and sit. I want to talk."

"Oh," I said with a measure of uncertainty. "What about?"

"Sit!" she said, and she sounded so like our mother that I obeyed without thinking. Once I was settled into a chair, she cleared her throat.

"Do you think Helen is the Princess?" she blurted out. I stared at her, a little taken aback by her bluntness.

"Well…" I had thought I knew the answer to that. In fact, I had been going to say yes to Lydia's question. So why was I hesitating? "I… I don't know," I confessed.

"Why?" Her big dark eyes were troubled.

"Well, I…" She was looking at me expectantly, and I wondered if I could trust her. She was only fifteen, after all. What did she understand of such matters?

"You can tell me," she said softly, and for some reason I believed her. All of my frustrating emotions burst from me at once.

"I don't know how to feel!" I exclaimed. "I loved Elena. Love. Loved. I don't know! She was everything to me. She was the one I was going to marry. I made my mind up to that when we were very small – when she climbed that stupid tree and wouldn't come down. I knew when I saw her up there that she would be my wife. She was stubborn and spoiled and vain and so young, but she was my Elena and I loved her. And then she disappeared, and it was the worst pain I had ever felt. I didn't know it was possible to experience that much hurt and still live through it, but I did. And now… And now…"

"Helen," said Lydia, still softly.

"Yes, Helen! She's different. She's lived a harder life, and she's learned lessons that Elena was never capable of at sixteen. She's compassionate, and sweet, and lovely, and she is the only person apart from you who has ever dared to tell me what she thinks about me… But is she Elena? I don't know. Sometimes I am convinced of it. The way she screws up her nose and laughs, and the way she dances when she thinks no one is looking, and just that excitement about life – they are all Elena. But there is always that horrible doubt lurking in the back of my mind. What if she is not? I'm torn in two, Lydia. If she is Elena, well and good… but she has forgotten everything that made her mine, and perhaps she will never care for me as she once did. And if she is not? Then I have betrayed Elena's memory, and my love for her – wait, why are you crying?"

I had been pouring out my heart and soul, but my bewildered interruption caused Lydia to start and flush, evidently hoping that I hadn't noticed. "I'm not," she said valiantly, sniffing.

"Yes you are. What's wrong?" My own troubles, heavy as they were, were almost forgotten as I went over to sit by her. "Tell your nice brother Callum."

She sniffled again. "It's just that…" she said in a rush. "I want you to be happy, and Helen too, and I wish that you could just be together, but I loved Elena too and she was like a sister to me, and I feel like a traitor being Helen's friend because she's taking her place, and I miss Marcus a lot, and my favourite cat has gone missing."

I almost laughed at the unexpected final addition, but managed to restrain myself. This was new to me, this sisterly confidence in me – but I remembered Helen crying about her family, and put my arm round Lydia comfortingly. "It will be all right," I murmured while she cried into my shoulder. "It will be all right somehow, I promise."

By the evening of the following day, my patience had completely run out. I'd never had much of it to begin with; I'd always preferred to jump first and think afterwards and hang the consequences, though my father was trying to instil thoughtfulness into me. But I'd waited long enough now. I had to talk to her. She hadn't even appeared at lunch or dinner, and she'd elected to have breakfast in her rooms so I hadn't seen her all day. Lydia and I had been playing a nervous game of cards in her rooms, to which she'd invited me after dinner, with the idea of trying to calm me down; but I kept forgetting myself and slamming the cards down irritably, startling her each time.

"Ace of spades," she said timidly. I looked down at the cards I held in my hand. But I couldn't even see them. Before my eyes appeared only Helen, Helen feeding breadcrumbs to the ducks in the lake, Helen licking her fingers after that pastry and grinning up at me, Helen's face so close to mine that I could count every individual freckle on her pale skin and count every individual lash standing out from her green eyes… Why didn't I kiss her when I had the chance?

Abruptly, making Lydia jump again, I threw down all my cards and jumped to my feet.

"Callum?"

"I'll see you later," I said distractedly, and left her rooms at a run.

I knew where Helen would be. We'd spent many happy hours in my private garden, lounging on the hanging chair, lying on the grass, telling stories; but when she wanted to be alone, she always went to the rose garden. It only took me a few minutes to run there at top speed, and then I halted at the entrance, suddenly besieged by uncertainty. Should I? Or not?

Then I remembered the way she'd cried in her sleep, the night after she'd read the letter, and hardened my resolve. I passed through the arch, heavy with climbing roses, and peered into the garden. Among a mass of crimson roses, she was sitting on a stone bench, shoulders drooping, staring into nothingness. Tears rolled slowly down her face, but she seemed unaware of them.

"Helen," I said softly. I was unprepared for her reaction.

"Callum!" She stood, stared at me for a second, and then flung herself at me. Her small frame was shaking with sobs. "I can't stand this any more!"

I was distracted by the fall of her soft hair on my shoulder for a moment, and the feel of her body against mine, but pulled myself together in time to ask quietly: "Can't stand what? Come and sit down."

She obeyed me passively, still crying. "This – this – uncertainty!" she sobbed. "I don't know who I am anymore! I've tried and tried to remember – if I only knew, I could be happy – I don't care who I am, Callum!" She turned a tear-streaked face to mine. "I wouldn't care if I was the lowest servant in the land – if I was nothing – as long as I remembered where I came from!"

I felt a terrible pang of guilt as I stroked her hair. This was all my fault. I had caused this. If she had never met me, she would still be living happily in the village, never dreaming that her life was a lie. "It doesn't matter," I tried to say. "You're still you."

But she wouldn't listen. "I want to go home," she hiccoughed.

The words burned through me with a painful clarity. She wanted to leave me. Of course she didn't care. I almost gave in to my possessiveness, told her that she could never leave me, that she was mine and belonged to me alone and always would. But it was the wrong choice to make: I could see that now. She was just a flower, fragile despite herself; a flower could not survive when it was pulled up by the roots. "Then go home," I whispered, finding the words very hard to say. "Just go."

She stilled in my arms and then looked up at me again, a new expression dawning in her eyes that I couldn't quite read. "No," she murmured.

"No?" It was almost like flying, this feeling that maybe – just maybe –

"I can't leave you," she said simply, and those four words made me feel happier than I ever remembered feeling throughout my life.

The next hour passed in a daze. I don't know what we said to each other. Nothing much; just the occasional small comment on something we'd done that day or what someone had said to us. We made no declarations to each other, no promises. But she put her head on my shoulder and her small hand into mine, and I would have done anything for her at that moment, anything at all to keep her by my side.

Eventually, though, it began to grow darker, and though it was summer I felt her shiver a little. "We should go inside," she said, turning those eyes – still green in the mysterious half-light of evening – on me.

"I suppose so," I said, still half in a trance.

"Come on." She was herself again, teasing, laughing at my lassitude. "Get up, you lazy lump."

"All right, all right." I got up and we walked through the silent darkening gardens, content to be silent in each other's company. When we reached one of the doors that led inside, I bowed and let her go ahead of me in a most gentlemanly manner; she giggled, swept me a curtsey, and sailed through the doorway with her nose in the air. It was things like this that made me fall for her – how she could turn from serious to silly in an instant, how she never reacted the way I thought she would. I liked how everything was turned upside down when I was with her.

As she stalked down the corridor in front of me, dignity personified, I caught up with her and poked her in the side. She squealed and leapt away, dignity forgotten. "That tickles!" She poked me back and I also jumped in a rather un-princely way.

"Hey!" I complained. "You did it harder." I poked her again.

"Stop it! Keep your hands to yourself, your highness – "

"Try and stop me!" I grinned, trying to grab her round the waist. She danced out of reach and laughed up at me. I laughed too, caught up in how beautiful she was when she was happy. I was so busy staring at her that when we reached my parents' rooms, where we had been unconsciously heading as we often did to say goodnight, I didn't see what it was that made the smile slide off her face; all I knew was that she turned whiter than paper, staring at something inside the room.

"Helen?" I asked, instantly worried. What could have made her look like that?

She just pointed towards my parents. I turned to look… and froze.