Page 10 of Seasonal Fears

Melanie moves carefully and quietly as she slips into her own yard, skirting the outline of the house, avoiding the windows looking in on the rooms where her father is most likely to be whiling his day away, heading for the perfect cliché that is the oak tree outside her bedroom window. Family legend says her mother loved that tree, which is why her father never cut it down. She’s been climbing up and down its loving branches since she was six and old enough to slip away from sight for the precious minutes it took her to defy gravity. Her proprioception was built half on bouncing on her bed and half on swinging from the old oak, and she loves it like the babysitter she always wanted.

Her father has only seriously threatened to cut it down once, the year she was seven, after Harry used it to sneak into her room while she was home sick from school and scared himself into thinking she was dead. She begged him not to, begged and cried until he agreed that the tree could stay as long as neither of them went climbing anymore, and since she’s pretty sure Harry’s afraid of the tree after that incident, it wasn’t hard for her to cross her fingers and agree. She still climbs it constantly. Harry has never climbed it again.

Hoisting herself onto the lowest branch, she pauses and waits for the warning twinge from her hapless heart. It never comes. There is still no pain, still no feeling of having something frantic trapped inside her chest.

Still no heartbeat, and she’ll worry about that later, when it turns into a problem. Right here, right now, it’s still a relief.

Silent as the grave, Melanie climbs upward, toward her bedroom window on the second floor, toward the peace that waits for her there.

Toward home.

Melanie has never been downstairs in her father’s study when she was also going out of or coming in through her bedroom window. Try as he might, Roland has never been able to fully invert causality in his own home, and if he had, inviting his daughter to come and experience the proof that he always knows where she is would have been at the bottom of his list of good ideas. So she doesn’t know, because he’s never told her, that when she uses the window in either direction, one of the boards in her floor bends, ever so slightly, underfoot. It makes no sound in her room, cushioned as it is by carpet and muffled by the sole of her shoe. But downstairs, oh downstairs, the creak is plainly audible.

Roland looks up, phone pressed to his ear, and frowns at the evidence of his daughter’s return. He knows she snuck out to attend Harry’s football practice; she’s not as subtle as she thinks she is. She’s seventeen, and not being as subtle as she thinks she is is essentially a survival adaptation. He also knows, from the schedule pinned to the fridge, that practice won’t be over for another two hours. She shouldn’t be home yet.

If the boy had finally gathered up the spine and sense to break up with her before she could break up with him by putting herself into the ground, she’d be crying: he knows his daughter well enough to be certain of that much. She would have come in through the front door, sobbing like she thought she could expel her sorrow if she just tried hard enough, so the fact that she’s sneaking it with what she believes to be silence means she hasn’t been hurt that deeply.

So why is she so early? It is a mystery not of his own making, and he doesn’t care for those: especially not today, when he has just received the second most distressing phone call of the last year. William Monroe, the Winter King, the man who has kept the crown safe and prevented it from passing for three hundred years, is dead. His counterpart somehow managed to wake from the slumber she had been forced into, and walked onto the runway where his plane for Minneapolis had been beginning its taxi. She died on impact. He died an instant after, unable to form a swift-enough connection to any of the available Summer candidates.

That’s the trouble with the natural ones. They require a specific key to unlock them, a second side to their coin. The artificials will be better, more flexible, more equipped to bond in multiple directions. The naturals almost never manage to re-bond if their counterpart is lost, and so they go down as well, ships lost at sea.

William Monroe was a bottom feeder of a man, a coward who spent more time fleeing from his own death than he did living the life he fought so hard to preserve. But he was useful, and he was known. If the crown is in play again, Roland can’t control where it goes.

He can’t control whether Melanie is in the running. She is his daughter and his darling and his greatest failed experiment, because there’s no way her body can take the strain of carrying the crown. He’s tried, for the last several years, to undo some of the damage he originally did, tried to bring her back to what she should have been in the beginning, and this is the only way to know if he succeeded.

She’s here. In her room, where she belongs, not bursting into his office and throwing herself into his arms as she tries to make sense of what’s happening to her, so maybe nothing is happening to her. Maybe he did worse work in the beginning than he thought he did, or better work now, and she gets to be an ordinary dying girl.

He doomed her once. Maybe he saved her too.

It’s a strange thing for a father to hope for. It has to be enough.

On the other end of the phone, a voice asks if he’s still there. He forces himself to focus, responding, “Yes, yes, I’m still here.”

“Good. The timing of this couldn’t be worse. What we know is that Mr. Monroe was leaving the country because he didn’t feel we could protect him with the Alchemical Congress decimated. He could have chosen to help us rebuild, and instead he ran.”

“We’ve always known he was a coward.”

“You mean we’ve always known that Reed said he was a coward. Well, Reed is gone, and he’s not coming back.”

Roland nods. “That’s true enough. He’s gone.”

He went to the site of Reed’s research facility in the fall, when the hunter’s moon was in the sky, and sifted the ashes for himself. All Reed’s work, destroyed. Reed himself, destroyed, and that mannikin monster he called a right-hand woman along with him. America will be stronger for the loss of those two beasts, but first they’ll have to recover and rebuild, and they did not need this right now.

“I’m sorry. This was above my pay grade eight months ago.”

“It’s all right. We’re all getting used to the new status quo.” A status quo that includes two of the most powerful embodiments the world has ever known, both artificial and both ungrateful toward the people who made them possible, somewhere out there in the wilds, doing whatever pleases them.

Attempts have been made to find the incarnate Doctrine, something which shouldn’t be difficult, given what little information Reed shared with the rest of them: they know the language side of the equation is likely to be somewhat reserved, resigned to their place in the cosmos, while the math side will be flashy and loud and unable to resist drawing attention. Combined with the power they wield when together, they should be a beacon shining on the horizon, leading their pursuers to the Impossible City.

Instead, there has been nothing. For months, nothing. Reed is gone, his lab destroyed, his research burnt, and the Doctrine is unleashed upon the world, uncontrolled and uncontained.

This is not a good time for a passing of the crowns that have been stable for three hundred years, even if the moment of their passing will unlock another path, however briefly, into the Impossible City.

The stability of those crowns was the only reason he agreed to be a part of this project, a project that has already cost him his wife and youngest daughter, that has been costing him his eldest one heartbeat at a time for seventeen years. If the crowns weren’t stable, he would never have put her into harm’s way.

(He can tell himself that as much as he wants to. He’s still an alchemist, still a student of the American Congress, which prizes accomplishment at all costs, and would have thought him infinitely less if he hadn’t been prepared to sacrifice what he claimed to love in the name of progress. Knowledge was the light, and the light would guide them to a glorious new age of logic and plenty. Maybe not Reed’s Impossible City, but something even better. He would have done this even if the crown had been a normal harvest away from changing hands.)

“With Monroe dead, you need to be on your guard. There’s every chance Melanie won’t be in the running, and if she’s not, you’re to continue as you have been: the experiment in process matters more than a change to the situation. But if she’s under consideration at all, if Aven wakes…”