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Beneath the Sugar Sky

Page 12

by Seanan McGuire


  “Oh, that’s a good smell,” she said. “That’s a right-and-ready smell. No charcoal or char.”

  “How can we help?” asked Kade.

  “Grab a pair of oven mitts and lift,” said Layla.

  She didn’t put on oven mitts before reaching into the oven: she simply grasped the metal end of the tray in her bare hands and pulled. There was no smell of burning, and she didn’t make any sounds that would indicate that she was in pain. She might not do magic, but this world was magic, and it said that the Baker was important: the Baker would be protected.

  Kade had never been very fond of cooking. Too much work for something that was too transitory. He much preferred tailoring, taking one thing and turning it into something else, something that would last. His parents had taken his interest in sewing after he got home from Prism as a sign that he was a little girl after all, until he’d started modifying his dresses, turning them into vests and shirts and other things that made him feel more comfortable.

  He’d stuck his fingers with pins and cut himself with scissors more times than he could count. If someone had offered him a place where he could just sit and sew for a while, with all the fabric and findings he could ever want, with tools that wouldn’t do him harm, no matter how careless he got, well. The temptation would be more than he could handle.

  Rini hung back, unable to trust her grip with so much of her hands missing, but the others lifted as Layla ordered them, two to a side, like pallbearers preparing Sumi for her final rest. They set the tray on the baker’s block at the middle of the kitchen, and Layla motioned them to step away before she reached for the sheet of parchment paper covering Sumi’s face.

  Cora realized she was holding her breath.

  The parchment paper came away. Sumi had been gone before Cora came to the school: there was nothing there for Cora to recognize, just a beautiful, silent, teenage girl with smooth brown skin and long black hair. Her eyes were closed, lashes resting gently on her cheeks, and her mouth was a downturned bow, mercurial even when motionless.

  Rini gasped before starting to cry. “Wake her up,” she begged. “Please, please, wake her up.”

  “She needs to cool,” said Layla. “If we woke her now, she’d have a fever bad enough to cook her brains and kill her all over again.”

  “She looks…” Kade reached out with one shaking hand, pulling back before he could actually brush against her skin. “She looks perfect. She looks real.”

  “Because she is real,” said Layla. “The hair proves it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “If the oven hadn’t wanted to put her back together, she wouldn’t have hair now.” Layla beamed. “She’d have a sticky black mess attached to a bunch of melted fondant—you’re not supposed to bake fondant, by the way, or frosting, or most of the other things I put onto her skeleton. Confection wanted her back, so Confection gave her back. I’m just the Baker. I put things in the oven, and the world does as it will.”

  It seemed like a very precise way of avoiding accusations of magic. Kade didn’t say anything. Getting into an argument with someone who was helping was never a good idea, and in this case, making Layla doubt her place in Confection could result in a door and an expulsion, and then all of this would have been for nothing.

  Sumi looked so real.

  “Was making a new body out of candy and cake and everything enough?” asked Cora. “Will that give her back her nonsense?” Or would Sumi’s quiet, solemn ghost open her new eyes and ask to be taken home—not to the school, but to the parents who believed that she was dead, the ones who’d been willing to send their daughter away when she turned out to be someone other than the good girl they had raised her to be.

  “I don’t know,” said Layla. “I’ve never done this before. I don’t know if anyone has.”

  That was a lie, but it was a necessary one. Of course someone here had done this before. This was Confection, land of the culinary art become miracle: land of lonely children whose hands itched for pie tins or rolling pins, for the comfortable predictability of timers and sugar scoops and heaping cups of flour. This was a land where perfectly measured ingredients created nonsensical towers of whimsy and wonder—and maybe that was why they could be here, logical creatures that they were, without feeling assaulted by the world around them. Kade remembered his aunt’s tales of her own Nonsense realm all too well, including the way it had turned against her once she was old enough to think as an adult did, rigidly and methodically. She would always be Nonsense-touched, but somewhere along the way, time had caught up with her enough to turn her mind against the realm that was her natural home.

  Confection wasn’t like that. Confection was Nonsense with rules, where baking soda would always leaven your cake and yeast would always rise. Confection could be Nonsensical because it had rules, and so Logical people could survive there, could even thrive there, once they had accepted that things weren’t quite the same as they were in other worlds.

  Layla reached over and carefully touched the first two fingers of her right hand to the curve of Sumi’s remade wrist. She smiled.

  “She’s cool enough,” she said. “We can wake her up now.”

  “How?” asked Christopher.

  “Oh.” Layla looked at him, eyes wide and surprised. “I thought you knew.”

  “I do,” said Rini. She walked toward the table, and the others stood aside, letting her pass, until she was standing in front of Sumi, looking down at her with her sole remaining eye. She rested the back of her hand against her mother’s cheek. Sumi didn’t move.

  “I finally had an adventure, Mama, like you’re always saying I should,” said Rini softly. “I went to see the Wizard of Fondant. I had to trade him two seasons of my share of the harvest, but he gave me traveling beads so I could go and bring you back. I went to the world where you were born. I breathed the air.…”

  On and on she went, describing everything that had happened since she’d fallen out of the sky as if it were the greatest adventure the universe had ever known. How she had argued with the Queen of Turtles and bantered with the Lord of the Dead, how she had been there for the cleverest defeat of the Queen of Cakes, when a Mermaid and a Goblin Prince had conquered her at last. It was all lords and ladies and grand, noble quests, and it was magical.

  Quests were a lot like dogs, Cora thought. They were much more attractive when seen from a distance, and not barking in the middle of the night or pooping all over the house. She had been there for every terrible, wearying, bone-breaking moment of this quest, and it held no magic for her. She knew it too well. But Rini described it for Sumi like it was a storybook, like it was something to whisper in a child’s ear as they were drifting off to sleep, and it was beautiful. It was truly beautiful.

  “… so I need you to wake up now, Mama, and go with your friends, so you can come back here, so you can marry Papa, so I can be born.” Rini leaned forward until her head was resting on Sumi’s chest, closing her eye. “I want you to meet me. You always said I was the best thing you’d ever done, and I want you to meet me so you can know it’s true. So wake up now, okay? Wake up, and leave, so you can come home.”

  “Look,” whispered Kade.

  Sumi’s hands, which had never once in her life been still, were twitching. As the others watched, she raised them off the table and began stroking Rini’s hair, her eyes still closed, her face still peaceful.

  Rini sobbed and lifted her head, staring at her mother, both eyes wide and bright and filled with all the colors of a candy corn field in full harvest. Cora put her hands over her mouth to hide her gasp. Christopher grinned, and said nothing.

  “Mama?” asked Rini.

  Sumi opened her eyes and sat up, sending Rini stumbling back, away from the table. Sumi blinked at her. Then Sumi blinked down at her own naked, re-formed body.

  “I was dead a second ago, and now I’m naked,” she announced. “Do I need to be concerned?”

  Kade whooped, and Christopher laughed, and Rini so
bbed, and everything was different, and everything was finally the same.

  PART V

  WHAT CAME AFTER

  13

  TIME TO GO

  RINI HELD FAST TO her mother’s hands, squeezing until Sumi pulled away, taking a step backward.

  “No and no and no again, girl who says she’s a daughter of mine, in the some bright day when I get to come home, instead of coming wherever and whenever this is: don’t damage the merchandise.” Sumi shook her hands like she was trying to shake Rini’s touch away before tucking them behind her back and shifting her sharp-eyed gaze to Layla. “The door you’ve baked, you’re sure of where it goes?”

  “I told the oven what I wanted,” said Layla.

  The door was gingerbread and hard candy, piped with frosting details that looked like golden filigree and dusted with a thin veneer of edible glitter. It looked like something that would open on another world. Nothing else entirely made sense.

  “You’re the Baker.” Sumi shook her head. “Always thought you were a myth.”

  “When you’re saving our world, I am. I come after you,” said Layla, and smiled, a little shyly. She turned to look at Kade. “Remember what I said. Don’t look for me. I need to find my door, and that means I need everything to go just the way I remember it going. Leave me alone.”

  “I promise,” said Kade.

  “If you ever find yourself back in Brooklyn, give us a call,” said Christopher. “We take students throughout the year, and it’d be nice to know that you were going to where there were familiar faces.”

  “I’ll keep you in mind,” said Layla, and flicked her hand toward the door, which swung lazily open, revealing nothing but a filmy pinkness beyond. “Now get out of here, so the timeline can stop getting tied into knots.”

  “Wait!” said Rini. She darted forward, pulling Sumi into a rough hug. “I love you, Mama,” she whispered, before letting the younger woman go and turning away, wiping her eyes with her fully restored hand.

  Sumi looked bemused. “I don’t love you,” she said. Rini stiffened. Sumi continued: “But I think I’m going to. See you in a few years, gumdrop.”

  Turning, she started for the door, with her classmates tagging after her.

  The last thing Layla and Rini heard before the door swung shut behind them was Sumi asking, “So why didn’t Nancy come?”

  Then the door was closed, and the strangers were gone. Bit by bit, the door crumbled away, joining the debris that covered the ground. Layla looked at Rini and smiled.

  “Well?” she asked. “What are you waiting for? You have about a day’s walk between here and home, and I bet your parents want to see you.”

  The sound Rini made was half laugh, half sob, and then she was off and running, leaving the junkyard and the girl who only wanted to make cookies behind, racing into the bright Confection hills.

  * * *

  FOUR STUDENTS HAD LEFT and four students returned, even if they weren’t the same ones, stepping out of a door-shaped hole in the air and onto the dry brown grass of the front lawn. Eleanor was standing on the front porch, smiling wistfully—an expression that transformed into a gasp of open-mouthed delight when she saw Sumi.

  “Sumi!” she cried, and started down the stairs, moving faster than such a frail-looking woman should have been able. “My darling girl, you’re home!”

  “Eleanor-Ely!” cried Sumi, and threw herself into Eleanor’s arms, and held her tight.

  Kade and Cora exchanged a glance. There would be time, soon enough, to tell Eleanor about everything that had happened: about leaving Nadya behind, about Layla, who might someday join them at the school, about the ways that Nonsense could be underpinned with Logic, and how this changed the Compass. There would be time for Kade to find Layla’s family, to seize the chance to watch someone—from a distance, never interfering—who was about to be chosen by a door. There would be time for so many, many things. But for right now …

  For right now, the only thing that mattered was an old woman and a young girl, embracing in the grass, under a bright and cloudless autumn sky.

  Everything else could wait.

  14

  THE DROWNED GIRL

  WELL. PERHAPS NOT EVERYTHING.

  Nadya sat on the bank of the River of Forgotten Souls, one leg drawn up against her chest so she could rest her chin atop her knee. Turtles basked on the bank around her, their hard-shelled bodies pressing against her hip and ankle. They followed her everywhere she went, a terrapin train of devoted acolytes keeping her company in this most uncompanionable of places.

  It was nice, being in the company of turtles again. The turtles back in the pond at school (which seemed more like a dream with every endless, languid day that passed here, time defined by the lapping of the water against the riverbanks, by the occasional sound of music drifting from the Hall) had never wanted to spend time with her. There wasn’t enough magic in the world of her birth. Some magic worked there—Christopher’s flute, or Nancy’s stillness, back when she’d been a student, although Nadya had to admit that it was nothing compared to what Nancy could do here, in her natural habitat—but most magic was just too much for the local laws of nature to bear.

  These turtles, though … these were proper, magical turtles. They didn’t talk to her, not like the turtles back in Belyyreka, and the largest of them was only the size of a dinner plate, instead of being wide enough to ride upon, like her beloved Burian, who had been her steed and dearest companion in the Drowned World, but they were still willing to let her tickle their shells and stroke their long, finely pebbled necks. They let her exist among them, ever-damp and ever-weeping, and she loved them all, and she hated them all, because they were a constant reminder that what she had here was not enough. This, none of this, was enough.

  “I hate everything,” she said, and grabbed a stone off the bank and skipped it hard across the water, watching it hit the surface three, four, five times before it plopped and sank, joining the others she had already thrown to the bottom. Then she froze.

  She had grabbed the stone with her right hand.

  Nadya had been born without anything below the elbow on her right arm, a teratogenic trick of something her birthmother had been exposed to back in Mother Russia. Three mothers for Nadya: the one who bore her, the country that poisoned her, and the one who adopted her, American tourist on a misery tour of the rest of the world, well-meaning and well-intentioned and willing to take on a “special needs” child who liked nothing more than to flood the orphanage bathroom playing with the taps.

  Her third mother had been the first to fit her with a prosthetic hand, which had pinched and dug into her skin and done nothing to improve her quality of life. The only things she hadn’t been perfectly capable of doing with one hand were things the prosthetic didn’t help her do anyway, lacking the fine motor control necessary to apply nail polish or thread a needle. If she’d been younger, maybe, or if she’d wanted it more, but the way it had been presented, like it was a great gift she wasn’t allowed to refuse, had only served to remind her that in the eyes of her adoptive family, she would always be the poor, pitiful orphan girl with a missing hand, the one they needed to help.

  She had never wanted that kind of help. She had only wanted to be loved. So when the waterweeds by the turtle pond had looked like a door, so open and inviting, she hadn’t watched her footing on the muddy bank. She’d gotten too close. She’d tumbled in, and found herself somewhere else, somewhere that didn’t want to help her. Somewhere that wanted her to do the helping, and promised to love her if she only would.

  She had spent a lifetime in Belyyreka, and they had always called her a Drowned Girl, even when she was away from the water, and she had never considered how literal that might be, not until she had fallen into a river and felt hands yanking her by the shoulders, away from the surface, away from the real world, back into the false one, where mothers left her, one after the other, where nothing ever stayed.

  In Belyyreka, she had ch
osen her own prosthetic, a hand made of river water, which she could decorate as she liked, with weeds and small fish and once, with a tadpole that had grown to froghood in the sheltering embrace of her palm, looking at her with a child’s love before hopping away to find freedom. In Belyyreka, no one had called her broken for lacking a flesh and bone hand: they had seen it as an opportunity for her to craft a tool, a weapon, an extension of her own.

  It had dissolved when that helpful neighbor had seen her floating face-down in the pond and pulled her to supposed “safety.” She had thought it lost forever.

  Slowly, Nadya raised her right hand to her face and stared at it, its translucent flesh, its rippling skin. There was nothing inside it. She reached down with her left hand, laying it against the surface of the water. A turtle the size of a quarter crawled into her palm. She lifted it to her water hand, sliding it through the surface. It swam a content circle before poking its head up to breathe, nostrils breaking the “skin” between the left and right knuckles.

  Nadya stood. The light reflecting on the water had formed the shape of a doorway, or a grave. It was eight feet long by three feet wide, and she knew that if she dove in here, no one would come to save her. Had she really been drowning the whole time she was in Belyyreka? Had it all been a lie?

  But the school was real. The school was real, and Christopher could raise the dead, and Cora’s hair was like a coral reef, bright and impossible, and if magic was real, if her water hand was real, then she had only started to drown in truth when someone sought to pull her back. All she had to do was believe. All she had to do was be sure.

  “We’re going on a journey, little friend,” she told the turtle in her palm. “Oh, I can’t wait for you to meet Burian.”

  Nadya backed up, giving herself room for a running start before she leapt into the air, feet pointed downward like knives, set to slice through the surface of the water. She landed squarely in the middle of the dream of a door, eyes closed, hands lifted above her head, and she slid into the river without splash or ripple, and she was gone, leaving nothing but the turtles who loved her behind.

 

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