Page 35 of Seasonal Fears

“Okay, so they’re called ‘Jenny’ because—?”

“Because I refuse to be a ‘Jill Frost’ or whatever bullshit gendered name they’d slap on my position if they tried to divide things into boys and girls, and as far as I’m concerned, all names are gender-neutral. Ever notice how no one bats an eye when you call your girlfriend ‘Mel,’ even though that’s usually a man’s name, but no one calls you ‘Harriet’?”

“I’d knock the block off of anyone who tried it,” he growls, then stops, startled by his own vehemence.

“There, you see?” asks Jack. “You call me ‘Jack’ and her ‘Mel’ without batting an eye, and you never wonder if you’re insulting our femininity, but if someone trod too close to insulting your masculinity, you’d be on them in a second. So we stick with ‘Corn Jenny’ in part because it’s tradition, and in part because it makes us happy to call the guys who get called to serve the summer by a name that makes them wince. It’s a man’s world, little buddy. Leave us the small pleasures we can salvage from the ruins.”

Harry feels like he ought to be offended somehow, and then he feels like he’s being silly even considering getting offended by something said by a twelve-year-old who may or may not actually be thirteen. Either way, she’s not even in high school yet. “Got it. sorry.”

“It’s fine. This is a lot, and it doesn’t all make sense from the outside, and you’re way, way on the inside while still looking at the outside of things, trying to figure it all out. Anyway, blame the French.”

“What? Why?”

“I mean, blaming the French is always a good idea, but in this case, we’re doing it because a lot of these concepts made their way into English by way of French, and French is a heavily gendered language. So everything got a ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ label slapped on it, and the seasonal ascendants all got common names in whatever language worked best for the area. Honestly, if we’re really getting into the semantics of it all, it’s sort of weird that it’s ‘Corn Jenny’ and not ‘Harvest Jack’ or something else like that. All the rest of us are Jacks.”

“Huh,” says Harry. This is interesting, it really is, but he could have this conversation with Melanie in the room. He glances at the bathroom door, confirming that it’s still closed, then looks back to Jack. “So I don’t like Melanie because she’s my parallel?”

“No. If anything, you should have been more inclined to avoid her. Not hate her, but keep her at a decent remove. She’s the opposition, after all. The fact that the two of you decided to bond instead of battling each other just means you’re going to be stronger going into the coronation that’s coming.”

“I thought a coronation was an event. Like a wedding or a graduation. Not a competition.”

“I mean, it is, at the end. This is sort of like … sort of like the reception before an art opening, or the part of the birthday party where everyone’s still milling around talking about things other than presents and cake. This is the floor show. The disaster movie already in progress.” Jack sits up, looking at him gravely. “There will be an event. When the two still standing claim their crowns, there will be an event. The coronation started as soon as the old Incarnates died, and the new ones began the process of competing for their place.”

“I’m not competing for anything,” says Harry.

“Sure you are. At this stage, you compete just by staying in the running. That’s part of what makes you stronger when you’ve bound to your parallel. You can do all sorts of things that would normally disqualify you for being too connected to another season.”

“What, like, Melanie eats ice cream and she can’t be the winter anymore?”

“Not quite, but right neighborhood. More like Melanie buys some flower seeds and puts them in a pot, and she’s disqualified because she’s engaging in summer activities. And then she’s dead, because the only thing that’s keeping her moving is the sheer volume of winter she has crammed into that ruined honeycomb she calls a heart.”

“Seasons don’t need anything as plebian as organs,” murmurs Harry, and Jack casts him an approving look, like a teacher who’s relieved to see one of her pupils finally catching on.

“It’s all about the symbolism from here on out, buddy,” she says. “Symbolism and murder.”

Harry looks alarmed. “I don’t actually plan to kill anyone.”

“If you’re lucky, you won’t have to. The other candidates will already be eliminating each other, all across the continent, and then hunting each other down so they can eliminate some more. If we’re lucky and you keep moving—and moving doesn’t lead you smack into the path of one of the other candidates, silver sickle in hand and harvest on their mind—you might make it to the labyrinth without spilling any blood at all.” She looks at her hand then, studying her nails with casual nonchalance. “It’s a lot more likely that there’s going to be killing, of course. It didn’t used to work that way.”

“So why does it have to work that way now?”

She lowers her hand. “Because the only way to eliminate the competition is to either kill them or convince them to renounce their claim on the crown, in so many words, and really mean it. This isn’t something you can trick someone into doing, or do by accident. You have to understand that you’re severing yourself from your season.”

“Then we do that!” says Harry, suddenly excited. He sits up straighter. “We give up the crown and we go home and everything’s normal again.”

Jack looks at him with pity. “I know you’re smarter than this. What part of ‘your girlfriend’s heart gave out and she’s been dead for two days’ isn’t getting through your head? Mel claims her crown or she’s done. Finished, finite, no more Melanie. There’s no other way for her.”

“A transplant…”

“Wouldn’t save her, because she’s already gone.” Jack shakes her head. “She’s been gone since she fell down, since the winter in her bones started to uncurl and assert itself. All she can do now is win. You can sever if you want to. We’ll miss you. And you’ll die too, of course. Now that the summer has you, you win it all or you die.”

Harry looks at her blankly, and she manages, barely, not to laugh.

“I’ve had to explain the same things to you four or five times now, while Mel hears it once and starts asking new questions,” says Jack. “It’s not because she’s paying more attention than you are. It’s because she’s closer to coronation than you are. All her veils got torn away when her heart stopped beating.”

“I don’t … I can’t…”

“Harry.” Jack looks at him and sighs. “We had this conversation last night. I swear we did. I explained everything to you, even though I’d already done it at the diner, and in the car, and at the botanical gardens. Melanie’s father was an alchemist, and she lived with him for seventeen years. Even with him trying to hide the true nature of his work and her origins from her, the background radiation of that house was priming her to accept all of this as the real world, and not some sort of delusion. You, though. You lived in the ‘real’ world that whole time. Alchemy, sorcery, seasonal monarchs, they’re all the same thing to you. They’re fairy tales. All this stuff sounds like nonsense, because in the life you were living, it was nonsense. You’re acclimating, but you’re acclimating slowly. That makes sense. You’re a real person. Melanie adapted more quickly because she’s not.”