Cora stepped around him, moving toward Christopher, who looked so small, and so frail. The blood seemed to have been leeched away from his face and hands, leaving his naturally brown skin surprisingly pale, like scraped parchment stretched over a bucket of whey. She knelt, careful not to jostle him, and lifted the dead starfish of his hand off the floor.

“I think this is yours,” she said, and pressed the bone flute into his hand.

Christopher opened his eyes, inhaling sharply, like it was the first true breath he’d been able to take in hours. The color came back to his skin, not all at once, but flooding outward from his hand, racing up his arm until it vanished beneath his sleeve, only to reappear as it crept up his neck and suffused his face. He sat up.

“Fuck me,” he said.

“What, here? Now? In front of Kade?” Cora put on her best pretense of a simpering expression. “I’m not that kind of girl.”

Christopher looked startled for a moment. Then he laughed, and stood, offering her his left hand. It was probably the only hand he was going to have free for a while. The fingers on the right were clenched so tight around the bone flute that they had gone pale again, this time from the pressure.

“Thank you,” he said, with all the sincerity he had. “I don’t think I had much time left.”

“All part of the job,” said Cora.

“Chris? You all right?” called Kade. He pressed the tip of his sword down a little harder into the hollow of the Queen’s throat, dimpling the skin. “You say the word and she’s gone.”

The Queen said nothing, frozen in her terror while Rini wrapped more and more pulled taffy and gummy candy around her. She looked like all of this had suddenly become genuinely, awfully real, like it had all been a game to her before.

And maybe it had been, once. Maybe she had stumbled through her door into a world full of people who grew candy corn from the chocolate and graham soil and thought that none of them were real people; like none of them truly mattered. Maybe she had played at becoming despot instead of baker because she hadn’t believed that there would be consequences. Not until another traveler came along, a fighter rather than a crafter, because Confection hadn’t needed another baker, not with their last one sitting on a throne and demanding tribute. Not until her death at Sumi’s hands … but even that had been reversed, forgiven by the world when Sumi died before she could return and start a proper revolution.

Until this moment, even into death and out of it again, the Queen of Cakes hadn’t truly believed that she could die.