Page 4 of Seasonal Fears

The ground is too soft.

He knows that even as he hurries across the lawn, eschewing the paved pathway intended for passenger use. The ground is too soft. It sucks and tugs at the heels of his Italian leather shoes, trying to pull them off his feet, trying to pull him under. It wants to keep him, this ground. It wants to have him, in a way he can’t articulate and will not allow. He hasn’t made it this far by giving in to the senseless demands of soil.

He’s not a worm. He’s not even a man. He’s a god, has been a god for more than three hundred years, since the day he achieved and seized his own ascension, and like any god, he refuses to go down this easily. This isn’t his fault. This isn’t fair. This isn’t what he agreed to.

But the world has been changing while he’s been standing still; the seasons no longer follow the exact pattern he remembers. So the ground is too soft, and when he steps onto a patch of what should be safely frozen grass, his foot sinks almost an inch into the muck before he can pull back, the dried-out fronds of last year’s growth wrapping tight around his shoe. They remember him, somehow, even though he’s never stepped on them before, and this isn’t fair, this isn’t right, Reed promised—

But according to his connections in the alchemical world, Reed is gone, like Asphodel before him. Like Milo before her. Like all those temporary, transitory people still tied to the yoke of the year, and not standing at the helm. Reed is gone, and most of the American Alchemical Congress along with him, all save those few masters who had failed to attend the meeting that destroyed their elders and, for the most part, betters. Their promises hold no weight any longer. America is defenseless.

He is defenseless, and the ground is too soft, and the thaw is coming. He’s been delaying this moment for literally decades, and now, when it’s finally arriving, he has nothing and no one to hide behind.

William Monroe has always been, essentially at the base of himself, a coward. When he realized none of the boys he went to school with could hear the snowflakes singing as they fell, he kept that knowledge to himself, not out of a desire for power or the strength that comes from having secrets, but out of the intrinsic understanding that to be different, to be in any way other, was to make himself a target. He was a fox surrounded by wolves, and like all successful foxes, he learned to make himself small, to play down the degree to which his very body was a red flag, his very presence a reminder of blood on the snow.

He carried that same understanding to the coronation, seeming small, seeming soft, until he was ready to strike, and then he struck, again and again, without mercy, to win his godhood.

All those lessons, though, all those years; all those alliances forged with larger predators, monsters who understood what it meant to move, camouflaged in bars of light and shadow, through the edges of the forest; all those hard-won battles mean nothing in the here and now, not when the ground is this soft. Not when the ice is retreating. He was supposed to have more time. He was supposed to have another two weeks, at least, before the thaw began!

He walks faster, and his feet hit the solid, safe concrete of the runway, gray asphalt under the hard soles of his shoes, mud smearing away and leaving a trail behind him by which any predator could track his progress, but there are no predators here. None except for William himself, and he’s never been a hunter. He prefers the easy ambush, the long wait before a full stomach, and the lack of danger.

He’s never had the nerve for taking risks he was able to avoid, and the more time he’s had to solidify his place at the center of his own little universe, the fewer risks he’s had to shoulder on his own. The symmetry of it has always appealed. It still appeals now.

The plane is waiting that will take him away from here, away from this undefended country with its too-soft ground, carry him to the sweet safety of the antipodes, where the cold still reigns. He’ll miss the snow—it snows so rarely in the parts of Australia he claims as his home—and he supposes he’ll have to renegotiate his treaties with the Australian Alchemical Congress once they realize he intends to supplant their pretender of a Winter Queen and stay on in her place, but he’s sure they’ll see the logic of his requests, the reasons he has to stay in ascension. This is so much better than the old system, the one he inherited from his predecessor. Change is another word for chaos, and chaos disrupts the best possible plans.

He’s just grateful that those damn cuckoos of Reed’s pulled their little coup in the middle of the summer, and in the presence of the corn. He’s known about the situation for months. He had time to prepare.

He could have hurried, could have done this sooner—should have done this sooner, if he’d been on top of things, but he’s not used to having deadlines anymore, didn’t really think through what the change to the balance of things was going to do until it was too late to evade. Still, he had the bulk of the summer and all of the fall to brace himself for what he knew all along was going to be a hard spring.

It just wasn’t supposed to get here so fast. Not with the worm moon still hanging ripe and restless in the sky, not with the hunger moon so close behind them. All the meteorologists he’d spoken to had given him a few more weeks to get things in order, and only the fact that he fell asleep at his desk last night gave him the warning to make it this far.

The plane that will take him from this rural little strip of nothing to the hub where he’ll transfer to his plane for Melbourne appears on the runway up ahead. No security here, no invasive scans or troublesome examinations of his luggage; his are the privileges of power, and no one would dare. William Monroe rushes across the strip, past the silently waiting man in pilot’s whites, and all but throws himself up the narrow stairway to the open door.

“Come on, man,” he shouts over his shoulder to the pilot. William is a man of many skills, some developed out of necessity and others out of boredom as the years marched by, but he’s never learned to fly a plane. Too many powerful people have died because they decided they were better than the sky.

He is better than the sky, has two of the four winds under his dominion by right and two more by conquest, but that doesn’t mean taunting the oversized. Let people who still understand what it is to be properly humble control the planes, and he’ll ride along, safe and protected and shepherded by the skills of others, as he always has.

The pilot, who has been flying Mr. Monroe’s private plane for almost a decade, yet has never been referred to by name, manages not to sneer as he follows his employer into the overly opulent cabin, where two women in uniforms stolen straight from the nineteen seventies wait with cocktails in their hands. They shoot the pilot sidelong, sharp-eyed looks, which he acknowledges with a nod. This job demeans them all, but it pays well, and sometimes that’s what matters.

His copilot is already strapped into her seat. She avoids contact with Mr. Monroe, who sees her as a glorified flight attendant, and cannot understand why she refuses to make herself equally available to his wandering hands. “Ready?” she asks.

“He’s in a hurry today,” he says, beginning to run down his part of the preflight checklist. It is shorter than it should be, every step that can be taken before their single passenger arrives long since taken, to minimize the amount of time Mr. Monroe spends on the plane.

“This is your captain speaking,” he says, flicking on the intercom. “We have an approved flight path between here and Minneapolis, with little turbulence and clear skies predicted. Mr. Monroe, please take your seat. Crew, please secure cabin for takeoff.”

Mr. Monroe will sit, he knows, but won’t bother with his seatbelt. The man seems to think of himself as invincible, and while he knows it would mean his job, he’s sometimes tempted to steer into turbulence, just to bounce his employer off the walls a few times and make him understand that money doesn’t grant immunity from physics. He’ll never do it: his flight crew doesn’t deserve that. But oh, he wants to.

The ground crew has sent up the okay. He turns the engine on, moves the stick into position, and begins making the long, slow turn that will allow them to accelerate down the runway until they reach velocity and soar away.

The plane responds easily, even eagerly, and they’re away, gliding down the runway, gathering speed, gathering momentum, finally reaching the point at which braking, even in a modern aircraft, becomes difficult enough to border on the impossible. Physics has the wheel now. They’ll be obeying her demands.

His copilot reaches over, clutches his arm, and he sees what she sees.

“Mr. Monroe,” he says, almost automatically. “We’re going to be making a hard turn and hopefully stopping. There is a woman on the runway.”

The door to the cockpit, which would be locked and bolted if they were flying commercial, to prevent exactly what is about to happen, bangs open, and their sole passenger rushes into the space. All the color has drained from his cheeks: he looks like nothing so much as a wax figure of Santa Claus. “No,” he says, somewhere between a moan and a shout. “No, the spring’s not here. The season still holds!”

Pilot and copilot alike look at him like he’s been dropped in from another story, something far more dangerous and dramatic than a routine flight. He barely notices them. All his attention is fixed on the woman on the runway.

Diana.