KADE MARCHED CORA into the throne room, one hand clenching her shoulder so hard that it verged on painful, the stolen sword sheathed at his hip. The Queen of Cakes, sitting on her throne with her chin propped on her hand, sat up a little straighter, seeming torn between irritation at the intrusion and relief that she had something to be annoyed about.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “I didn’t call for any of the prisoners to attend on me.”
Sumi was tethered to the base of the throne, a braided licorice rope around her skeletal throat, and the sight of her was enough to put steel in Cora’s spine. They couldn’t afford to get this wrong. If they did, then this would become the reality in Confection: a woman who thought that torturing the dead was appropriate and just.
“I asked to come,” said Cora quickly, before Kade could have been expected to speak. “I wanted … I wanted to talk to you.” She thought of Rini standing naked in the turtle pond, proudly telling Nadya that her vagina was a nice one, and felt the hot red flush rise in her cheeks. Being easily embarrassed could be a weapon, if she was willing to use it that way. “I thought maybe you could … I thought we might have something in common.”
The Queen of Cakes raked her eyes up one side of Cora and down the other. Cora, who had endured many such inspections over the years, forced herself to stand perfectly still, not flinching away. She knew what the queen was seeing. Double chin and bulging waistline and thighs that pressed against the fabric of her jeans, wearing them out a little more every day. She knew what the queen wasn’t seeing just as well. She wasn’t seeing the athlete or the scholar or the friend or the hero of the Trenches. All she was seeing was fatty fatty fat fat, because that was all they ever saw when they looked at her that way. That was all that they were looking for.
The Queen of Cakes sighed, her face softening. “Oh, you poor child,” she said. “How cruel this place must seem to you. The temptation of it all—unless that’s what drew you to Confection? Are you looking to eat yourself to death on the hills and leave your body where no one will ever find it?”
“No,” said Cora. “I wasn’t drawn to Confection. I came to help Rini get her mother back. I didn’t understand what Sumi had done to this place. We were wrong.”
The Queen of Cakes narrowed her eyes. “Go on,” she said.
“This wasn’t Sumi’s world, and that means it isn’t really Rini’s, either. They’re too … I don’t know. Too illogical to take care of a place like this. A place like this needs a firm hand. Someone who understands willpower and discipline.” She needed to be careful not to lay things on too thickly. Overselling it would lead to suspicion, and suspicion would ruin everything.
The Queen of Cakes started to smile and nod. “Yes, exactly,” she said. “This place was a mess when I found my own door.”
“I can believe it,” lied Cora, fighting the urge to remind the Queen that she had already tried to have this conversation. When people wanted to think that they knew more than she did, she found that it was generally best to let them. “You seem so perfect for what you are. This world must have needed you very badly.”
“It did,” said the Queen. She leaned back in her throne. A chunk fell off of her dress and tumbled to the floor. “It called me here to bake cookies—cookies! Who wants to put more cookies into the world? No one needs that sort of disgusting extravagance. It wanted to make me fat and lazy and awful, like all the people who came before me. Well, what I wanted was bigger, and better, and I won, didn’t I? I won. What do you want, little renegade?”
“I want to learn to be…” Cora looked at the Queen’s trim waist, wreathed as it was in cake, and swallowed bile at the hypocrisy of what she was about to say. For Christopher, she thought, before saying, “I want to be like you.”
“Bring her closer,” said the Queen. “I want to see her eyes.”
Kade obediently marched Cora across the room. There were two guards, one to either side of the throne, neither close enough to intervene if things went south. That was good. Both guards had a spear, in addition to their swords. That was bad. Cora took a deep breath and kept her eyes on the Queen of Cakes, trying to focus on how necessary this all was.
When they were close enough, the Queen leaned forward, gripping Cora’s chin in bony fingers and tilting her head first one way, then the other.
“You could be pretty, you know,” she said. “If you learned to control your appetite, if you understood how important it was to take care of yourself, you could be pretty. I’ve never seen hair quite like yours. Yes, you could be a striking beauty. Staying here will help you. The best way to become strong is to surround yourself with the things you can never have. The daily denial reminds you what you’re suffering for.”
Cora said nothing. She was used to having people assume that her size was a function of her diet, when in fact it owed more to her metabolism and her genes, neither of which she could control.
The Queen smiled. “Yes,” she said, letting go of Cora’s chin and sitting back in her throne. “I think I’ll keep you.”
“Thank you,” said Cora meekly, and took a step backward, putting herself behind Kade. “Truly, you’re a monarch to be emulated—and overthrown. Now!”
Kade had been trained as a hero and a warrior, and had earned the title of Goblin Prince in Waiting with his good right arm. His sword was free of its sheath before Cora finished speaking, the tip coming to rest at the hollow of the Queen’s throat, pressed down just hard enough to dimple the surface of her skin.
“Don’t move, now,” he drawled, behind the safe shield of his helmet. “You want to hand over that flute you took from our friend? He’s sorely missing it. Cora?”
“Here.” She stepped forward, holding out her hand. The Queen of Cakes scowled before sullenly reaching into her dress and slapping the flute, now smeared with frosting, into Cora’s palm. Cora danced back before the Queen could do anything else.
“You’ll pay for this,” said the Queen, in an almost-conversational tone. “I’ll have your bones for gingerbread, and your candied sweetmeats for my dinner table.”
“Maybe,” said Kade. “Maybe not. Neither of your guards seems to be coming to save you. That tells me a lot about the kind of place you’ve got here.” Indeed, the guards were standing frozen at their posts, seemingly unable to decide what to do next.
Cora walked over to where Sumi was tethered, leaving Kade with the Queen. Sumi turned her head to look at Cora, spectral eyes over glistening bone, and Cora suppressed her shudder. This was not the sort of thing she was prepared for.
“Hang on just a second,” she said to Sumi, and walked on, stopping when she reached the first guard. “Why aren’t you trying to defend your boss?”
“I don’t know,” said the guard. “I don’t … None of this feels right. None of this feels real. I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.”
Probably because he wasn’t supposed to be. He was meant to be tending a candy corn farm of his own, or fishing for some impossible catch within the waves of the Strawberry Sea. The Queen of Cakes was a dead woman as much as Sumi was, but unlike Sumi, she was dressed in skin and speech, still talking, still moving through the world. That had to warp things. For her to have a castle, she would need courtiers, and guards, and people to do the mopping-up.
“There are too many dead people here,” muttered Cora. Louder, she said, “Leave, then. If you’re not willing to defend her, you don’t have to be our enemy, and you can go. Get out and let us fix the world.”
“But the Queen—”
“Really isn’t going to be your main problem if you don’t get the hell out.” Cora bared her teeth in what might have been a smile and might have been a snarl. “Trust me. She’s not going to be in a position to hand out punishments.”
The guard looked at her uncertainly. Then he dropped his spear, turned, and ran for the door. He was almost there when the other guard followed suit, leaving the four of them—two truly among the living, two more than half among the dead—alone.
Cora turned and walked back to Sumi, who was still waiting with absolute patience. She dug her fingers into the braided licorice rope, feeling it squish and tear under her nails, until it gave way completely, ripping in two and setting Sumi free.
Sumi didn’t seem to realize that she was free. She continued to stand where she was, shade over bone, staring straight ahead, like nothing that was happening around her genuinely mattered, or ever could. Cora wrinkled her nose before taking Sumi’s hand, wrapping her fingers tight around the skeletal woman’s bare bones, and leading her gently back to where Kade was holding the Queen.
“Those traitors will bake for what they’ve done to me,” snarled the Queen of Cakes.
Kade cocked his head. “That’s almost a riddle. Will you bake them, or are you going to sentence them to some suitable length of time in your cookie factory? Not that it actually matters either way, since you’re not going to be giving any orders for a while.” He leaned forward and grabbed her by the arm. “Come with me.”
For the first time, the Queen looked afraid. “Where—where are you taking me?”
“Where you belong,” said Kade. He pulled her across the throne room to the door, shedding chunks of her dress with every step, and Cora followed, Sumi walking silently beside her, bony feet tapping on the floor.
* * *
CHRISTOPHER WAS STILL breathing when they reached the tower room, and Rini had tied their captive guard up so tightly that he was more a cocoon than a captive, propped in the far corner and making muffled grunting noises against the severed gummi bear leg she had stuffed into his mouth. She raised her head when the door opened, eyes widening in relief. Well. Eye. Her left eye was gone, replaced by a patch of nothingness that somehow revealed neither the inside of her skull nor the wall behind her. It was simply gone, an absence masquerading as an abscess on the world.
“Did you…” She stopped herself as Sumi stepped into the room behind Cora. “Mom.”
“She’s still dead,” spat the Queen of Cakes, struggling against the taffy rope Kade had wrapped around her wrists. “Nothing you do is going to change that.”
“I don’t know,” said Kade. “Killing her early seems to have brought you back just fine. Seems like cause and effect aren’t all that strict around here.”
He shoved the Queen of Cakes forward, until she stumbled and fell into a frosted, crumb-covered heap.
“Tie her up,” he said to Rini, holding his stolen sword in front of him to ward off any possible escape attempts.
Cora stepped around him, moving toward Christopher, who looked so small, and so frail. The blood seemed to have been leeched away from his face and hands, leaving his naturally brown skin surprisingly pale, like scraped parchment stretched over a bucket of whey. She knelt, careful not to jostle him, and lifted the dead starfish of his hand off the floor.
“I think this is yours,” she said, and pressed the bone flute into his hand.
Christopher opened his eyes, inhaling sharply, like it was the first true breath he’d been able to take in hours. The color came back to his skin, not all at once, but flooding outward from his hand, racing up his arm until it vanished beneath his sleeve, only to reappear as it crept up his neck and suffused his face. He sat up.
“Fuck me,” he said.
“What, here? Now? In front of Kade?” Cora put on her best pretense of a simpering expression. “I’m not that kind of girl.”
Christopher looked startled for a moment. Then he laughed, and stood, offering her his left hand. It was probably the only hand he was going to have free for a while. The fingers on the right were clenched so tight around the bone flute that they had gone pale again, this time from the pressure.
“Thank you,” he said, with all the sincerity he had. “I don’t think I had much time left.”
“All part of the job,” said Cora.
“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.