Page 103 of Seasonal Fears

He reaches up to feel his forehead. There’s no crown there, not even a circlet, but he doesn’t need there to be, because the weight of it remains. He was chosen and he made his choice and the seasons did the same, the Summer before he came here, the Winter once he arrived. He looks behind him. There is no one else. He doesn’t know the rules of this place, he doesn’t know the consequences of lingering, but he remembers what Jack said:

The coronation doesn’t end until the winning candidates emerge from the labyrinth. He hasn’t truly won as long as he’s standing here, and so he turns toward the exit and begins making his way toward it. He’s stiff and cold and truly tired for the first time since this all started; until the process is complete, he feels like he’s finally human again, finally the person he always believed himself to be.

Harry steps out of the labyrinth and onto the field unchallenged. The attendants all turn toward the movement. One of them—Jenny, his Jenny—whoops and punches the air before running toward him, Jack trailing behind. The other attendants look at him with varying expressions of disappointment or regret. One puts her hands over her face, shoulders shaking, and while he’s too far away to hear, he has the distinct impression she’s started to sob.

Then Jenny is reaching him, flinging his arms around Harry’s shoulders and spinning them both around with his momentum. “You made it through!” he exclaims—yells, really, jubilant and unrepressed. “You survived. Man, did you win?”

Harry looks at the man who has been his attendant, the Corn Jenny who went through three candidates before reaching the labyrinth, and his throat is empty. There are no words left in him. Not until the coronation is done; not until Melanie comes out.

She will come out. She has to. The Winter chose him because he would balance the coming Summer; the alchemical marriage works best with two willing participants, not a participant and a sacrifice. He defeated Aven. He was the better Summer soul.

But he doesn’t know the other Winter offerings. Maybe Mel won’t be what the Summer approves; maybe there’s someone warmer, someone less damaged, someone more suited to the whims of his home season. So he shakes his head and pulls away from Jenny, shivering.

Jack puts a hand on his arm. “Harry,” she says, voice low and urgent. “Do you know where Mel is? Did she not make it through?”

His lips are dry, but he can answer questions about something other than himself. He swallows, and says, “We got separated as soon as we stepped inside. I think … I think you really had to want to find someone else to navigate the labyrinth anything other than alone.” If Aven hadn’t been unable to resist the urge to attack him on sight, she could have come after him in the labyrinth. If nothing else, she could have slowed him down enough for someone else to receive the Winter’s blessing to proceed. She could have kept him from the crown.

“So you lost her?”

Put like that, it becomes a blow, an accusation he can scarcely weather. Harry closes his eyes and swallows, fighting to get his head to stop spinning. When he opens them again, it’s to answer, in a mild tone, “I didn’t lose her. I didn’t have her. Not once we entered the labyrinth. Everyone enters alone.”

Jenny grabs his elbow. “But did you win?”

“I think so.” Harry’s voice turns thoughtful. “The Winter said it could stand my company. Then it put on Melanie’s face, and it crowned me. The crown disappeared when I came out, but I still feel it. I think I won.”

“If you won, we’ll know soon,” says Jack. She turns to look at the labyrinth. “We wait to see who else comes out.”

Harry turns as well, and sees only the wall, and the distant shape of the Impossible City beyond it. “How can they come out? The exit’s gone.”

Jack gives him a bewildered look. “No, it’s not. It’s right there.”

Ah. Well, that makes sense. He thinks he’d die for another glimpse of those streets. If there were an easy way back into the labyrinth, he’d take it, just for the chance that he might be able to find his way through to the wonders on the other side. The Impossible City is not for the living or the mortal, and he’s both, right here and now; it can’t be his home.

Not yet, anyway.

“Not for me,” he says. “I’m not allowed to go back in.”

“Sucks to be you,” says Jack. “I’m not allowed to go in at all.”

When Melanie appears, it’s by stepping straight through the wall. No gate opens for her to pass through, no exit he might use to re-enter. Just the wall, and then just her, looking dazed, hands crackling with cold as she walks toward them. Harry takes a step forward.

She sees him. Her head snaps around, and she begins to run. He answers in kind, and they meet in the middle of the field, locking their arms around each other and not leaving enough space between them for a single snowflake, a single blade of grass.

They just hold on.

The Queen of Swords has a reputation for making monsters, and most of the Pages are monsters in their own way, but she does not forge most of them, nor have anything to do with their creation. Each ruler crafts their own Court, claiming them from the resources of their land. A Consort, when desired, Lord or Lady; a Knight, to carry their will across the protectorates; and, at times, a Page, who serves as living weapon for their regnant. Many Consorts will refuse to share space with a Page, for so many of them are monsters.

The Pages are heartless, all of them, even the kindest, you see. They act according to their own ideals, and not to the ideals of the gentle or the merciful. The Page of Frozen Waters is the worst of them, and always has been, having been crafted from ice and the drowned, but without the natural mercies to which those ordinary things are heir. And if the Page of Gentle Embers is the best of them, it is only because the Queen of Wands could envision no cruelty when she crafted her companion. They are not human. They are monsters, and that the Queen of Swords is forever blamed for the making of monsters when the Pages exist is one more piece of proof that the world is ever and always essentially unfair.

But all of them, once they have the scent of something to be destroyed, will return again and again, and to make an enemy of a Page is to make an enemy of the elements themselves, in their rawest, cruelest form.

Avery and Zib walked on, all unaware that both the wind and water were set against them now, in different ways, or that their journey was so very far from over as to be barely begun …

—From Along the Saltwise Sea, by A. Deborah Baker

BOOK VIIICoronation

Winter’s not gone yet, if the wild geese fly that way.