“SOMEPLACE NICE,” IN THE castle of the Queen of Cakes, was a large, empty room with gingerbread walls and heaps of gummy fruit on the floor, presumably to serve as bedding for the prisoners. There had been no effort to chain the four of them up or keep them apart; the guards had simply dragged them up the stairs until they reached the top of what felt like the tallest tower in the world. The only window was almost too high for Cora to reach, and looking out of it revealed a rocky chocolate quarry, studded with the jagged edges of giant almonds. Oh, yes. They were stuck. Unless they could open the door, they weren’t going anywhere.
Rini was slumped against the wall, eyes closed, the slope of one shoulder gone to whatever sucking nothingness was stealing her away one fragment at a time. Alarmingly, she wasn’t the one in the worst condition. That dubious honor belonged to Christopher, who was curled into a ball next to the door, shaking uncontrollably.
“He needs his flute,” said Kade, laying the back of one hand against Christopher’s forehead and frowning. “He’s freezing.”
“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.”