“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.
Beehives were set up around the edge of the field, and fat striped humbugs and butterscotch candies crawled on the outside, their forms suggesting their insect progenitors only vaguely, their wings thin sheets of toffee that turned the sunlight soft and golden.
Like the castle of the Queen of Cakes, the farmhouse and barn were both built of gingerbread, a holiday craft taken to its absolute extreme. Unlike the castle, they were perfectly symmetrical and well designed, built with an eye for function as well as form, not just to use as much edible glitter as was humanly possible. The farmhouse was low and long, stretching halfway along the edge of the far field, its windows made of the same toffee as the wings of the bees. Rini smiled when she saw it, relief suffusing her remaining features and making her look young and bright and peaceful.
“My father will know what to do,” she said. “My father always knows what to do.”
Kade and Cora exchanged a glance. Neither of them contradicted her. If she wanted to believe that her father was an all-knowing sage who would solve everything, who were they to argue? Besides, this wasn’t their world. For all they knew, she was right.
“Come on, Mom!” said Rini, exhorting Sumi to follow her into the candy corn field. “Dad’s waiting!” She plunged into the green. The skeleton followed more sedately after, with the three visitors from another world bringing up the rear.
“I always thought that if I found another door, to anywhere, I’d take it, because anywhere had to be better than the world where my parents were asking me awful questions all the time,” said Christopher. “There was this telenovela about a bunch of sick kids in a hospital that my mother made me watch like, two whole seasons of after I got back, giving me these hopeful little looks after every episode, like I was finally going to confess that yes, the Skeleton Girl was another patient with an eating disorder, or a homeless girl, or something, and not, you know, a fucking skeleton.”
“Let’s be fair here,” said Kade. “If my son came back from a journey to a magical land and told me straight up that he wanted to marry a woman who didn’t have any internal organs, I’d probably spend some time trying to find a way to spin it so that he wasn’t saying that.”
“Oh, like you’re attracted to girls because you think they have pretty kidneys,” said Christopher.
Kade shrugged. “I like girls. Girls are beautiful. I like how they’re soft and pretty and have skin and fatty deposits in all the places evolution has deemed appropriate. My favorite part, though, is how they have actual structural stability, on account of how they’re not skeletons.”
“Are all boys as weird as the two of you, or did I get really lucky?” asked Cora.
“We’re teenagers in a magical land following a dead girl and a disappearing girl into a field of organic, pesticide-free candy corn,” said Kade. “I think weird is a totally reasonable response to the situation. We’re whistling through the graveyard to keep ourselves from totally losing our shit.”
“Besides,” said Christopher. “You don’t choose your dates based on their internal organs, do you? Settle this.”
“Sorry, but I have to side with Kade if you’re dragging me into your little weirdness parade.” Cora relaxed a little. This was starting to feel more like one of her walks around the school grounds with Nadya than a life-threatening quest. Maybe Rini was right, and her father would fix everything. Maybe they’d be able to go home s—
Cora stopped dead. “The bracelet.”
“What?” Kade and Christopher stopped in turn, looking anxiously at her.
“We didn’t get Rini’s bracelet back from the Queen of Cakes,” said Cora. She shook her head, wide-eyed, feeling her chest start to tighten. “We were so worried about getting Christopher’s flute that we didn’t look for the bracelet. How are we going to get back to the school?”
“We’ll figure it out,” said Kade. “If nothing else, the Wizard she got the first set of beads from will be able to take care of us. Breathe. It’s going to be okay.”
Cora took a deep breath, eyeing him. “You really think so?”
“No,” he said baldly. “It’s never okay. But I told myself that every night when I was in Prism. I told myself that every morning when I woke up, still in Prism. And I got through. Sometimes that’s all you can do. Just keep getting through until you don’t have to do it anymore, however much time that takes, however difficult it is.”
“That sounds…” Cora paused. “Actually, that sounds really nice. I’m not that good at lying to myself.”
“Whereas I am a king of telling myself bullshit things I don’t really believe but need to accept for the sake of everyone around me.” Kade spread his arms, framing the moment. “I can make anything sound reasonable for five minutes.”
“I can’t,” said Christopher. “I just refuse to die where the Skeleton Girl can’t find me. I don’t think this is the sort of world that connects to Mariposa. It’s too far out of sync.”
“What do you mean?” Cora started walking again, matching her step to theirs.
“You know Rini isn’t the first person to come to our world—call it ‘Earth,’ since that’s technically its name—from somewhere else, right?” Kade paused barely long enough for Cora to nod before he said, “Well, every time it’s happened and we’ve known about it, someone’s done their best to sit them down and ask a bunch of questions. Getting a baseline, getting more details for the Compass. Most of them, they have their own stories about doors. They knew someone who knew someone whose great-aunt disappeared for twenty years and came back the same age she’d been when she went away, full of stories that didn’t make sense and with a king’s ransom in diamonds in her pocket, or salt, or snakeskins. Currencies tend to differ a bit, world to world. And what we’ve found is that there are worlds to and worlds from.”
“What do you mean?”
“Confection, it was made by the doors. Its rules were set by the bakers, and maybe those bakers came from Logical worlds, but what they wanted out of life was Nonsense, so they whipped themselves up a Nonsense world, one layer at a time. Half the nonsense probably comes from having so many cooks in the kitchen. Thirty people bake the same wedding cake, it doesn’t matter if they’re all masters of their craft, they’re still going to come up with something that tastes a little funny.”
Cora nodded slowly. “So this is a world to.”
“Yes. Earth, now, we’re a world from. When we get travelers, it’s people like Rini, people who didn’t have a choice, people who’ve been exiled, or who are looking for an old friend who came to a long time ago, and hasn’t made it back yet, even though they said they were going to.” Kade paused. “Earth isn’t the only world from. We know of at least five, and that means there are probably more out there, too far away for us to have much crossover. Worlds from tend to be mixed up. A little Wicked, a little Virtuous. A little Logic, a little Nonsense. They may trend toward one or the other—I feel Earth’s more Logical than Nonsensical, for example, although Aunt Eleanor doesn’t always agree—but they exist to provide the doors with a place to anchor.”
“All the worlds to, they connect to one or more of the worlds from,” said Christopher, picking up the thread. “So Mariposa and Prism both connect to Earth, and get travelers from there. And maybe they also connect to a few similar worlds, like how Nadya’s world touches on Nancy’s, and maybe they connect to another world from, so they can get the travelers they need without drawing too much attention. But when they connect to another world to, it’s always one where the rules are almost the same.”
“And the rules here aren’t like the rules you had back in Mariposa,” said Cora slowly.
Christopher nodded. “Exactly. Mariposa was Rhyme and Logic, and this place is Nonsense and Reason. I can’t say whether it’s Wicked or Virtuous, but that doesn’t really matter for me, because Mariposa is Neutral, so it can sync to either. What it can’t handle is Nonsense.”
“My head hurts,” said Cora.
“Welcome to the club,” said Kade.
They had reached the end of the candy corn field. The trio stepped out of the green, onto the hard-packed crumble of the dirt in front of the farmhouse. It was impossible to tell what it was made of without tasting it, and Cora found that her curiosity didn’t extend to licking the ground. That was good. It was useful to know that there were limits to how far she was willing to commit to this new reality. Or maybe she just didn’t want to eat dirt.
There was Rini, in front of the farmhouse, with her arms around a man who was taller than she was by several inches. He must have towered over Sumi even when she was a fully grown adult woman, and not the teenage skeleton standing silently off to one side. His hair was yellow. Not blond: yellow, the color of ripe candy corn, the color of butterscotch.
“The people here are made of meat, right?” murmured Cora.
Kade glanced down at the patch of blood on his trousers and said, “Pretty damn sure.”
“How do they not all die of malnutrition? How do they still have any teeth?”
“How did your skin not rot and fall off when you spent like, two years living in saltwater all the time?” Kade flashed her a quick, almost wry smile. “Every world gets to make its own rules. Sometimes those rules are going to be impossible. That doesn’t make them any less enforceable.”
Cora was silent for a moment. Finally, she said, “I want to go home.”
“Don’t we all?” asked Christopher mournfully, and that was that: there was nothing else to say. They walked toward Rini and her family, hoping for a miracle, hoping for a solution, while the fields of candy corn grew green all around them, reaching ever for the sun.
* * *
RINI WAITED UNTIL her friends—were they her friends now? Had they bonded sufficiently in adversity that they could use that label? She’d never really had friends before, she didn’t know the rules—were almost upon her before letting go of her father and stepping back, letting him see them, letting them see him.
He was tall. They’d been able to see that from a distance, along with the unnatural yellow of his hair. What they hadn’t been able to see was that his eyes were like Rini’s, candy corn somehow transformed into an eye color, or that his hands were large and calloused from a lifetime spent working in the fields, or that his face had been tanned by the sun until he was almost as dark as his daughter, although his undertones were different, warm where hers were cool, ruddy red and peach, not amber and honey. They looked nothing alike. They looked absolutely alike.
Kade, who had known Sumi better than either of his companions, looked at Rini, and looked at her father, and saw Sumi in the differences between them, the places where she had been added to the recipe that, when properly baked, had resulted in her daughter.
“Sir,” he said, with a very small bow. It seemed appropriate, somehow. “I’m Kade. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Thank you for bringing my daughter home,” said Rini’s father. “She tells me you’ve had quite the adventure. The Queen of Cakes is back to her old tricks, is she? Well, I suppose that was the only thing that could happen in a world where my Sumi never made it back to me.” He sounded less sad than simply resigned. This was the way he had always expected the world to go: snatching joy out of his hands for the sheer sake of doing it, and not because he, personally, had done anything to earn the loss. “My name is Ponder, and it’s a pleasure to have you on my farm.”
“This is no time for manners and moodiness, Daddy,” said Rini, with a little of her old imperiousness. Being near her father seemed to be bolstering her spirits, enough to remind her that, fading or not, she was still here; there was still time for her to fix this. “I found Mom. I found her bones in a world that didn’t know how to laugh, and I found her spirit in a world that didn’t know how to run, and now I need you to tell me how to find her heart, so I can stick them all back together again.”
Rini smiled at her father when she finished, guilelessly bright, like he was the answer to all her prayers: like he was going to make things right again.
Ponder sighed deeply before reaching over to touch her cheek—not the one with the emptiness where her eye had been, but the one that was still whole and sound, untouched by the nothingness that was eating her up from the inside.
“I don’t know, baby,” he said. “I told you when you went that I didn’t know. I’m just a candy corn farmer. My only part in this play was loving your mother and raising you, and I did both of them as well as I could, but that didn’t make me worldly, and it didn’t make me wise. It made me a man with a hero for a wife and a daughter who was going to do something great someday, and that was all I wanted to be. I never saved the day. I never challenged the gods. I was the person you could come home to when the quest was over, and I’d greet you with a warm fudge pie and a how was your day, and I’d never feel like I was being left out just because I was forever left behind.”
Rini made a small sound, somewhere between a gasp and a sob, and covered her face with what was left of her hands.
“The Lord of the Dead said that Sumi’s nonsense came home,” said Christopher abruptly. “Mr. Ponder, Rini told us about the Bakers. How they come and make Confection bigger and stranger in order to do what they need to do. Do you know where the oven is? Where they bake the world?”
“Of course,” said Ponder. “It’s a day’s journey from here.”
Christopher smiled wanly. “I guess it would have to be,” he said. “Can you show us the way?”