“You’ll pay for this,” said the Queen, in an almost-conversational tone. “I’ll have your bones for gingerbread, and your candied sweetmeats for my dinner table.”
“Maybe,” said Kade. “Maybe not. Neither of your guards seems to be coming to save you. That tells me a lot about the kind of place you’ve got here.” Indeed, the guards were standing frozen at their posts, seemingly unable to decide what to do next.
Cora walked over to where Sumi was tethered, leaving Kade with the Queen. Sumi turned her head to look at Cora, spectral eyes over glistening bone, and Cora suppressed her shudder. This was not the sort of thing she was prepared for.
“Hang on just a second,” she said to Sumi, and walked on, stopping when she reached the first guard. “Why aren’t you trying to defend your boss?”
“I don’t know,” said the guard. “I don’t … None of this feels right. None of this feels real. I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.”
Probably because he wasn’t supposed to be. He was meant to be tending a candy corn farm of his own, or fishing for some impossible catch within the waves of the Strawberry Sea. The Queen of Cakes was a dead woman as much as Sumi was, but unlike Sumi, she was dressed in skin and speech, still talking, still moving through the world. That had to warp things. For her to have a castle, she would need courtiers, and guards, and people to do the mopping-up.
“There are too many dead people here,” muttered Cora. Louder, she said, “Leave, then. If you’re not willing to defend her, you don’t have to be our enemy, and you can go. Get out and let us fix the world.”
“But the Queen—”
“Really isn’t going to be your main problem if you don’t get the hell out.” Cora bared her teeth in what might have been a smile and might have been a snarl. “Trust me. She’s not going to be in a position to hand out punishments.”
The guard looked at her uncertainly. Then he dropped his spear, turned, and ran for the door. He was almost there when the other guard followed suit, leaving the four of them—two truly among the living, two more than half among the dead—alone.
Cora turned and walked back to Sumi, who was still waiting with absolute patience. She dug her fingers into the braided licorice rope, feeling it squish and tear under her nails, until it gave way completely, ripping in two and setting Sumi free.
Sumi didn’t seem to realize that she was free. She continued to stand where she was, shade over bone, staring straight ahead, like nothing that was happening around her genuinely mattered, or ever could. Cora wrinkled her nose before taking Sumi’s hand, wrapping her fingers tight around the skeletal woman’s bare bones, and leading her gently back to where Kade was holding the Queen.
“Those traitors will bake for what they’ve done to me,” snarled the Queen of Cakes.
Kade cocked his head. “That’s almost a riddle. Will you bake them, or are you going to sentence them to some suitable length of time in your cookie factory? Not that it actually matters either way, since you’re not going to be giving any orders for a while.” He leaned forward and grabbed her by the arm. “Come with me.”
For the first time, the Queen looked afraid. “Where—where are you taking me?”
“Where you belong,” said Kade. He pulled her across the throne room to the door, shedding chunks of her dress with every step, and Cora followed, Sumi walking silently beside her, bony feet tapping on the floor.
* * *
CHRISTOPHER WAS STILL breathing when they reached the tower room, and Rini had tied their captive guard up so tightly that he was more a cocoon than a captive, propped in the far corner and making muffled grunting noises against the severed gummi bear leg she had stuffed into his mouth. She raised her head when the door opened, eyes widening in relief. Well. Eye. Her left eye was gone, replaced by a patch of nothingness that somehow revealed neither the inside of her skull nor the wall behind her. It was simply gone, an absence masquerading as an abscess on the world.
“Did you…” She stopped herself as Sumi stepped into the room behind Cora. “Mom.”
“She’s still dead,” spat the Queen of Cakes, struggling against the taffy rope Kade had wrapped around her wrists. “Nothing you do is going to change that.”
“I don’t know,” said Kade. “Killing her early seems to have brought you back just fine. Seems like cause and effect aren’t all that strict around here.”
He shoved the Queen of Cakes forward, until she stumbled and fell into a frosted, crumb-covered heap.
“Tie her up,” he said to Rini, holding his stolen sword in front of him to ward off any possible escape attempts.
Cora stepped around him, moving toward Christopher, who looked so small, and so frail. The blood seemed to have been leeched away from his face and hands, leaving his naturally brown skin surprisingly pale, like scraped parchment stretched over a bucket of whey. She knelt, careful not to jostle him, and lifted the dead starfish of his hand off the floor.
“I think this is yours,” she said, and pressed the bone flute into his hand.
Christopher opened his eyes, inhaling sharply, like it was the first true breath he’d been able to take in hours. The color came back to his skin, not all at once, but flooding outward from his hand, racing up his arm until it vanished beneath his sleeve, only to reappear as it crept up his neck and suffused his face. He sat up.
“Fuck me,” he said.
“What, here? Now? In front of Kade?” Cora put on her best pretense of a simpering expression. “I’m not that kind of girl.”
Christopher looked startled for a moment. Then he laughed, and stood, offering her his left hand. It was probably the only hand he was going to have free for a while. The fingers on the right were clenched so tight around the bone flute that they had gone pale again, this time from the pressure.
“Thank you,” he said, with all the sincerity he had. “I don’t think I had much time left.”
“All part of the job,” said Cora.
“Chris? You all right?” called Kade. He pressed the tip of his sword down a little harder into the hollow of the Queen’s throat, dimpling the skin. “You say the word and she’s gone.”
The Queen said nothing, frozen in her terror while Rini wrapped more and more pulled taffy and gummy candy around her. She looked like all of this had suddenly become genuinely, awfully real, like it had all been a game to her before.
And maybe it had been, once. Maybe she had stumbled through her door into a world full of people who grew candy corn from the chocolate and graham soil and thought that none of them were real people; like none of them truly mattered. Maybe she had played at becoming despot instead of baker because she hadn’t believed that there would be consequences. Not until another traveler came along, a fighter rather than a crafter, because Confection hadn’t needed another baker, not with their last one sitting on a throne and demanding tribute. Not until her death at Sumi’s hands … but even that had been reversed, forgiven by the world when Sumi died before she could return and start a proper revolution.
Until this moment, even into death and out of it again, the Queen of Cakes hadn’t truly believed that she could die.
“I’d say something about being the better man, but fuck, man, I don’t know,” said Christopher. He stretched before slumping forward and groaning. “I feel like I’ve been dragged behind a truck for the last hundred miles. This is the worst. Let’s never come here again.”
“Deal,” said Cora.
Christopher looked at Kade and the Queen of Cakes, and the room went slowly still. He took a step forward.
“I never got offered a door to this place,” he said. “I’m not a baker, and I wouldn’t have liked it here. Too sweet for me. Too much light, not enough crypts. I like my sugar in skull form, and my illumination to come from lanterns hung in the branches of leafless trees. This place isn’t mine. But the place I did go, the place that is mine, it sort of screwed with my ideas about life and death. It made me see that the lines aren’t as clear as the l
iving always make them out to be. The lines blur. And you, lady? I don’t want you to be dead, because I never want to see you again.”
He looked away from the shaking Queen of Cakes, focusing on Kade. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, and turned and walked out of the room.
When the others followed, they left the Queen of Cakes and the one captive guard bound and gagged, to be found or forgotten according to the whims of fate. If the Queen had thought to order her prisoners fed, she might be rescued.
Or she might not. Whatever the outcome, it no longer mattered to the rest of them. They were moving on.
10
THE CANDY CORN FARM
“BEING DEAD FOR A while really messes with your staffing,” said Cora, as they emerged from the castle’s kitchen door and into the wide green frosting grass fields beyond. No farmers worked here, although there were a few puffy spun-sugar sheep nipping at the ground. “I figured we’d get caught at least twice.”
“Once was enough for me,” said Kade grimly. He had shed his stolen armor, but still carried his stolen sword. There was blood on the hard candy edge, commemorating that one brief encounter, that one hard slash.
Cora turned her face away. She had never seen someone die like that before. Drowning, sure. Drowning, she knew intimately. She had pulled a few sailors to their deaths with her own two hands, when there wasn’t any other way to end a conflict, when the waves and the whispering foam were the only answer. She was good at drowning. But this …
This had been a stroke, and flesh opening like the skin of an orange, and blood gushing out, blood everywhere, hot and red and essentially animal in a way that seemed entirely at odds with the candy-colored wonderland around them. The people who lived here should have bled treacle or molasses or sugar syrup, not hot red animal wetness, so vital, so unthinkable, so, well, sticky. Cora had only brushed against one edge of one shelf stained with the stuff, and she still felt as if she would never be clean again.
“How far from here to your farm?” asked Christopher, looking to Rini. He was holding his flute in both hands now, tracing silent arpeggios along the length of it. Cora suspected that he was never going to let it go again.
“Not far,” said Rini. “It usually takes most of a day to get to the castle ruins, so Mom can show me what they look like when the sunset hits them just so, and she can tell me ghost stories until the moon mantas come out and chase us away. But it never takes more than an hour or two to get back to the edge of the fields. There’s not as much that’s interesting about walking home, not unless robbers attack or something, and that almost never happens.”
“Nonsense worlds are a little disturbing sometimes,” said Christopher.
Rini beamed. “Why thank you.”
Sumi’s rainbow-dressed skeleton was still plodding faithfully along, neither speeding up nor slowing down, not even when she put her foot down in a hole or tripped over a protruding tree root. When that happened, she would stumble, never quite falling, recover her balance, and continue following the rest of them. It wasn’t clear whether she understood where she was or what she was doing there. Even Christopher lacked the vocabulary that would allow him to ask.
“Do you know yet?” asked Cora, glancing uneasily at Rini. “What you’re going to do with her? You have to do something with her.”
“I’m going to find a way to make her be alive again, so that I can be born and the Queen of Cakes can be overthrown and everything can be the way it’s supposed to be.” Rini’s tone was firm. “I like existing. I’m not ready to unexist just because of stupid causality. I didn’t invite stupid causality to my birthday party, it doesn’t get to give me any presents.”
“I’m not sure causality works that way, but sure,” said Kade wearily. “Let’s just get to where we’re going, and we’ll see.”
Cora said nothing, but she supposed they would. It seemed inevitable, at this point. So she, and the others, walked on.
* * *
RINI WAS TRUE to her word. They had been walking no more than an hour when the land dipped, becoming a gentle slope that somehow aligned with the shape of the mountains and the curve of the land to turn a simple candy corn farm into a stunning vista.
The fields were a lush green paean to farming, towering stalks reaching for the sky, leaves rustling with such vegetative believability that it wasn’t until Cora blinked that she realized the ears of corn topping each individual stalk were actually individual pieces of candy corn, each the length of her forearm. Their spun sugar silk blew gently in the breeze. Everything smelled of honey and sugar, and somehow that smell was exactly appropriate, exactly right.
Beehives were set up around the edge of the field, and fat striped humbugs and butterscotch candies crawled on the outside, their forms suggesting their insect progenitors only vaguely, their wings thin sheets of toffee that turned the sunlight soft and golden.
Like the castle of the Queen of Cakes, the farmhouse and barn were both built of gingerbread, a holiday craft taken to its absolute extreme. Unlike the castle, they were perfectly symmetrical and well designed, built with an eye for function as well as form, not just to use as much edible glitter as was humanly possible. The farmhouse was low and long, stretching halfway along the edge of the far field, its windows made of the same toffee as the wings of the bees. Rini smiled when she saw it, relief suffusing her remaining features and making her look young and bright and peaceful.
“My father will know what to do,” she said. “My father always knows what to do.”
Kade and Cora exchanged a glance. Neither of them contradicted her. If she wanted to believe that her father was an all-knowing sage who would solve everything, who were they to argue? Besides, this wasn’t their world. For all they knew, she was right.
“Come on, Mom!” said Rini, exhorting Sumi to follow her into the candy corn field. “Dad’s waiting!” She plunged into the green. The skeleton followed more sedately after, with the three visitors from another world bringing up the rear.
“I always thought that if I found another door, to anywhere, I’d take it, because anywhere had to be better than the world where my parents were asking me awful questions all the time,” said Christopher. “There was this telenovela about a bunch of sick kids in a hospital that my mother made me watch like, two whole seasons of after I got back, giving me these hopeful little looks after every episode, like I was finally going to confess that yes, the Skeleton Girl was another patient with an eating disorder, or a homeless girl, or something, and not, you know, a fucking skeleton.”
“Let’s be fair here,” said Kade. “If my son came back from a journey to a magical land and told me straight up that he wanted to marry a woman who didn’t have any internal organs, I’d probably spend some time trying to find a way to spin it so that he wasn’t saying that.”
“Oh, like you’re attracted to girls because you think they have pretty kidneys,” said Christopher.
Kade shrugged. “I like girls. Girls are beautiful. I like how they’re soft and pretty and have skin and fatty deposits in all the places evolution has deemed appropriate. My favorite part, though, is how they have actual structural stability, on account of how they’re not skeletons.”
“Are all boys as weird as the two of you, or did I get really lucky?” asked Cora.
“We’re teenagers in a magical land following a dead girl and a disappearing girl into a field of organic, pesticide-free candy corn,” said Kade. “I think weird is a totally reasonable response to the situation. We’re whistling through the graveyard to keep ourselves from totally losing our shit.”
“Besides,” said Christopher. “You don’t choose your dates based on their internal organs, do you? Settle this.”
“Sorry, but I have to side with Kade if you’re dragging me into your little weirdness parade.” Cora relaxed a little. This was starting to feel more like one of her walks around the school grounds with Nadya than a life-threatening quest. Maybe Rini was right, and her father would
fix everything. Maybe they’d be able to go home s—
Cora stopped dead. “The bracelet.”
“What?” Kade and Christopher stopped in turn, looking anxiously at her.
“We didn’t get Rini’s bracelet back from the Queen of Cakes,” said Cora. She shook her head, wide-eyed, feeling her chest start to tighten. “We were so worried about getting Christopher’s flute that we didn’t look for the bracelet. How are we going to get back to the school?”
“We’ll figure it out,” said Kade. “If nothing else, the Wizard she got the first set of beads from will be able to take care of us. Breathe. It’s going to be okay.”
Cora took a deep breath, eyeing him. “You really think so?”
“No,” he said baldly. “It’s never okay. But I told myself that every night when I was in Prism. I told myself that every morning when I woke up, still in Prism. And I got through. Sometimes that’s all you can do. Just keep getting through until you don’t have to do it anymore, however much time that takes, however difficult it is.”
“That sounds…” Cora paused. “Actually, that sounds really nice. I’m not that good at lying to myself.”
“Whereas I am a king of telling myself bullshit things I don’t really believe but need to accept for the sake of everyone around me.” Kade spread his arms, framing the moment. “I can make anything sound reasonable for five minutes.”
“I can’t,” said Christopher. “I just refuse to die where the Skeleton Girl can’t find me. I don’t think this is the sort of world that connects to Mariposa. It’s too far out of sync.”
“What do you mean?” Cora started walking again, matching her step to theirs.
“You know Rini isn’t the first person to come to our world—call it ‘Earth,’ since that’s technically its name—from somewhere else, right?” Kade paused barely long enough for Cora to nod before he said, “Well, every time it’s happened and we’ve known about it, someone’s done their best to sit them down and ask a bunch of questions. Getting a baseline, getting more details for the Compass. Most of them, they have their own stories about doors. They knew someone who knew someone whose great-aunt disappeared for twenty years and came back the same age she’d been when she went away, full of stories that didn’t make sense and with a king’s ransom in diamonds in her pocket, or salt, or snakeskins. Currencies tend to differ a bit, world to world. And what we’ve found is that there are worlds to and worlds from.”