Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

“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 living 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.