Page 36 of Seasonal Fears

“Not a person?”

“Not real. I mean, she exists, she’s here, she became the person she was going to be as much despite her father as because of him, and now that she is, it’s going to take work to make her not, the same as it would for anyone. But she didn’t start out real. She’s a skin horse, and you’ve loved her into being something bigger and more concrete than she would have been entirely on her own.”

“Skin horse…?” Harry’s head is spinning. Jack says these things like they make sense, and then she moves along, heading for the next thing she wants to say, not pausing long enough to see if he’s following her. It makes him feel like he’s the kid in this conversation, and she’s the almost-adult. It makes his brain hurt. He wants her to stop.

“Did you ever read The Velveteen Rabbit?” asks Jack. When Harry shakes his head, she sighs. “Terrible book, absolutely awful for kids, never let kids anywhere near it, it just scrambles them up inside. Anyway, it says toys are alive, and they do stuff when their children aren’t around.”

“Like Toy Story,” says Harry, pleased to finally be following something she’s trying to say.

“That’s probably where the idea for those movies came from, yeah,” says Jack. “Anyway, in the book, when the velveteen rabbit is all new and perfect and shiny as anything, the boy who owns him also has a rocking horse covered in real horse skin. That’s how you know it’s classic children’s literature. When there’s just straight-up taxidermy in the nursery. Anyway, they call the rocking horse ‘the Skin Horse,’ because that’s not fucked-up and creepy or anything.”

“And because the Skin Horse has been in the nursery for so very, very long, he knows things none of the other toys know,” says Mel. Harry looks over his shoulder and sees her in the bathroom doorway, damp and dripping and flushed red from the heat of the shower, a towel wrapped around her body and her hair pulled over one shoulder. Now that he’s paying attention, he can smell the steam and the cheap hotel soap hanging in the air. He doesn’t know how long she’s been listening. “Things like the fact that children grow up and put their toys aside, and more children always come. And he knows about being real. He teaches the velveteen rabbit, because even though they’re just toys, toys can love as well as real things can. He says ‘Real isn’t how you’re made, it’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.’” She shakes her head. “I always thought that was one of the most beautiful things in any book, and one of the most dangerous ones, too. I tried to love my dolls so much they’d be Real and never leave me, and it never worked, so what did that say about me? Was I not good enough to love something into Realness?”

Harry blinks. This isn’t a secret, not exactly, because he doesn’t think they have any secrets left from one another, but it’s still something he’s never heard before, and he also thought they didn’t have anything new to say to each other. They’re not boring and he’s never been bored, but they’re in that long, comfortable middle that comes to any good relationship, whether romantic or platonic, where they know each other completely enough that there are very few surprises.

Or that’s where he thought they were, at least. Maybe there are more surprises here than he knew.

“Reality doesn’t work that way,” says Jack, with apparently sincere apology in her tone. “The person who wrote that book was—”

“Another alchemist?” asks Melanie sharply. She hasn’t been taking her pills since they fled Portland, Harry realizes; he knows she got them when she raided her bedroom, has seen them in her bag when she opened it to get out fresh clothes, snacks, or a hairbrush, but he hasn’t seen her swallow a single one. Her mood, normally stabilized and smoothed out by the sedatives that keep her heart from racing, is returning to its natural state.

“Yes,” admits Jack. “She was speaking of the creation of alchemical servants, the same way Shelley was, just less … fleshily.”

“Has anyone ever written a damn book for reasons other than encoding secret alchemical knowledge for future students?” demands Harry. “Because this seems like a really inefficient way to run a school. ‘No textbooks, kids, but here are nineteen children’s novels and a couple of classic works of science fiction that might teach you some basic principles if you squint hard enough.’”

Jack actually cracks a smile at that. “Most books weren’t written by alchemists,” she says, in what she probably intends as a reassuring tone. She doesn’t quite get what she’s aiming for, but at least she’s trying. “All literature is a form of alchemy, turning letters into words into messages from the past, like chucking bottles into the tide. So by that definition, all authors are alchemists, and ought to change their titles.”

Harry huffs. Jack holds up a hand to quiet him.

“But in the sense you’re talking about, no, not all authors are alchemists. Most alchemists these days go into either academia or medicine, as places where they’ll have access to the resources their work requires. But they used to be better able to keep labs in their basements and do something else with their evenings, and they wrote books because it was a way to keep knowledge circulating without getting stoned to death in the village square. Also because it let them influence the way non-alchemists saw the world. And non-alchemists will always outnumber alchemists.”

“Okay, and?” asks Harry.

“And convincing another alchemist that you’re right about the way things work and he’s wrong about it is borderline impossible,” says Jack. “Alchemists are stubborn. You sort of have to be when you’re trying to distill moonlight into a liquid that you can pour into a river to light it up at night, instead of just buying a bunch of glowsticks like a normal person. They don’t do ‘practical’ when they can do ‘ridiculous but impressive’ instead. And since the universe runs at least partially due to the way people think it runs…”

Mel walks over to the beds, still wrapped in her cheap white motel towel. The smell of cheap soap gets stronger, but Harry doesn’t mind; not when it’s mixed with the smell of hot skin and clean water. She hasn’t stopped to gasp for breath and clutch the walls in two days, and she just took a shower without leaving the door open in case she fell down and needed help. That’s a precious enough thing to be worth a little soap in the air.

“That’s why forces get stuck embodying over and over again after it happens for the first time, right?” asks Mel. “Because people believe they do.”

“Exactly,” says Jack, sounding a little smug. She likes it when they follow where she’s trying, in her own abstracted way, to lead them. “The moon turns into a person because the alchemists demand it, they write a bunch of books where the moon’s a person, and then all the people in the world who aren’t alchemists believe that sometimes, the moon’s a person. And the weight of all that belief, the conviction, actually changes the universe.”

Harry flops backward on the bed. “This is making my head hurt,” he complains.

“So stop asking questions,” says Jack.

He pushes himself up onto his elbows and frowns at her. “I thought you wanted us to understand all this.”

“Not really,” she says, with a shrug. “If you can accept that Melanie’s heart has stopped beating and won’t start again unless she claims the crown of winter, and you need to do the same with the crown of summer if you want to stay with her, then my job is done. If you’ll fight the other candidates when they present themselves to you, and you’ll avoid them when you don’t think you can defeat them, then you know everything I need you to.”

“I don’t think I can kill someone,” says Harry. “I just don’t … No. I don’t think I can.”

“Some of them won’t be looking to kill you,” says Jack. “The last coronation in Europe, the girl who won the summer did it with six kills at the very end, and seventeen Pokémon battles. She carried a big binder of cards with her everywhere she went and she challenged her competition to fight her for the crown. None of them wanted to kill an eleven-year-old girl, so they went along with it, and she didn’t tell them until they were renouncing their crowns that she’d gone to the Pokémon world championships the year before. Didn’t win, but came in second. She’s a badass, and if I were a Summer Ascendant, I would have booked it for Europe the minute I heard about her. Serving that Summer Queen would have been way better than serving the sleeping one.”

“Hey,” says Harry, feeling obscurely stung by the idea that Jack, who isn’t Summer-tied at all, would have fled the continent rather than stay and work with the monarchy she had. Somewhere along the way, he’s started believing this is actually happening. It’s too ridiculous for him to have come up with on his own, and too elaborate to be some sort of fever-induced fantasy, and too imperfect to be wish fulfillment. A Melanie who isn’t going to drop dead on him at any moment is basically his dream. A Melanie who dies every summer and doesn’t wake up until the fall is a bit too cruel for him to have imagined.

“It didn’t happen. You can’t change a season after it’s been set, and no, I don’t know how normal Incarnates and Ascendants are chosen. Your ice-girl there was made to play her part, but that’s about as far as it goes. You happened all on your own.”

“I always knew you were a natural wonder,” says Mel, and leans over to kiss his cheek. Her lips are cold. Her lips are always cold these days, even when she’s fresh out of the shower and gently steaming in the open air. She rests her damp head against his shoulder and looks to Jack. “So we don’t need to get anything that’s happening to us, we just need to deal with it, is that what you’re saying?”