Beneath the Sugar Sky

by Seanan McGuire

  “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?”

  PART IV

  THIS IS WHERE WE CHANGE THE WORLD

  11

  SUGAR AND SPICE AND PAYING THE PRICE

  PONDER HAD GIVEN THEM each a bag of provisions and an item he thought they might find useful: a small sickle for Cora, a jar of honey for Kade, something that was either a white rock or a
very hard egg for Christopher. What he had given Rini was less clear, since she walked side by side with her mother’s skeleton, hands empty, eyes fixed on the horizon.

  Cora sidled over to her. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “My father gave us gifts because he had to, not because they’re going to help us in the here and now,” said Rini. “You can throw them away if you like.”

  “I don’t know,” said Cora, who had never owned a sickle before. She thought it was pretty. “Maybe it’ll come in handy someday.”

  “Maybe,” Rini agreed.

  Cora frowned. “Okay, seriously. Are you all right?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. I’ve never been to see the Baker,” said Rini. Her voice was low, even awed. “I always thought I’d do it someday, maybe, when I felt brave enough, but I haven’t done it yet, and I’m a little scared. What if she doesn’t like me? Or what if she likes me so much that she wants me to stay with her for always, to be her kitchen companion and kept thing? I would do it. For my mother, for my world, I would do it. But I’d die a little more inside every hour of every day, until I was just a candy shell filled with shadows.”

  “Wait.” Cora glanced at Kade and Christopher, alarmed. The boys were talking quietly as they walked, Christopher’s fingers still tracing silent songs along the length of his flute. She looked back to Rini. “We’re not going to see the Baker. We’re going to see the oven the Baker used when she made the world. Big difference.”

  “Not really,” said Rini. “You can’t go into someone’s kitchen while they’re using it and not expect to see them.”

  Cora stared at her. “I thought you said the Baker left a long time ago.”

  “I said a Baker left a long time ago. One of them did. Lots of them did. The current Baker, though, she’s only been here since I was a little girl. She came through a door and started making things, and she’s been making things ever since.” Rini shook her head. “I guess she’s probably still here, even though the Queen of Cakes is alive again, because the Queen was never a Baker, not really, but she was supposed to be, and the world needs to be kept up if we don’t want it to fall down.”

  “Oh sweet Neptune I am getting such a headache,” muttered Cora, massaging her temple with one hand. “All right. I … all right. We’re going to see a god. We’re going to see the god of this messed-up cafeteria of a reality, and then we’re going to go the hell back to the school and stay there until our own doors open. Yes. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do that.”

  “Cora?” called Kade. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine,” said Cora. “Just, you know. Coming to terms with the idea that we’re about to go hassle someone who is functionally divine in this reality. Because that’s exactly how I was planning to spend my afternoon.”

  “Could be worse,” said Kade. “Could be the first god you were meeting.”

  Cora frowned. “This is the first god I’m meeting.”

  “Really? Because I assumed you were using the word to mean ‘absolute arbiter of the rules of the reality I’m standing in.’ Were you?” Kade cocked his head. “If you were, you’ve already met at least one god, and possibly two. Probably two. The Lord and Lady of the Dead, back in Nancy’s world, remember? They didn’t get those titles in an open election.”

  Cora blanched. “Really?”

  “If you ask me, they probably got the same deal the first Baker here did. Just a couple of confused kids who stumbled into a dead world and decided, for whatever reason, that they should stay.” That, or the world refused to let them go. That could happen, too. Worlds could put down roots, winding them through the heart and drawing tighter with every breath, until “home” was an empty idea with nothing on the other side of it.

  “Fuck.” Cora shook her head, looking back to Rini, and to the silent, narrow shape of Sumi, wrapped in her own ghost. “I did not sign up for gods.”

  “None of us signed up for any of this,” said Christopher. “I just wanted to live to see my sixteenth birthday.”

  “I just wanted to have an adventure,” said Kade.

  Sumi, voiceless, said nothing, and maybe that was for the best. She had been like Cora, a savior, a tool, someone who was called and offered a wonderful new existence in exchange for doing just one thing: saving the world. She’d done it, too, before she’d been killed too soon and had all her hard work revised away.

  Nonsense was exhausting. Cora couldn’t wait to get back to the school, where everything was dry and dreadful, but where things at least made sense from one moment into the next.

  The road was made of sandy crushed graham crackers, and wound its way through a pastoral landscape that would have been impressive even if it hadn’t been crafted entirely from living sugar. Kade paused to pick a handful of sugar buttons off a bush, and munched idly as he walked.

  Cora frowned. “Rini,” she said. “If the Bakers made the world and then went home, where did the people come from? Like your father? I mean, he’s clearly enough like the people from my world for Sumi to marry him and have you, but that doesn’t make sense, not really. Everything else is sugar.”

  “Oh, there were people who didn’t want to be where they were, and the world was getting so big that the Baker was spending all her time—we had the First Confectioner then, and she was very busy doing sugar work—fixing things. So she opened all the doors she could, and told the people who were scared or hungry or lonely or bored that if they came through, they’d never be able to go back, because the doors wouldn’t open for them, but that she could give them candy hearts to make them a part of this world, and then they could stay here and be happy and fix all the things she didn’t want to fix, forever.” Rini shrugged. “A lot of people came, I guess. She made them new hearts, and they found places to be, and they made homes and planted fields and built ships, and now there’s me, and my father has a candy heart and my mother had a meat one, and they both loved me just as much as the moon loves the sky.”

  “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” said Christopher, almost wonderingly.

  Cora, who had never considered that there might be less personal doors, doors that swallowed entire populations whole—with or without their consent—chewed anxiously on her lip, and kept walking. She was getting tired of walking. It had never been one of her top ten ways to exercise. It might not even be top twenty, although she wasn’t sure there were twenty ways to exercise worth considering, unless she started counting every swim stroke and every dance style as a different category. Worse yet, this was necessary walking. She couldn’t complain if she wanted to.

  (And even though she wanted to, she never wanted to. If the fat person was the first one to say “hey, I’m tired” or “hey, I’m hungry” or “hey, can we sit down,” it was always because they were fat, and not because they were a human being with a flesh body that sometimes had needs. Maybe Christopher had the right of it, going someplace where people had figured out how to do without the fleshy bits, where they would be judged on their own merits, not on the things people assumed about them.)

  Christopher stopped, putting one hand up before bending forward and resting both hands on his knees, flute jutting out at a jaunty angle. “Just a second,” he said. “Almost died a few hours ago. Need to catch my breath.”

  “It’s okay,” said Cora magnanimously. She kicked her left foot back and reached down to grab it, pulling it up into a stretch. The muscles in her thigh protested before they relaxed, letting her work out the incipient knots.

  When she glanced up again, Kade was looking at her, impressed.

  “You’re more flexible than I am,” he said.

  “Swimmer,” she said. “I have to be.”

  Kade nodded. “Makes sense.”

  Rini turned and glowered at the three of them. It was an odd expression, with her one remaining eye and her half-faded cheek muscles, but she managed it all the same. “We need to keep moving,” she said. “I’m running out of time.”

  “Sorr
y,” said Christopher. He straightened. “I’m okay.”

  “Good,” snapped Rini. She started walking again, and the others hurried to keep up with her.

  Kade moved to walk on her left side, sparing only a brief glance for Sumi, walking on her right. He focused on Rini’s face, trying not to look away from what wasn’t there anymore. She deserved more than that. She deserved at least the pretense of her dignity.

  “I know you can’t say for sure how much farther, but we’ll be there soon,” he said. “The Baker will help us, and then you can go home to your family, and things will be better. You’ll see.”

  “Time kept happening here and it didn’t happen for you. I’m later than you. My mother’s younger than I am,” said Rini bitterly. “If we fix her, does that fix me? Or do I keep fading, since now she’s too young to be anything but a child bride for my father—and he’d never do that, he would never have done that, even before he had a daughter of his own. Even if we get her back and she’s this much younger than me, do I still lose everything?”

  “The prophecy—”

  “Only said that she’d defeat the Queen of Cakes and usher in an era of peace and peanut butter cookies. It didn’t say when she would do it, or that she’d for sure get to marry her true love and have a ravishingly beautiful daughter named Rini who’d get to grow up and find a true love of her own.” Rini’s mouth twisted in a bitter line. “Nobody promised me a happy ending. They didn’t even promise me a happy existence.”

  Kade looked at the road. “We’ll fix this,” he said again.

  “We’ll try,” said Rini.