Beneath the Sugar Sky

by Seanan McGuire

  “Is it really made from one of his bones?” Cora dropped back to the flats of her feet and turned to face the pair.

  Kade nodded grimly. “It was part of saving Mariposa, for him. He told me when I was updating the record of the world.”

  In addition to his duties as the school tailor, Kade was an amateur historian and mapmaker rolled into one, recording the stories of all the children who came through the school. He said it was because he was trying to accurately map the Compass that defined Nonsense and Logic, Virtue and Wickedness, all of the other cardinal directions of the worlds on the other side of their doors. Cora thought that was probably true, but she also thought he liked the excuse to talk to people about their shared differences, which became their shared similarities when held up to the right light. They had all survived something. The fact that they had survived different somethings didn’t change the fact that they would always be, in certain ways, the same.

  “Can it be put back?”

  Christopher shook his head, and muttered weakly, “Wouldn’t want it. There was something wrong inside. A dark thing. The doctors said it was a tumor. But the Skeleton Girl piped it away and freed me. Owe her … everything.”

  “But…”

  “It’s still mine.” There was a flicker of fierceness in Christopher’s voice, there and gone in an instant, like it had never existed in the first place.

  Kade sighed, patting Christopher on the shoulder before he rose and walked over to stand next to Cora at the window. Dropping his voice to a low murmur, he said, “This doesn’t happen as much as it used to—I guess the universe figured out it was an asshole move—but it’s happened before. Kids who went through doors and came back with some magical item or other that still worked in our world, where there isn’t supposed to be much magic at all.”

  “So?”

  “So you want magic in our world, you pretty much have to be paying for it out of your own self, somehow. Most of the time, the magic item’d been tied to the person with blood or with tears or with something else that came out of their bodies. Or, in this case, a whole damn bone. The magic that powers the flute is Christopher. If he doesn’t get it back…”

  Cora turned to gape at him, horrified. “Are you saying he’ll die?”

  “Maybe not die. He’s never been separated from it for more than a few minutes. Maybe he’ll just get really sick. Or maybe the cancer will come back. I don’t know.” Kade looked frustrated. “I interview all the newbies, I write everything down, because there are so many doors, and so many little variations on the theme, and we don’t know. He might die if we don’t get it back. He wouldn’t be the first.”

  Their stories were written down too, by Eleanor before his time, or by the other rare scholars of travel and consequence, of the space behind the doors. They wrote about girls who wasted to nothing when they were separated from their magic shoes or golden balls, about boys who burned alive in the night when their parents took away their cooling silver bells, about children who had been found at the bottom of the garden, magically cured of some unthinkable disease, only for the sickness to come rushing back ten years later when a sibling or one of their own children broke a little crystal statue that they had been instructed not to touch.

  Travel changed people. Not all of the changes were visible, or even logical by the rules of a world where up was always up and down was always down and skeletons stayed in the ground instead of getting up and dancing around, but that didn’t make the changes go away. They existed whether they were wanted or not.

  Cora, whose hair grew in naturally blue and green, all over her body, looked uneasily over her shoulder at Christopher, who was huddled in a pile of gummi bears, shivering.

  “We have to get his flute back,” she said.

  “How do you suggest we do that?” asked Rini. Her voice was flat, dull, devoid of sparkle or whimsy. She had given up. The resignation was visible in every remaining inch of her, slumped and shattered as she was. “The Queen of Cakes has an army. We have … nothing. We have nothing, and she has us, and she has my mother, and it’s over. We’ve lost. I’m going to be unborn, and then I won’t have to worry about this anymore. I hope you can get away. If you can, go to the candy corn fields. The farmers there will help you hide from the Queen. She hates them and they hate her, but candy corn isn’t like most crops. It won’t burn. So she leaves them alone as much as she can, and you’ll be okay.”

  Rini paused for so long that Cora thought she was done talking. Then, in a hushed tone, she said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought you here. This is all my fault.”

  “This is the fault of the person who killed your mother, and of the stupid Queen of Cakes for being all ‘rar look at me I can be a despot of a magical candy world aren’t I great?’” Cora kicked the wall in her frustration. The gingerbread dented inward. Not enough to offer her a way to freedom—and even if it had, the way to freedom would have involved a long, long fall. “We agreed to come because we wanted to help. We’re going to help.”

  “How?” asked Rini. “Christopher’s too sick to stand, and he’s the only one of you who’s been useful.”

  Cora opened her mouth to object, paused, and shut it with a snap. She turned to Kade. “You,” she said. “You’re a tailor and you write stuff down, but what did you do when you went through your door? What was on the other side?”

  Kade hesitated. Then he sighed and looked out the window, and said, “Every world has its own set of criteria. Some of them are … pickier … than others. Prism is considered a Fairyland. Technically it’s a Goblin Market, which means they can control where the doors manifest. Every world chooses the children who get to visit, but Prism curates them. Prism watches them before they sweep them up, because Prism usually keeps them. Prism is one of the worlds we mostly knew about because of the hole it made in the compass, before I went there and got myself thrown out.”

  Cora said nothing. Speaking would have broken the spell, would have reminded Kade that he was talking to an audience. He might have stopped then. She didn’t want that.

  “In Prism, the Fairy Court has been fighting a war against the Goblin Empire for thousands of years. They could have won a hundred times. So could the goblins. They don’t, because the war is all they know anymore. They have so many rituals and ceremonies and traditions wrapped up in fighting that if you took their war away, they’d be lost. I didn’t know that, of course. I just knew that I was going to have an adventure. That I was going to be a hero, a savior, and do something that mattered for a change.”

  Kade’s face darkened. “The Fairy Court always snatched little girls. The prettiest little girls they could find, the ones with ribbons in their hair and lace on their dresses. They liked the contrast we made against the goblin armies.”

  Cora jumped a little at the word “we.” “What—”

  “Oh, come on.” Kade gave her a half-amused sidelong look. “You said Nadya was your best friend. There’s no way she didn’t tell you that.”

  “I … but, yes, but … I…” Cora stopped. “I don’t have the vocabulary for this.”

  “Most people don’t, until they need it, and then they need the whole thing at once,” said Kade. “My parents thought I was a girl. The people in Prism responsible for choosing their next expendable savior thought I was a girl. Hell, I thought I was a girl, because I’d never had the time to stop and think about why I wasn’t. It took me years of saving a world that stopped wanting me when I changed my pronouns to figure it out.”

  “But you saved the world,” said Cora.

  Kade nodded. “I did. The Goblin King made me his heir when I killed him. He called me the Goblin Prince in Waiting, and that was when I realized how long I’d been waiting for someone to see me, to really understand who I was, under the curls and the glitter and the things I didn’t want but couldn’t refuse.”

  “So you know how to use a sword,” said Cora.

  “Yes.” Kade paused, looking at her warily. “Why?” />
  Cora smiled.

  * * *

  THE FIRST STEP was moving Christopher into the middle of the room, where he’d be easily visible from the door. Getting something heavy was the second. In the end, Cora had licked her fingers and driven them over and over again into the hard-packed frosting between the baked bricks of the wall, eroding it until she’d been able to punch one of the bricks clean out. After that, it had been easy to pry another one free, jagged edges and all.

  Now, she rushed the door and beat her fists against it, shouting, “Hey! Hey! We need Christopher’s flute! Hey! We need help!”

  She kept hitting, kept yelling, until her hands hurt and her throat was sore. The door might be made of hardened shortbread, but the key word there was “hardened”: it was still enough to hurt her. Still, she kept going. The plan only worked if she kept going.

  Eventually, as she had hoped, footsteps echoed up the stairs outside, and a voice shouted, “You! Stop that! Be quiet!”

  Cora was very good at ignoring people who told her to do foolish things. She kept hitting the door and yelling.

  The door slammed open without warning, hitting her in the nose and knocking her back several feet into the tower room. That was fine. It hurt, but she had been anticipating a little pain, and she was an athlete. She was used to mashing her nose against the side of the pool, to skinning her knees and scraping her fingers. She staggered to her feet, trying to look cowed without looking overly terrified.

  “We need Christopher’s flute,” she whined. “He’s dying. Look.” She pointed at Christopher, who was performing his part in their little play with distressing ease. All he had to do was lie there and look terrible. He was doing both, and they hadn’t even needed to ask.

  The guard at the door frowned dourly and took a step into the room, past the threshold. Cora moved fast, slamming into his side and bearing him away from the doorway. Kade, who had been hidden by the angle of the door itself while it was open, stepped forward and slammed his chunk of edible masonry as hard as he could into the back of the guard’s head. The man made a gagging noise and fell down.

  Rini, who had been slumped against the wall, was suddenly there, back on her feet to deliver a solid kick to the fallen guard’s throat. He made another gagging noise but didn’t raise his hands to protect himself.

  “You should go,” she said, eyes on the man’s still form. “I can watch him while you go.”

  “By ‘watch him,’ do you mean—”

  Rini raised her head, candy corn irises seeming even brighter and more impossible than they had back at the school. “He doesn’t want to be here,” she said. “The world is reordering itself so the Queen of Cakes was always, and my family was never. But there isn’t supposed to be a Queen of Cakes, which means he’s supposed to be someplace other than here. I’m going to tie him up, and then I’m going to find out whether he knows where he’s supposed to have been this whole time. But you should take his armor first.”

  Kade nodded uncertainly and began stripping the man’s armor away. It was gilded foil over hard chocolate: it should have melted from the heat of the guard’s skin, if nothing else, but it was still fresh and sound. Cora wrinkled her nose. Some things seemed like a misuse of magic, and this was one of them.

  Christopher hadn’t moved throughout the commotion. She turned and knelt next to him, checking his throat for a pulse. It was there. He wasn’t gone yet. He might be going, but he wasn’t gone.

  “We’re going to get your flute,” she said softly. “It’s going to be okay. You’ll see. Just hang on. This would be a stupid way to die.”

  Christopher didn’t say anything.

  When she stood, Kade was dressed in the guard’s gilded-foil armor, and was studying the guard’s sword.

  “It’s weighted differently than I’m used to,” he said. “I think it’s toffee under the chocolate. But it’s got an edge on it. I can make this work.”

  “Good,” said Cora. “Let’s go save the day.”

  9

  DANCING WITH THE QUEEN OF CAKES

  KADE MARCHED CORA into the throne room, one hand clenching her shoulder so hard that it verged on painful, the stolen sword sheathed at his hip. The Queen of Cakes, sitting on her throne with her chin propped on her hand, sat up a little straighter, seeming torn between irritation at the intrusion and relief that she had something to be annoyed about.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “I didn’t call for any of the prisoners to attend on me.”

  Sumi was tethered to the base of the throne, a braided licorice rope around her skeletal throat, and the sight of her was enough to put steel in Cora’s spine. They couldn’t afford to get this wrong. If they did, then this would become the reality in Confection: a woman who thought that torturing the dead was appropriate and just.

  “I asked to come,” said Cora quickly, before Kade could have been expected to speak. “I wanted … I wanted to talk to you.” She thought of Rini standing naked in the turtle pond, proudly telling Nadya that her vagina was a nice one, and felt the hot red flush rise in her cheeks. Being easily embarrassed could be a weapon, if she was willing to use it that way. “I thought maybe you could … I thought we might have something in common.”

  The Queen of Cakes raked her eyes up one side of Cora and down the other. Cora, who had endured many such inspections over the years, forced herself to stand perfectly still, not flinching away. She knew what the queen was seeing. Double chin and bulging waistline and thighs that pressed against the fabric of her jeans, wearing them out a little more every day. She knew what the queen wasn’t seeing just as well. She wasn’t seeing the athlete or the scholar or the friend or the hero of the Trenches. All she was seeing was fatty fatty fat fat, because that was all they ever saw when they looked at her that way. That was all that they were looking for.

  The Queen of Cakes sighed, her face softening. “Oh, you poor child,” she said. “How cruel this place must seem to you. The temptation of it all—unless that’s what drew you to Confection? Are you looking to eat yourself to death on the hills and leave your body where no one will ever find it?”

  “No,” said Cora. “I wasn’t drawn to Confection. I came to help Rini get her mother back. I didn’t understand what Sumi had done to this place. We were wrong.”

  The Queen of Cakes narrowed her eyes. “Go on,” she said.

  “This wasn’t Sumi’s world, and that means it isn’t really Rini’s, either. They’re too … I don’t know. Too illogical to take care of a place like this. A place like this needs a firm hand. Someone who understands willpower and discipline.” She needed to be careful not to lay things on too thickly. Overselling it would lead to suspicion, and suspicion would ruin everything.

  The Queen of Cakes started to smile and nod. “Yes, exactly,” she said. “This place was a mess when I found my own door.”

  “I can believe it,” lied Cora, fighting the urge to remind the Queen that she had already tried to have this conversation. When people wanted to think that they knew more than she did, she found that it was generally best to let them. “You seem so perfect for what you are. This world must have needed you very badly.”

  “It did,” said the Queen. She leaned back in her throne. A chunk fell off of her dress and tumbled to the floor. “It called me here to bake cookies—cookies! Who wants to put more cookies into the world? No one needs that sort of disgusting extravagance. It wanted to make me fat and lazy and awful, like all the people who came before me. Well, what I wanted was bigger, and better, and I won, didn’t I? I won. What do you want, little renegade?”

  “I want to learn to be…” Cora looked at the Queen’s trim waist, wreathed as it was in cake, and swallowed bile at the hypocrisy of what she was about to say. For Christopher, she thought, before saying, “I want to be like you.”

  “Bring her closer,” said the Queen. “I want to see her eyes.”

  Kade obediently marched Cora across the room. There were two guards, one to eithe
r side of the throne, neither close enough to intervene if things went south. That was good. Both guards had a spear, in addition to their swords. That was bad. Cora took a deep breath and kept her eyes on the Queen of Cakes, trying to focus on how necessary this all was.

  When they were close enough, the Queen leaned forward, gripping Cora’s chin in bony fingers and tilting her head first one way, then the other.

  “You could be pretty, you know,” she said. “If you learned to control your appetite, if you understood how important it was to take care of yourself, you could be pretty. I’ve never seen hair quite like yours. Yes, you could be a striking beauty. Staying here will help you. The best way to become strong is to surround yourself with the things you can never have. The daily denial reminds you what you’re suffering for.”

  Cora said nothing. She was used to having people assume that her size was a function of her diet, when in fact it owed more to her metabolism and her genes, neither of which she could control.

  The Queen smiled. “Yes,” she said, letting go of Cora’s chin and sitting back in her throne. “I think I’ll keep you.”

  “Thank you,” said Cora meekly, and took a step backward, putting herself behind Kade. “Truly, you’re a monarch to be emulated—and overthrown. Now!”

  Kade had been trained as a hero and a warrior, and had earned the title of Goblin Prince in Waiting with his good right arm. His sword was free of its sheath before Cora finished speaking, the tip coming to rest at the hollow of the Queen’s throat, pressed down just hard enough to dimple the surface of her skin.

  “Don’t move, now,” he drawled, behind the safe shield of his helmet. “You want to hand over that flute you took from our friend? He’s sorely missing it. Cora?”

  “Here.” She stepped forward, holding out her hand. The Queen of Cakes scowled before sullenly reaching into her dress and slapping the flute, now smeared with frosting, into Cora’s palm. Cora danced back before the Queen could do anything else.