Page 29 of Seasonal Fears

“Yes,” says Melanie.

“I guess,” says Harry. “If I have to.”

“Earlier you said that once a force embodies itself, it keeps doing it,” says Melanie. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means the first time the living Winter became a person, that person was perfect for the Winter, somehow. They were the platonic ideal of the idea, and they lived the season like they had never been anything else and never could have been anything else. They may even have forgotten what it meant to be human—although it’s a lot more likely that the first Winter, and the first Summer, were never people at all. They were probably sculpted, from ice or wildflowers, snowflakes and fresh fruit. Alchemy is all about transmutation. Turning something shaped like a person into an actual person is easy, and if the conditions were right, the natural forces we’re talking about could have done the transmutation without an alchemist to help. And then the season got to walk around and be a person for a while, and that was very fun for them.”

“But?” asks Harry. When Melanie turns to look at him, he shrugs. “There’s always a ‘but’ in a story like this.”

“But once the season had been a person, it got addicted to being a person. When something turns human, humanity changes it, even if only a little. So now there’s always a Summer, and always a Winter. Multiple, actually, of each, seasonal monarchs scattered around the world, manifesting entirely on their own, people who hold the power and potential of a season in their hands. Some people are born naturally inclined toward one season or another—the people who go out barefoot on frost-covered grass because their feet aren’t cold, or who run marathons in the middle of July and don’t worry about heat exhaustion. The people who are inclined. Most of them will never be called to serve their season. They grow up and grow old and become more complicated, and the more complicated they are, the less room they have inside them for something as simple as a seasonal orientation. The timing has to be right. But if it happens that a crown is to be passed, all those who are near enough—and that usually means ‘on the same continent,’ since there’s no point in activating the potential candidates in Europe for a coronation in Australia—will be called to compete, and the two who win will take the crowns. Summer and Winter, born again, out of blood on the barley and blood on the snow.”

“This is making my head hurt,” complains Harry. Mel leans over and puts her hand on his knee, and he covers it with his own, holding on to her. He still can’t feel her pulse, not in her fingers and not, when he shifts his grip a little further down, in her wrist.

This is happening.

“It made my head hurt, too,” says Jack. “All the candidates in an area will be called, but they tend to arrive in pairs, because they naturally cleave to each other when they find one another. It’s not a soulmates thing or any of those weird-ass romantic tropes. It’s more ‘we make a wheel when we’re together, let’s roll,’ and then they enjoy one another’s company too much to stop. So they come to the challenge in pairs, and sometimes—not often, but sometimes—both halves of the same pair will win. Other times, one of them falls and the other hooks up with someone unpartnered, and they continue that way. In the end, the last two standing take the crowns, and they keep them until they either die or set those crowns aside.”

“You said before that the dead guy, William Morris, was crowned three hundred years ago,” says Harry. “Talk more about that.”

“William Monroe. Not the talent agency. Once you’re crowned, you’re dead for three months out of the year. Like, dead-dead, glass box or pine box or whatever makes you comfortable. And during that time, if someone destroys your body, they can claim your crown—not that I can understand why anyone would want to, since taking the winter crown in the middle of July would mean committing suicide in the weirdest way I’ve ever heard of. But the rest of the year, you’re healthy and functional and not dead, like, ever. Old William liked being the living Winter, liked the power it gave him, and the control. He didn’t like being dead, though.”

“Who would?” asks Harry.

“I mean, most of the monarchs are cool with it, because the three months of deadness might suck, but the other nine months of the year are pretty slammin’,” says Jack. “Health, prosperity, usually wealth, since the world literally provides for all their needs—it’s one of the better gigs, and has been since humans stopped symbolically massacring the living seasons to bring about a better harvest. Most continental monarchs do their jobs for at least a hundred years before they decide to hand off their divinity and call a crowning.”

“So what happened here?” asks Melanie.

“William disliked being dead so much that he bargained with the alchemists to keep himself from dying. And the solution they hit on was exploiting the fact that multiple crowns exist in parallel and keeping him in motion. As long as he was never in a place where summer was happening, his own personal winter remained in effect.” Jack shudders. “That’s the only thing I didn’t like about being called to become the Winter Ascendant. It meant working for that asshole. Because each region’s crowns turn out to be pretty tightly linked, when he didn’t die at the start of summer, the North American Summer Queen never woke up. She came back to life, but not enough to actually open her eyes. And he kept her like that for almost the entire three hundred years they served together.”

“What an asshole,” says Harry. “So that’s how this Reed guy got involved.”

“Yes. Asphodel Baker was obsessed with the incarnate natural forces. She thought the existence of the living seasons proved that anything could be forced to manifest in a human form if the right preparations were made, and that controlling that human form would mean she controlled whatever natural force that person represented. She couldn’t take the seasons, because there are too many of us—”

“Wait,” interjects Harry. “How many of you are there?”

“The Incarnates represent the two big seasons, and then the Ascendants either serve them directly, as I do, or they represent the transitional seasons. So Winter has Jack Frost, and Summer has Corn Jenny. And then you have Jack in the Green for spring and Stingy Jack for fall.”

“Someone really liked the name ‘Jack,’” comments Harry. “I’m sure that’s not going to be confusing at all.”

“I’m Winter enough to have been called when there was an opportunity for the season to manifest in my area, but not Winter enough to have been held back for a coronation,” says Jack, sounding amused. “I serve the Winter Incarnate, whoever that may be, meaning that for the last year, I served William Monroe, even though I didn’t want to. There are dozens of Ascendants. Sometimes we live only miles apart. And that’s how things are meant to work, but because the system needs such a volume of people to function properly, Asphodel knew she couldn’t claim us, and so she started setting her eyes on new systems.”

“Hence the whole ‘Doctrine of Ethics’ thing,” says Harry.

“Ethos, and yes,” says Jack. “She passed her obsession down to her student before she convinced him he had to kill her in order for her to progress to the next stage in her enlightenment. He was an obedient creation, if he was nothing else. While she took her rest, he continued with the work.”

Melanie is starting to get the feeling that these people have a different definition of “death” than the one she’s always known, and she frowns. She’s spent most of her life afraid of dying, of leaving her father and Harry alone. If her father really is an alchemist, he must have known death didn’t necessarily mean going away, and so many of the things he’s said and done to her are taking on a new light. She doesn’t like it.

“Did he succeed?” she asks. “In making the Doctrine of Ethos ascendant, or whatever?”

“Incarnate,” says Jack. “I know it’s confusing now, but it’s like learning any new language. It all starts making sense once you have the pieces. If you force a natural concept to become a person, you incarnate it. If someone is tied to a natural concept but doesn’t fully represent it on their own, they’re ascendant. And if someone embodies a natural concept so completely that they take ownership, they control it and how it works on the world, they manifest and become that concept incarnate. Right now, you’re potential incarnates. If you get the crown, you’ll manifest as the Winter Incarnate, and you will be the living Winter, not just linked to it. You’ll be able to call down storms and walk the winter ways that currently don’t exist for you. All you have to do is win.”

“You make that sound easy,” says Harry.

“Oh, it won’t be,” says Jack. “Because every single person who’s eligible has someone like me, or like Corn Jenny, who’s supposed to be here to help walk you through this, telling them how it works. And maybe some of them will be better at explanations than others, and maybe some of the candidates will be better at listening than others, but every candidate gets a guide. That’s why there are so many ascendants. The winners catch the crowns. The losers die for keeps. Can I get back to explaining what Melanie’s father has to do with all this?”

“Sure,” says Harry, and frowns. He doesn’t like any part of this. But he likes Mel’s hand on his knee. He likes the fact that even if he can’t find her pulse, he can find her, and if there’s anything he’s taking away from this Jack kid’s fumbling attempts to explain herself, it’s that if they get these crown things, Mel won’t have to leave him. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever.

They’ll get to stay together, and all they have to do is embody two natural concepts that have no business being people in the first place.