Page 32 of Seasonal Fears

The urge to argue with that assessment is surprisingly strong. Roland has attended countless support group sessions at the hospital, rooms packed with loving, panicked parents whose children have walked right up to the border of death’s country and turned back at the last second, or not turned back at all but crossed over and been lost forever. He’s been through grief counseling and miraculous recoveries, and he’s stayed because he recognized himself in their struggles. He may not have been grieving in the same ways they are, may never have hit the same plateau of hopeless resignation, but he’s grieved.

And the whole time he’s been grieving, he’s also been returning home to kiss his officially surviving daughter on the forehead before shooing her off to sleep, aided by the drugs he slips into her evening tea, the ones he makes to complement the ones he substitutes for the capsules containing her officially prescribed medications, and then slipping away downstairs to the daughter no one knows he has.

He’s known for years that if the mundane authorities ever had cause to search his basement, he’d be unable to explain the girl sleeping there, bone-white and cold as the grave. For the first year or so, when the girls had been infants and Melanie had slept almost all the time, when not waking to cry fitfully or require hospitalization, he would have been accused of nothing worse than grave-robbing, and maybe necrophilia, depending on how perverse the minds of the arresting officers turned. The fact that a premature newborn looked nothing like a child of even a month wouldn’t have stopped them from going “his daughter died at birth, he has a dead baby in his basement, clearly he stole her body,” and their tools weren’t remotely sophisticated enough to detect the signs that Aven was not, in fact, dead.

But things that aren’t dead don’t stop growing, and Aven has been no different. Her growth kept pace with and sometimes exceeded Melanie’s. She shares her sister’s heart condition, having been even more connected to their mother at the moment of Ariadne’s death; if anything, her condition is worse, and he’s not sure her heart will ever be capable of beating on its own. But if she wins the Summer, it won’t need to. If she wins the Summer, the laws of life and death will apply to her differently, and she’ll be free of the limitations of her anatomy. Both his girls will.

He didn’t expect to love them when he helped his wife to make them, and his love is, perhaps, not the clean, uncomplicated love he sees from other parents, is more proprietary than parental, but they’re his girls, his creations and greatest achievements, and he loves them, no matter what it may look like from the outside. He’s proud of them for living long enough to reach the coronation, and he’s proud of Aven, functionally newborn as she is, for already figuring out the best way to betray him.

Fingers curl over his shoulder and grip him tight. It’s not the tightness of someone trying to show their strength, causing pain on purpose: it’s the tightness of someone who doesn’t understand their own strength, doesn’t know yet what it means to have strength. The worm moon hangs in the sky above them. Winter is waning, all those Jack Frosts preparing to lay their mantles down and go about their ordinary lives until it comes around again, all those potential Incarnates growing weaker by the moment, with no means of understanding the why or the how of it. Their attendants will do what they can to educate them, but even Roland, alchemist and scholar, finds their self-regulating structure difficult to follow. He doesn’t understand what form those preparations will take, or what lessons she has to learn. This is all a mystery to him, one of the last in the world, which has been picked apart and rebuilt so many times for the pleasure and convenience of men like him.

The fingers dig in deeper, tug him back. He keeps his feet planted even as his chest tilts, pulled inexorably toward the person behind him. He wants to turn. He wants to see her, see her awake and in motion, see whether she has Ariadne’s eyes. Melanie does. Melanie looks so much like her mother that it hurts sometimes, even if Ariadne was never that pale. Ariadne was a real woman, human, flesh and bone where his Mel is stone and snow. Aven, for all that they floated together in the womb, was woven from different materials, corn husks and roses. Both of them have hearts of thorn and briar. They’ll know each other when they come together.

Trevor looks past him, frowns a little. “I think I have to go now,” he says, almost deferentially. “This isn’t a place for outsiders. This is a family matter. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Cosgrove. I promise, I’m going to take excellent care of your daughter.”

Then he turns and walks away, and Roland is alone with his creation.

He’s been alone with his creations, either singular or in unwitting tandem, for the better part of seventeen years, and there is no fear as Aven turns him to face her. She’s raided Melanie’s closet, is dressed in one of Melanie’s favorite sweaters, and they might as well be the same girl save for the hair. No matter how often they tried, he and Ariadne had never been able to convince their models to match. The seasons always came through, one way or another.

Summer is for sun-bleached bones drying at the bottom of a canyon, for color stolen by the heat and not yet replaced by char. Winter is for nights as black as the feathers of a raven’s wing, for color dampened and overwhelmed by the cold and not yet brought back to blossom. He looks at Aven and he understands two things:

That she has her mother’s eyes, deep and drowning blue, beautiful as anything, and exactly like Melanie’s. In their eyes and their features, the two girls are perfectly alike. Dip one in bleach and the other in ink and they could trade places with no one in the world the wiser. Not even him, and for a moment, it’s hard to convince his horrified and hammering heart that he’s truly looking at his younger child, that Aven has been awakened by the coming of the crown and risen from her bier.

She is shaped exactly like her sister. Melanie has had the advantages of a life outside the lab, of running and climbing and seeing the world through her own eyes. Aven has had the advantages of focused alchemy, of electrical currents to keep her muscles from atrophy and machines to move her according to the proper design. Of the two of them, she is his Galatea, but he is not her sculptor, for every choice he made with her form was based on Melanie, on the things she did and chose to do. He has made her in the image of her sister, bright mirror, now looking at him with gravity and consideration, but not a hint of compassion or care. She doesn’t love him, and that’s a good thing, because this is the second thing he understands:

He’s going to die tonight. He will never see the coronation, never know who claims the crown, and somehow that’s the only part of this that pains him, the only part that gives him pause. He started this story: he picked up his pen and wrote the opening lines of his own volition. There would be only one potential Incarnate in this shitty little city with its shitty little slogans—“Keep Portland Weird,” as if these people have ever been half so strange, half so counterculture as their own imaginations—if he had chosen a different path of research, or if Ariadne had suggested another way. He did this. He made this. It seems only fair that he should be allowed to see it through.

But then, Ariadne made it as well, did as much of the math as he did, worked out as many of the calculations, and when the time came, when their incubators and eggs had failed, she was the one who had proposed a more traditional methodology, who had willingly nestled their two greatest works beneath her breastbone and fed them on her own body as much as on mercury and mistletoe. Ariadne carries as much of the praise and as much of the blame as he does, and she didn’t get to see it through. So maybe this is just a way of evening the scales, of putting things the way they should have been all along.

Maybe he never had a chance.

“Hello, Daddy,” says Aven, voice raspy with disuse and slightly deeper than her sister’s, unshaped by a lifetime of pitching her words higher than necessary, trying to make herself seem feminine and harmless. He’s never understood the need of women in this culture to seem smaller than they are, but he knows it comes from the outside: everything around them is telling them, every hour of every day, that whatever space they occupy is stolen from someone who could use it better, spend it more wisely, benefit it more. Even his Ariadne hadn’t been immune, and she could have been a queen of the alchemical paths, if only their master’s work had progressed a little more quickly, if only she’d had access to the wonders of the Impossible City. Hearing Aven speak is like hearing Melanie with none of that nonsense and cultural baggage piled upon her head, and he glories in it, even as he hears his ending in her tone.

“Hello, Aven,” he says.

She cocks her head to the side, almost insectile as she studies him. “Why did you name me that?” she asks. “My attendant tells me that my twin’s name is Melanie. Greek. Means ‘darkness.’ Aven is Irish. They don’t match. They don’t go together. They should go together.”

“But they do,” he says, as carefully as he can. She’s going to kill him. There’s no reason to antagonize her and speed the process along. “‘Aven’ means ‘radiance.’ You were always going to be the sun to her moon, and we chose your names accordingly.”

“We?”

“Your mother did much of the work. She was more interested in the symbolism of words and names, had a better eye for it. We were still trying to decide on your middle names when she died, which is why you don’t have any. It seemed unreasonable to give you something without consulting her, and well.” He shrugs. “She wasn’t available to be consulted. I did the best I could with what I had.”

What he’d had was an unprecedented situation, a dead wife and a dead baby who nonetheless needed his full attention, while his living daughter also needed his full focus if he wanted to keep her alive. And he had wanted that, very badly, still wanted that more than almost anything. Keeping the girls from dying has been an intense amount of work, and if he’d been happy to see either one of them dead, he wouldn’t have been at the March house, demanding the return of his daughter after he’d seen that video.

(Where, exactly, had he gone wrong? He’s always done his best to take care of Melanie, to make sure she felt like she had as much freedom as her broken, breaking heart allowed, has been very careful to draw the lines between parental restrictions and the restrictions imposed by her condition. He started letting her go out on dates with Harry when they were only fourteen, almost a full year before any of the other parents were allowing their girls to go out unchaperoned. And yes, part of that had been knowing that her body wouldn’t allow her to cross certain arbitrary lines, that her virtue, such as it was, would remain intact until the coronation, if she lived to see one, but he still let her go. She was supposed to trust him, to believe he had her best interests at heart, to come to him when she had a problem or a concern or when something happened, like her heart ceasing to beat in her chest, not run away with the boy who looked at her the way a puppy looks at a biscuit.)

Aven makes a small, inquiring sound that he can’t help reading as displeasure, and Roland stands a little straighter. He never wanted to be the villain of the piece, not where his girls were concerned, not where the world was concerned. He wanted only what any true alchemist wants, to push the limitations of human knowledge forward to a better, brighter place, to understand the inner workings of the universe and, perhaps, to claim some of those inner workings for his own. So he wanted power. So what? Ariadne wanted that as well, died wanting that, died with the demand that he finish what they’d started on her lips. He can’t be blamed for being what the world made of him, any more, he supposes, than they can be blamed for being what he sculpted them to be.

His girls. His masterpieces. His children. Reed’s cuckoos may have been more powerful than his girls, designed to embody a universe while his stood only for the seasons it contained, but he has known them as father and creator both: has kept them close and watched them grow, and he believes, truly believes, that they will be stronger for that.

“You let her wake and walk,” says Aven, and she either makes no effort to conceal or doesn’t yet recognize the venom in her own voice. Oh, she’s angry with him, this spun-sugar sunshine girl of his own creation; she’s furious.

She’ll figure it out soon, if she doesn’t already know.

“Why her and not me?” She leans closer, her eyes fixed on his, and he can’t keep himself from cataloging the little differences. Melanie, pale as she is from both her confinement and her natural connection to the washed-out winter, has at least seen the sun in her lifetime: she has a few faint freckles on the crests of her cheeks, the bridge of her nose. She has a small scar just above her lip on the right-hand side, as faded out as a sanded mark on a piece of beechwood, from where she fell off the swings and busted her lip against the blacktop in first grade.

She’s walked in the world and the world has walked in her, and Aven has never had that, and he understands her anger, he truly does, even as he wishes he’d arrived home before that Corn Jenny boy, before her ears had been filled with a terrible, unforgiving poison that painted the situation as simple and him as the villain. If he’d only thought a moment more about what Melanie’s collapse might mean for Aven before rushing off after the teens, he might have been able to shift this story along entirely different lines.