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 dinner. 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.
“Skeletons don’t walk around,” said Rini.
“All of you, silence,” snapped one of the knights. “Show some respect. You’re about to go before the rightful ruler of all Confection.”
“There is no rightful ruler of all Confection,” said Rini. “Cake and candy and fudge and gingerbread don’t all follow the same rules, so how can anyone make rules that work for everyone at the same time? You follow a false queen. The First Baker would be ashamed of you. The First Oven would refuse to bake your heart. You—”
His fist caught her full in the face, snapping her head back, leaving her gasping for breath. He turned to glare at the rest of his captives, eyes resting on each of them in turn.
“Show respect, or pay the price: the choice is yours,” he said, and the horses trotted on, carrying them ever closer to the castle, and to the impossible woman waiting there.
* * *
THE MAIN HALLWAY of the castle continued and fulfilled the promise of its exterior: everything was candy, or cake, or some other form of baked good, but elevated to a grace and glory that would have made the bakers back home weep at the futile nature of their own efforts. Chandeliers of sugar crystals hung from the vaulted, painted chocolate ceiling. Stained sugar glass windows filtered and shattered the light, turning everything into an explosion of rainbows.
Cora could close her eyes and imagine this whole place in plastic, mass-produced for the amusement of children. That made it a little better. If she just pretended none of this was happening, that she was safe back in her bed at the school—or better, that she was sleeping in her net of kelp in the Trenches, the currents rocking her gently through her slumber—then maybe she could survive it with her sanity intact.
The jagged sugar point of the spear at her back made it a little difficult to check out completely.
Rini was limping. From the way she wobbled, it looked like her toes were starting to follow her fingers into nothingness, leaving her off-balance and unstable. Kade and Christopher were walking normally, although Christopher looked pale and a little lost. His fingers kept flexing, trying to trace chords on a flute that wasn’t there anymore.
Only Sumi seemed unbothered by the change in their situation. She plodded placidly onward, her skeletal feet clacking softly against the polished candy floor, the thin screen of her shade continuing to look around her with polite disinterest, like this was by no means a remarkable situation.
“What are they going to do to us, Rini?” asked Kade in a low voice.
“Mom said the first time she faced the Queen of Cakes, the Queen forced her to eat a whole plate of broccoli,” said Rini.
Kade relaxed a little. “Oh, that’s not so bad—”
“And then she tried to cut Mom open so she could read the future in her entrails. You can’t read the future in candy entrails. They’re too sticky.” Rini said this in a matter-of-fact tone, like she was embarrassed to need to remind them of such a basic fact of life.
Kade paled. “See, that’s bad. That’s very bad.”
“Silence,” snapped one of the knights. They were approaching a pair of massive gingerbread doors, decorated with sheets of sugar glass in a dozen different colors. Cora frowned. They were colorful, yes, and they were beautiful, covered in tiny sugar crystals that glittered like stars in the light, but they didn’t go together. None of this did. That was why she kept thinking of children playing in the kitchen: there seemed to be no sense of unity or theme in the castle. It was big. It was dramatic. It wasn’t coherent.
This is a Nonsense world, she thought. Coherence probably wasn’t a priority.
A small hatch popped open next to the door, and a pretty dancing doll sculpted from peppermint spires and taffy popped out, holding a scroll in its sticky hands.
“Her Majesty, the Unquestioned Ruler of Confection, Heir to the First Baker, the Queen of Cakes, will see you now!” proclaimed the doll. Its voice was high, shrill, and sweet, like honeyed syrup. “Be amazed at her munificence! Be delighted at her kindness! Be sure not to bite the hands that feed you!”
The doll was yanked suddenly backward, as if by a string around its waist. The hatch slammed shut, and the doors swung open, revealing the brightly colored wonderland of the throne room.
It was like Confection in miniature: a children’s playroom version of the wild and potentially dangerous world outside. The walls were painted with green rolling hills topped by a pink and blue cotton candy sky. Lollipop trees and gumdrop bushes grew everywhere. The floor was polished green rock candy, like grass, like the rolling hills.
A step, and Cora saw that the walls weren’t painted. They were piped frosting, puffed and placed to create the illusion of depth. Another step, and she saw that the bushes and trees were in jawbreaker pots, their roots trimmed to keep them from growing out of control.
On the third step, a veil of transplanted sugar vegetation was drawn back, and there was the Queen of Cakes, a thin, pinch-faced woman in a gown that was also a six-tiered wedding cake, its surface crafted from frosting and edible jewels. It didn’t look like it could possibly be comfortable. Cora wasn’t even sure the woman could move without cracking her couture and forcing it to be re-baked. She was holding a scepter in one hand, a long, elaborate stick of blown sugar and filigreed fondant, matching the crown upon her head.
The Queen looked at each of them in turn, eyes lingering for a moment on Sumi before finally settling on Rini. She smiled, slow and sweet.
“At last,” she said. “Your mother did not invite me to your first birthday party, you know, and I the ruler of these lands. The first slice of cake should have been mine, to take as proper tribute.”
“My mother offered the first slice of cake to the First Baker, as is right and proper, and she didn’t invite any dead people to my party,” said Rini smartly. “Not that we’d have invited you if you hadn’t been dead. She always said you were the sort of person who never met a party she couldn’t spoil.”
The Queen of Cakes scowled for a moment—but only for a moment, her face smoothing back into pleasant placidity so fast that it felt like the scowl might well have been a lie. “Your mother was wrong about so many things. I can still remember her pouring hot grease on my hands. My beautiful hands.” She held them up, showing that they were perfect and intact. “She thought to stop me, but look at me now. I’m here, healthy and hale and resuming my rule, and you, her precious little potential, you’re fading away to nothing. How long do you think you have before the world realizes that you never existed and swallows you completely? I’ll want to know when to plan my own party. The one to celebrate living forever.”
“You were one of us,” said Cora wonderingly.
The Queen of Cakes turned, eyes narrowed, to face her. “I don’t recall inviting you to speak, dear,” she said. “Now shut that fat mouth of yours, or I’ll fill it for you.”
“You were one of us,” Cora repeated, not flinching from the venom in the word “fat.” If anything, it was too familiar to really hurt. She’d heard that sort of hatred before, always from the women in her Weight Watchers groups, or at Overeaters Anonymous, the ones who had starved themselves into thinness and somehow failed to find the promised land of happy acceptance that they had always been told waited for them on the other side of the scale.
“One of who?” asked the Queen, venom in every word, a poisoned slice of fudge waiting to be shoved past Cora’s lips.
“You found a door. You’re not from here any more than Sumi was.” Cora glanced to Kade, looking for confirmation, and felt hot validation fill her chest when he nodded, ever so slightly telling her that his suspicions were the same. She looked back to the Queen. “Were you a baker? Sumi wasn’t a baker. She was…”
“A violinist,” said Kade. “She didn’t want to bake cakes. She just wanted to do something useful with her hands. She needed Nonsense, and I guess Nonsense needed her, with you trying to make it follow rules it never wanted.”
The Queen of Cakes pursed her lips. “You must be from Sumi’s world,” she said primly. “You’re just as obnoxious as she was. She’s quiet now. How did you make her that way?”
“Well, she died, so that was a large part of it,” said Kade.
“Dead people normally stay in their graves, out of the way of the rest of us. This, though…” The Queen smiled. “What a gift you’ve given me. No one will ever stand against me again when they see that my great enemy has been reduced to a shadow over a skeleton. How did you achieve it? I’ll let you all go home, if you’ll only tell me.”
It would be a lie to say that the offer wasn’t, in some ways, tempting. They had each been called upon to save a world and save themselves in the process, but not this world. Not even Rini had been called upon to save this world. She was trying to save her mother, which was something very different, even if it was still very admirable. They could go back to the school and wait for their doors to open, wait for the chance to go back to the worlds where things made sense, leaving this place and its nonsense behind. This wasn’t their fight.
But Sumi was a silent skeleton, wreathed in shadows and rainbows, and Rini was disappearing an inch at a time, fading away according to the rules of her reality. If they left now, they couldn’t save Rini. They could only leave her to be unmade, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but a memory.
(Would even that endure? If she had never been born, if she had never existed, would they remember her after she disappeared? Or would this whole madcap adventure be revised away, filed under things that never actually happened outside of a dream? What would they think had happened to Nadya, if Rini faded completely? Would they think she had found her door, gone home again, another success story for the other students to whisper about after curfew, hoping that their own doors would open now that someone else’s had? Somehow, that seemed like the worst possibility of all. Nadya should be remembered for what she’d done to help them, not for what people invented to fill the space where she wasn’t anymore.)
“No, thank you,” said Cora primly, and she spoke for all three of them, for Kade, standing stalwart and steady, for Christopher, shaking and pale.
He didn’t look well. Even Rini looked better, and she was being written out of existence.
“I didn’t think you would, but I had to offer,” said the Queen, leaning back in her throne. A chunk of her dress fell off and tumbled to the floor, where a butterscotch mouse with candy floss whiskers snatched it up and whisked it away. “I ask again: how is my old enemy here? What’s dead is dead.”
None of them said a word.
The Queen sighed. “Stubborn little children find that I can be a very cruel woman, when I want to. Did it have something to do with this?” She reached behind herself, pulling out Christopher’s bone flute. “It’s an odd little instrument. I blow and blow, but it doesn’t make a sound.”
The effect on Christopher was electric. He stood suddenly upright, vibrating, the color returning by drips to his cheeks, until they burned like he had a fever. “Give it to me,” he said, and his voice was an aching whisper that somehow carried all the same.
“Oh, is this yours?” asked the Queen. “It’s a funny color. What is it made of?”
“Bone.” He took a jerky step forward, knees knocking. “My bone. It’s mine, it’s made of me, give it back.”
“Bone?” The Queen looked at the flute again, this time with fascinated disgust. “Liar. There’s no way you could lose a bone this big and still be whole.”
“The Skeleton Girl gave me another bone to replace it and it’s mine you have to give it back you have to give it back.” Christopher’s voice broke into a howl on his final words, and he took off running, the rope still dangling from his neck, launching himself at the Queen of Cakes.
His hands were only a few feet from her throat when one of the knights stomped on the end of the rope, jerking him backward. Christopher slammed into the floor, landing in a heap, and began to sob.
“Fascinating,” breathed the Queen. “What terrible worlds you must all come from, to think this sort of thing is normal, or should be allowed to continue. Don’t worry, children. You’re in Confection now. You’ll be safe and happy here, and as soon as that”—she indicated Rini—“finishes fading away, you’ll be able to stay forever.”
She snapped her fingers.
“Guards,” she said, sweetly. “Find them someplace nice to be, where I won’t have to hear them screaming. And leave the skeleton here. I want to play with it.”
The Queen of Cakes leaned back in her throne and smiled as her latest enemies were dragged away. What a lovely day this was shaping up to be.