Page 22 of Beneath the Sugar Sky

“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.”

9

DANCING WITH THE QUEEN OF CAKES