Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

“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 some thing 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.”