Page 31 of Seasonal Fears

Roland believes that somewhere in the world, the Moon walks on human legs, watches with human eyes, and since the Moon will always shine in the night sky, he assumes that even with the Doctrine awake and ascendant, the rest of the manifest forces do and will and must remain very relevant indeed.

So he’s always suspected Harry was seasonally inclined, but he didn’t expect the boy to announce his candidacy with such spectacular vehemence. The video showed both of them falling at the same time, and no matter how many times he rewound and resumed, it never showed Harry breathing before Melanie’s own breath resumed. He’s seasonally tied, all right. And he’s going to be Melanie’s partner in the challenge to come.

Unless Roland can find them, and dispose of the boy, and introduce Melanie to her sister, who was supposed to be her second all along. He would have introduced them already if Aven had been awake, and if he’d been given any indication a coronation was approaching. This is all happening too fast, and he didn’t consent to it, he didn’t ask for it, he didn’t agree to it in the slightest …

He pulls up in front of his house and frowns when he sees the living room light. He turned it off before he left, he knows he did, and while that might be a small thing to worry about on this night of gods and monsters, a home invasion is the last thing he needs right now. He’s been robbed before, hungry locals desperate for a hot meal, or money for drugs, or the narcotics they’re sure he keeps on hand for Melanie’s care. Some of those opportunistic souls have even survived the experience, although none of them will come anywhere near him if they have a choice in the matter. He ran into one of them at the supermarket a few years back, and the man actually pissed himself before fleeing out the back door, his purchases and his new wife discarded. According to the papers, he had been a small-time criminal who’d turned his life around over the course of three years following a “rock-bottom experience” that even the pretty new wife had been unable to explain in more detail.

Seeing Roland, even for a moment, had been enough to shatter that fragile new equilibrium and send the man back into the arms of his old demons. His body had been found in one of the local motels not three months later, a needle in his arm and a smile on his thinned-out face. Roland had read the report in the paper with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. Such was the only fair punishment for someone who would enter his home without permission.

Only now it looks as if someone has done precisely that. Whoever it is, they’ll pay for this insolence. Unless it was Melanie, little broken bird too afraid of freedom to flee her cage for long. Yes. He’ll hope that it was Melanie, coming home where she belongs.

He pulls into the driveway and stops the car, rage and hope roiling in his chest and clouding his mind. He would have been more careful a year ago, he knows, when Leigh Barrow was still alive; she had been an experiment of the worst kind, stitched together from a dozen women, some of them alchemists in their own right, all of them too clever for their own good. Her creator would have been considered a serial predator if he hadn’t been doing it for science. Roland isn’t sure the man shouldn’t be thought of that way anyway, although he supposes being remembered as the creator of Leigh Barrow, the Butcher of North America, is probably a worse punishment than being remembered for his own actions. In such moments, with such choices, are monsters erased and remade into something more palatable.

There are men for whom being forgotten has always been, will always be, a much direr punishment than any form of memory. To be erased is to be unmade by the alkahest of time, and they deserve nothing more. He doesn’t clutter his memory with their names.

But he would have been more careful if there had been any chance it was Leigh inside his house, Leigh turning on the lights and moving through his private spaces. She’d done it a few times, letting herself in with Reed’s key, or simply popping the locks and opening the doors. As far as Leigh had been concerned, anything her master claimed belonged to her in equal measure, and Reed had been more than willing to indulge her, the way a hunter will indulge a favorite dog with a prime piece of the kill and a choice spot by the fire. Only, he had indulged Leigh with freedom and with murder.

Roland misses his master very much, wishes Reed were here to work with him as they navigate the unexpected gift that is this well-timed coronation. At the same time, the loss of Reed is balanced by the loss of Leigh, who had been nothing but a scourge upon the alchemists of North America, who should never have been given the freedom to walk and run and terrorize as she had for so long.

He walks toward the front door, keys in his hand, ready to confront this invader. If it’s Melanie, he can welcome her home. If it’s an intruder, well … perhaps a good harvesting will settle his nerves. Like most alchemists outside the Congress, Roland is well skilled in the art of dismantling a human body; he can have the fool who dared violate his sanctuary in pieces in a few minutes’ time, and won’t even have to clean blood off the walls. Yes. It will be a good exercise before he goes looking for his wayward daughter, who should never have dared to run from him as she has, who should never have been so bold as to disappear.

He’s even looking forward to it by the time he reaches the porch and the door swings open, ready to welcome him inside. He frowns at the boy in the doorway, not quite his daughters’ age, still gangly and unfinished in the way of teens with growth yet buried in their bones. He has dark hair and dark eyes and a lovely tan, and he’s a stranger, which is strange. Roland is viewed by many in Portland as something of a recluse, and yet he knows everyone who comes anywhere near him on any sort of regular basis. If this boy is an opportunistic burglar, choosing the first house with no cars in the driveway, he’s made a dire mistake, and will not survive to make another.

“We’ve been waiting for you, Dr. Cosgrove,” says the boy, and steps aside, clearing the way for Roland to enter. He does, blinking in bemusement, and stops as soon as he’s past the door.

The house is warm as July, and the air is as fresh and sweet as any summer’s afternoon. He can smell wildflowers, and pavement that’s been baking in the sun for hours, letting off bursts of strange chemical signatures that make sense only in a specific context. He spins to face the boy who has invaded his home, eyes narrowing.

“Who are you?” he demands.

The boy’s smile stops barely shy of mockery. “You can call me Corn Jenny, if you have to call me anything,” he says.

Roland’s eyes narrow further, leaving him to watch the world through little more than slits. “What are you doing here?”

“That’s a funny way to talk to the person who saved your daughter from a creepy murder basement,” says the boy, and the heat of the room is explained, the radiant warmth of it all. Roland has been living in a house with the living avatar of the coming winter for seventeen years, aware all along that the summer slept below them, far under the earth, contained in a cage of silver and mercury, lead and charcoal, sustained by his alchemic art. But with the summer burning in her veins, Aven doesn’t need him anymore, if she’s ever truly needed him; if she’s ever needed anything beyond her season and her sister.

“I was always the weakest of the local Ascendants, and it’s reasonable that you wouldn’t have noticed me,” says the boy, says the Corn Jenny, slipping his hands into his pockets and stepping backward, out of reach, out of range. He seems to be looking at a point behind Roland, and the older man goes still, settling into position, heels sinking into the floor as he slowly accepts the fact that he’s not going anywhere. Ever again.

He’s going to die here, tonight, and the only thing he can do for his master, for his partner, for his daughters, is to accept the fate he’s earned with equanimity.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, voice gone soft.

“I was on the field when Harald March collapsed,” says the boy. “The summer surged into him and overloaded his buffers, and he fell down, just a split second after that vacuous cheerleader he’s been dating fell down. I knew what it was as soon as I felt it happen, but I didn’t feel him link up to me. He wasn’t mine to shepherd. There was another Summer in potential somewhere nearby. That’s why there are always so many more of us, you see. One Ascendant for every possible Incarnate, so they don’t have to share guides. We just got lucky. We aren’t expected to kill each other during the coronation.”

He smiles, and Roland has no doubt that this boy will kill anyone he feels he needs to in order to see his candidate to the throne. He’ll reap a harvest of Corn Jennies, fill his basket with bushels of their heads, and not see for a moment that he might have done something wrong. That’s good. Aven is going to need a strong right hand if she’s going to win this. She knows so little about the world. She’s not prepared for this fight.

Roland has done his best to teach her, has spent nights in the lab reading to her, has liquified what knowledge he could and fed it into her IVs, but as she’s been little more than an unrotting corpse for most of her existence, she hasn’t really been able to integrate or understand the things she knows. If not for the tinctures that impart understanding to those who drink them, and the long alchemical tradition of compressing knowledge to make it easier to bring a new apprentice up to a minimum necessary level of functionality, she wouldn’t even have the understanding she does. She can talk. She can think. She can do so much more than anyone else her age who’s spent her life in a form of suspended animation would be able to do.

It’s not going to be enough. A good Corn Jenny will make the difference between success and failure, at least until she can be united with her sister. Together, they’ll make an unstoppable force. Reed’s own work has already proven that. Incarnate two forces in the same blood, give them a connection as physical as it is theoretical, and the world belongs to you.

And like Reed before him, he’s going to die at the hands of his own creation, undone by his own effort to understand the universe a little more intimately. But unlike Reed, he’s going to go without a fight. This has never been his story. He was a motivating force, not a narrative necessity. He accepted that the night his wife died.

The boy steps closer, apparently taking Roland’s expression of calm acceptance as a lack of fear or, worse, a lack of respect.

“He doesn’t have a guide now,” says the boy. “Harald, I mean. I found her as soon as I felt our Lady wake, found her before she could find him, and I made sure she won’t be telling him anything I don’t want him to know. He’ll burn from the inside out as the Summer starts to claim its own, and when the heat’s too much for him to handle, I’ll be there to douse the fires. I’ll be the trusted friend who saves him, and he’ll never realize I was the one who damned him in the first place. Unless I tell him so.” The boy pauses, blinking, and a smile spreads across his face, like he’s just had the best and most clever idea had by anyone, ever. “I think I’ll tell him he was supposed to have his own attendant before he dies, and that I removed her from the court before she could tell him how to handle what he’s becoming. Aven won’t have any of those problems. Aven will have me every minute of her journey, and I’m going to make sure she becomes a queen. You don’t have to thank me for taking care of your daughter.”

“I wasn’t going to,” says Roland.

“No, you weren’t, were you? Because you’ve never cared much about taking care of her. She’s just been a burden to you.”