Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

Of course they failed. Of the five of them, only Cora ran with any regularity, and while she could be remarkably fast when she wanted to, she was more interested in endurance than in sprinting. Sumi was skeletal, lacking the large muscles that would have made it possible for her to take advantage of her light frame. Rini ran like someone who had never considered exercise to be a required part of daily life: she was slim but out of shape, and was the first to fall behind.

Kade and Christopher did the best they could, but the one was a tailor and the other had just come within a stone’s throw of drowning; neither of them were very well equipped to run. In short order, they were all surrounded by armored knights on horses.

Seen up close, the horses were clearly flesh and blood, although their armor appeared to have been made from hard candy and peanut brittle, wrapped in foil to keep it from sticking to human skin or horse hair.

“Rini Onishi, you are under arrest for crimes against the Queen of Cakes,” said the lead rider. Rini bared her teeth at him. He ignored her. “You will come with us.”

“Well, shit,” said Christopher, and that was exactly right, and there was nothing more to say.





PART III

BAKE ME A MOUNTAIN, FROST ME A SKY





7

PRISONERS OF SOMEONE ELSE’S WAR

THE KNIGHTS PRODUCED A surprising amount of spun-sugar rope and bound their captives, slinging them over the backs of their horses like so much dirty laundry. They seemed afraid to touch Sumi, in all her skeletal glory; in the end, they had to sling a loop of rope around her neck, like she was a dog. That seemed to be enough to make her docile: she trailed behind the slow-riding group without protest or attempt to break away.

They were all searched thoroughly before they were tied up, and anything that might be viewed as dangerous was quickly confiscated, including Rini’s bracelet and Christopher’s bone flute. Cora tried not to think too hard about what the loss of the bracelet could mean for the rest of them. Surely the wizard who had given it to Rini would be able to make another one, something that would let them all go back to Miss West’s when this was over. Surely they weren’t about to be trapped behind someone else’s door, in a world that was even less right for them than the one where they’d been born. She still couldn’t think of the school as “home” any more than she could consider going back to the house where her family waited for the day when she’d be cured of all the things that made her who she was, but …

But she couldn’t stay here. This wasn’t a fantasy adventure. This was a nightmare of a candy-coated wonderland, the place the kids she’d gone to school with would have expected her to dream of finding beyond an impossible door, and she wanted nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.

The riders rode, and the captives dangled, and everything began to blur together, like the landscape was accelerating around them. That was the logical nonsense of Confection coming into play, where everything was no more than a day’s journey from everything else, no matter how fast you traveled or how big the world became.

(It felt a little bit like cheating—but then, to someone like Rini, airplanes and sports cars probably felt like cheating too, like a way to have all the distance in the world and not be forced to account for any of it. Cheating was always a matter of perspective, and of who was giving out the grades.)

Kade gasped. Cora twisted against her bonds as much as she could, craning her neck until she could see what he saw. Then she gasped as well, eyes going wide while she tried to take it all in.

In some ways, the castle that had appeared in front of them was nothing more nor less than a gingerbread house taken to a dramatic new extreme. It was the sort of thing children were coaxed to build at the holidays under the watchful eyes of their parents, getting flour and frosting absolutely everywhere. But true as that idea was, it didn’t do justice to the towering edifice of cake and cereal brick and sugar. This was no kitchen-craft, meant to be devoured with sticky fingers after Christmas din ner. This was a monument, a landmark, an architectural marvel baked with the sole intent of standing for a thousand years.

The walls were gingerbread so dark with spice that it verged on black, hardened with molasses and strengthened with posts of twisted pretzel treats. The sugar crystals studding the walls were larger than Kade’s fist, and sharpened to wicked points, until the entire structure became a weapon. The battlements looked like they had been carved from rock candy, and the towers were impossibly high, ignoring the laws of physics and common sense alike.

Rini moaned. “The castle of the Queen of Cakes,” she said. “We’re doomed.”

“I thought your mother defeated her,” hissed Cora.

“She did and she didn’t,” said Rini. “Once Mom died before coming back to Confection, everything started to come undone. The Queen of Cakes returned the same time the first of my fingers disappeared. She came back all at once, maybe because Mom killed her all at once, and she made me one ingredient at a time. I took nine months to bake. I might take nine months to disappear, one piece at a time, until all that’s left is my heart, lying on the ground, beating without a body.”

“Hearts don’t work that way,” said Christopher.