Page 30 of Seasonal Fears

“Melanie’s parents,” says Jack, in a tone that implies this time she’s going to be allowed to finish her thought; this time she’s going to get to the ending, “were recruited by Reed at the beginning of their apprenticeships, and he became their master of record. Formal alchemy is a lot like formal academia. They like their rules and rituals and ways of doing things. He infected them with Asphodel’s obsession, and Ariadne became convinced he was going about things from the wrong angle. She thought manifesting the Doctrine would destroy the vessels—it was too big, it was too complicated, it was never meant to be a person—but if he could learn to shape and refine the perfect vessels with something smaller, he’d be able to do it. She and Roland drew up one of the most ambitious private plans anyone had seen. They would craft their own vessels to contain something that was supposed to be impossible to catch or control, they would give of their own blood and their own power to craft those vessels properly, and in the course of time, despite never having known the touch of one another’s flesh, she became pregnant with their greatest creation.”

Harry shoots a nervous glance at Melanie. “Is that why your dad was so worked up about the idea that we might be sleeping together?” he asks, swallowing hard.

“No, he was so worked up because we were sixteen and he wasn’t sure I wouldn’t have a heart attack in the backseat of your car, and if we didn’t use birth control, he might wind up a grandparent with a dead daughter trying to raise a baby all by himself,” says Melanie, with the sort of ridiculously perky cheer she’s always brought to saying terrible things. “I don’t think he cared much about my virginity as a social construct, just as a medical one.”

“Well, this is charmingly horrific and apparently I’ve said enough smart shit that you’ve both forgotten that I’m thirteen and would like you to not,” says Jack, as if she hadn’t been the one to introduce sex into the conversation. “Anyway, they got married to guarantee chains of custody, and continued their efforts. Ariadne confirmed she was carrying twins, and they decided this was a sign that they would ensnare both seasons at the same time. But that wasn’t possible.”

“Why not?” asks Melanie.

“Seasons Incarnate are always born at the appropriate time of year. She went into labor on the winter solstice, which would have made you both perfect vessels for the winter but left neither of you suited for the summer. So she proposed a solution while she was in her hospital bed. When their first daughter was born, Roland drove a stake of polished mistletoe into Ariadne’s heart, killing her where she labored and stopping her birthing before the second girl could be delivered. It would have played perfectly to their plans, if he’d been a little more aware of the mysteries of the female body.”

“The fuck?” asks Harry.

“He didn’t wait until she had expelled the placenta. Melanie was still connected to her mother when she died, and the symbolic nature of Ariadne’s sacrifice broke her Winter-primed heart before the connection was severed. As the doctors fought to save the suddenly struggling infant, Roland removed his wife from the hospital with the second babe still in her belly, suffocated by the weight of her own mother’s flesh.”

Melanie has heard this story before, but in a very different form. She heard her mother’s heart gave out from the strain of birth, that her twin sister had been stillborn, not suffocated in the womb. She says nothing, only stares as her hand clenches tight on Harry’s knee, fingers digging in until he winces. He doesn’t pull away, choosing instead to bear up under the pain and lend her what support he can.

Jack doesn’t appear to notice the distress she’s causing, and continues blithely on: “His wife and research partner was dead, and his perfect vessel was flawed. Reed’s suggestion was to harvest Melanie for parts, repurpose her to serve the greater alchemical goals of their organization. Roland refused, choosing instead to extract the second babe from Ariadne on his own and put her into a state of unborn stasis until the summer solstice.”

Melanie stares at her in silent horror.

“Your sister lives,” says Jack. “She has lived this entire time. She never wakes, she never walks, but she lives, by the cleverness of your father’s art and the horror of your mother’s sacrifice. She was intended to embody the Summer Incarnate, and she still carries that potential. She’s one of those who will be set against you as you continue.” She nods toward Harry. “Your father, once he becomes aware that a crowning is at hand—if he doesn’t know already—will be looking to remove your boyfriend from consideration. His intention was always to own both sides of the season.”

Melanie stares at her. Harry does the same. Neither of them says a word.

Jack shrugs. “So that’s where we are right now. It’s time to start running for your lives, because if you don’t win this race, you’re finished.”

Into the Woods

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 11TH, 2017: WINTER, UNDER THE WORM MOON.

Roland Cosgrove was not expecting this.

He knew when the aftershock of William’s death hit the remains of the Alchemical Congress, setting off a hundred sensors and monitoring devices, that there would be consequences. He knew the reaction from the Congress would be immediate, teams being dispatched to collect as many of the candidates as could be found and identified, whisking them away before the challenge could begin. Not all of them had been located over the years since he and Ariadne began their work; the techniques they developed together were still in their early days when she died and left him alone with a broken babe and no real idea of what he was doing as a father.

(If only he had realized the placenta had yet to be expelled, he might have saved himself so damn much trouble. But then, keeping a damaged, disabled daughter under his thumb had been difficult enough to seem impossible some days; he can’t really imagine what it would have been like trying to manage a fully healthy one.)

Without Ariadne to assist him, with Aven sleeping in what was once their shared lab, and Melanie taking up the majority of his leisure time, Roland has neglected his duties to the Congress for the past seventeen years, spending most of his time on his daughters, both the known and the unknown. The techniques for finding the potential avatars for summer and winter have never been sufficiently refined; they’ll have missed some, no matter how closely they hewed to his notes.

Their attendants, the seasonal Ascendants, are easier to find, for all that they’re less powerful. They come and go more quickly, for one thing, and William has always been happy to throw the ones who displease him out of his good graces. Roland is sure that by now, more than half of those ridiculous constructs have been caught, and while some will have died in the process, there will still be more than enough remaining to guarantee the outcome.

He damns William and Diana both as he drives toward his house, gas pedal pressed hard against the floorboard, hands locked on the wheel. If she had only managed to shake herself to early consciousness last year, Reed would have been alive, and the Congress would have been in full strength, not damaged and decimated by Reed’s attack against his own. The fact that he’s blaming a woman who spent the better part of three hundred years asleep for the actions of his own master doesn’t strike him as unreasonable in the slightest.

Roland is an expert at blaming anyone for his troubles but himself. He blames Ariadne for going into labor too early, blames the doctor for not realizing he was about to kill his wife and asking him to wait long enough to clear the detritus of her firstborn out of the way. He blames Melanie for being imperfect and Aven for being unable to walk in the world while her sister’s heart was beating.

But right here, right now, he blames the March boy most of all. Oh, he always suspected Harry of being Summer-called, has seen the signs in the boy almost from the beginning, but he never saw him as a danger. Harry wasn’t strong enough to challenge Aven for the season if and when she woke and went to claim her birthright, and it was the season in his soul that caused him to cleave so closely to Melanie, to recognize her as the other half of himself and worry as much as he did about keeping her safe and whole.

A non-seasonal boy would have behaved more like a, well, boy, and might have broken her heart, which was already too broken to withstand the strain. A non-seasonal boy (and Roland still thinks of that as, obliquely, a “real” boy, even though he’s never heard of any other artificial vessels for the seasons) would have been equipped to leave her, not to fight like a lion to keep her safe. Harry was never the enemy.

But Harry gave her the confidence to run, to jump, to fight for a life outside the walls of the garden her father had so carefully planted for her. Melanie might have been willing to be kept smaller than she was if only she’d been alone. Roland doesn’t know.

And now she does, somehow. When he’d seen her off for the dance, he’d done so believing there was still time to get things in order before he had to explain the situation. He’d expected to be able to prepare. He’s been preparing for eighteen years, since the day Ariadne announced she was pregnant and they were moving into the practical stage of their experiment. Theory was all well and good, but it was only in the field that anything could truly be tested.

They had believed they could raise the seasons in harmony, Summer and Winter side by side and devoted to one another, contained and controlled and too prepared for the coming challenge to risk defeat in any form. Ariadne had been working on ways to kill William and Diana even before they finished designing the girls; she had proposed, more than once, that they give the girls the hearts of their predecessors for their eighteenth birthday, making them Queens of Creation as they became adults.

Roland never expounded on that part to Reed. James Reed was many things. Teacher, student, scholar, master. Brilliant alchemist, and even more brilliant scientist and showman. But he was not, and never had been, generous of spirit. Roland and Ariadne were able to get their “little project” approved solely because it fed into the work Reed was already doing as regarded the Doctrine of Ethos, and any progress they enjoyed would be suitable for immediately repurposing and incorporating into his own research.

But for Reed, the idea of any other individual controlling any aspect of the universe was and always had been unacceptable. His intention was that his Doctrine should mature—which Roland assumes it has, assumes some of Reed’s little cuckoos flew home to roost, killing their creator in the process—and seize the reins of creation, rendering the rest of the manifest forces irrelevant.