“I’d say something about being the better man, but fuck, man, I don’t know,” said Christopher. He stretched before slumping forward and groaning. “I feel like I’ve been dragged behind a truck for the last hundred miles. This is the worst. Let’s never come here again.”

“Deal,” said Cora.

Christopher looked at Kade and the Queen of Cakes, and the room went slowly still. He took a step forward.

“I never got offered a door to this place,” he said. “I’m not a baker, and I wouldn’t have liked it here. Too sweet for me. Too much light, not enough crypts. I like my sugar in skull form, and my illumination to come from lanterns hung in the branches of leafless trees. This place isn’t mine. But the place I did go, the place that is mine, it sort of screwed with my ideas about life and death. It made me see that the lines aren’t as clear as the living always make them out to be. The lines blur. And you, lady? I don’t want you to be dead, because I never want to see you again.”

He looked away from the shaking Queen of Cakes, focusing on Kade. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, and turned and walked out of the room.

When the others followed, they left the Queen of Cakes and the one captive guard bound and gagged, to be found or forgotten according to the whims of fate. If the Queen had thought to order her prisoners fed, she might be rescued.

Or she might not. Whatever the outcome, it no longer mattered to the rest of them. They were moving on.

10. The Candy Corn Farm

10
THE CANDY CORN FARM

“BEING DEAD FOR A while really messes with your staffing,” said Cora, as they emerged from the castle’s kitchen door and into the wide green frosting grass fields beyond. No farmers worked here, although there were a few puffy spun-sugar sheep nipping at the ground. “I figured we’d get caught at least twice.”

“Once was enough for me,” said Kade grimly. He had shed his stolen armor, but still carried his stolen sword. There was blood on the hard candy edge, commemorating that one brief encounter, that one hard slash.

Cora turned her face away. She had never seen someone die like that before. Drowning, sure. Drowning, she knew intimately. She had pulled a few sailors to their deaths with her own two hands, when there wasn’t any other way to end a conflict, when the waves and the whispering foam were the only answer. She was good at drowning. But this …