Cora opened her mouth to object, paused, and shut it with a snap. She turned to Kade. “You,” she said. “You’re a tailor and you write stuff down, but what did you do when you went through your door? What was on the other side?”

Kade hesitated. Then he sighed and looked out the window, and said, “Every world has its own set of criteria. Some of them are … pickier … than others. Prism is considered a Fairyland. Technically it’s a Goblin Market, which means they can control where the doors manifest. Every world chooses the children who get to visit, but Prism curates them. Prism watches them before they sweep them up, because Prism usually keeps them. Prism is one of the worlds we mostly knew about because of the hole it made in the compass, before I went there and got myself thrown out.”

Cora said nothing. Speaking would have broken the spell, would have reminded Kade that he was talking to an audience. He might have stopped then. She didn’t want that.

“In Prism, the Fairy Court has been fighting a war against the Goblin Empire for thousands of years. They could have won a hundred times. So could the goblins. They don’t, because the war is all they know anymore. They have so many rituals and ceremonies and traditions wrapped up in fighting that if you took their war away, they’d be lost. I didn’t know that, of course. I just knew that I was going to have an adventure. That I was going to be a hero, a savior, and do something that mattered for a change.”

Kade’s face darkened. “The Fairy Court always snatched little girls. The prettiest little girls they could find, the ones with ribbons in their hair and lace on their dresses. They liked the contrast we made against the goblin armies.”

Cora jumped a little at the word “we.” “What—”

“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.