Page 46 of Seasonal Fears

“You won’t necessarily pick up on every Corn Jenny who crosses your path, because it would be just too much white noise and a lot of them already belong to other potential Summers, which blunts the signal, but you’ll know if you get close to another Summer.”

“What will that feel like?”

Jack looks frustrated. “I don’t know. I’m not trying to bullshit you or confuse you for my own amusement—I literally don’t know. I’m not Summer-bound. When I get near another Jack Frost, it feels like someone’s dropped an ice cube down the back of my shirt, and when I get near a Winter, it feels like … like…” She pauses, expression going just a little beatific. “It feels like ice cream on Christmas morning. Everything is cold, but in the best possible way. It feels like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. It feels like living in a Rankin-Bass special full of talking reindeer and singing snowmen, where your parents never hit you or sold your birthday presents for drug money.”

“That’s, uh. That’s a really specific feeling.”

Jack shrugs. “Maybe so, but that’s what it feels like to me. Being in the presence of the Winter is like being home, for me. For Mel, it’s going to be more like biting down on foil. For you, too, probably. Didn’t you feel anything when those jerks broke into the motel room?”

Harry thinks back. “I felt … too hot, just before they threw that car engine through our window. So hot I was afraid I’d burn Mel’s fingers if she tried to touch me. I always feel warm. It’s never been like that before.”

“That was the Summer in you reacting to the presence of a challenger. It’ll get stronger and stronger as there are fewer of you still in contention for the crown. Right now, there are probably, oh, two or three dozen of you across the continent, every one of them working their way toward wherever the final labyrinth has decided to manifest—Don’t ask right now.” She holds up one small hand, gesturing for him to be patient. “It would just confuse you, and we’ll get there soon enough. Anyway, if there’s a potential Summer in Iowa, he’s going to have to clear the state, and then fight his way through Nebraska, Colorado, and Arizona, just to hit California. So he’s not bothering you. Odds are good he dies on the journey, and you never know his name.”

“I already killed somebody, and I didn’t learn his name,” says Harry, and there’s a wobble in his voice that Jack doesn’t like, a certain element of disconnection and uncertainty. He’s got a better grounding in his season than he did before the motel, but that doesn’t change the man beneath the manifestation. He’s still the person he was before the Summer started coiling through him, and that’s not going to change.

Melanie, though … where Melanie’s concerned, Jack’s not so sure. There’s never been an alchemical vessel for one of the seasons before. It’s been done with other concepts, the Doctrine of Ethos and a few of the Virtues (which means some asshole alchemist has probably embodied a few of the Vices as well, squirrelling them away somewhere in catacombs to wait for the opportunity to ruin everyone’s day) and it’s worked, for the most part, but from what she knows, it took multiple tries before it worked, every single time. So will this work? On the first try?

She supposes they’re going to find out. One way or another, they’re going to find out. But will the person Harry knows survive the process? That’s the big question. After that’s answered, they can move on to asking themselves whether Melanie’s an already-broken vessel that’s going to shatter when she places the crown on her head.

If that happens, they’re screwed. Another coronation will start immediately, and this time there won’t be a whole crop of candidates waiting for their chance at the crown. If she has any doubts about Melanie’s suitability, she should be undermining her, should be setting her up to fail for the sake of her season.

But Harry’s Corn Jenny never came. Harry doesn’t have another attendant to keep him from getting killed. And he collapsed the same time Mel did. Jack isn’t completely sure—she tries to sound sure when she’s talking to the candidates, because she knows she’s young, and she knows she looks like she should be clutching a teddy bear and planning a slumber party, not trying to orchestrate the coronation of two of the primal forces of creation—but she thinks if Mel goes down, so does he. They’re running in parallel. That gives them certain advantages, and faster access to the deep parts of their prospective seasons. It also means that what hurts one of them can hurt them both.

Losing Mel costs them Harry. Losing Harry seems cruel to the boy, who thought a week ago that he was going to be going on campus tours, and signing up for his first classes at whatever college he decides to attend, and planning a life that’s not an option for him anymore.

Poor guy. Jack smiles, lopsided and reassuring.

“You didn’t need to know his name,” she says. “He was an opportunist. He probably hopped on the first bus when he heard a coronation was being called, made for the nearest small town with a big highway, because he figured a candidate would come through. He wanted to force a confrontation as fast as he could, and when he got one, it was more than he expected.”

“Why was he wearing a sweater?” It’s been bothering him. He never gets cold because he has the summer in his bones. That other boy did, too. So why did he get cold?

Jack doesn’t seem thrown by the question. If anything, she looks reassured that it’s something simple this time. “He wasn’t as far along as you are. That’s the other thing—every one of you is going to be connected to your season by different degrees. You’re very connected to the Summer right now, and that means you don’t get cold. Once it’s officially spring, you’ll start leaving little flowers where you walk, and all that other frustrating summer stuff. It’s not the easiest gig. Or so I hear.”

“So you hear?”

“During true summer, after the spring ends but before the autumn starts, I’m a normal little girl. I can get sunstroke, I can get older, I need to do a lot of things that are one hundred percent optional during true winter. Winter, I’m just shy of invincible. Until the spring starts, even you can’t really touch me. Spring and fall, I’m tougher than a normal kid, but I’m either waxing or waning, and I’m not taking many chances. And in the summer, I take no chances, at all. I never met the last Summer Queen. She was asleep from long before I was born until the coronation started, and it wasn’t worth risking my life to try waking her up.”

“Huh,” says Harry. Then: “I stabbed that guy.”

“I know. I saw.”

“Melanie … Melanie didn’t stab the guy who attacked her.”

“I saw that too.”

“How did she do that?” He looks at her with the lost expression of a child abandoned by their trusted adults, and for the first time, Jack feels like he’s truly present, truly listening, not just going along with things because nothing else made more sense at the time. He’s committed now, whether or not he ever realized he wasn’t before, and that’s going to be a good thing soon.

That might be enough to save them.

“You’re closer to Summer than the boy who attacked you was, but Melanie’s … Melanie’s almost all the way to Winter. She could probably walk the scarecrow trail right now if we knew the way to the labyrinth, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.” Jack grimaces. “Part of the point of putting a human face on the seasons is having it be, well, human. And if she sinks too deep into Winter without someone pulling her back, she won’t be human at all anymore.”

Harry starts to reply, then pauses and sags into himself, looking at his chapped hands again before he mutters, “You keep throwing around terms I don’t understand like I should understand them, and it makes me feel like you think I’m stupid.”

“No, I don’t think you’re stupid,” says Jack, and she sounds almost gentle, maybe for the first time since he’s met her. She’s trying to talk to him like he’s a person whose opinion matters. It’s a nice change. It’s one he wishes she’d been able to make a little earlier, when it would have made more of a difference. “I think you’re unprepared, and it’s not my fault, but it’s my problem. Mel’s also unprepared, because her father was keeping us from getting to her. I don’t know why your Corn Jenny never came for you.”

She has her suspicions, but she wants to keep them to herself for now, until she knows whether she’s on the right track. All they’d do now is muddy waters already so muddied that they’ve turned practically opaque. So she smiles at Harry, trying to seem encouraging, when she wants to hurry this along as much as she can.

“Okay,” says Harry, gathering himself. “So we have to keep Mel from giving way all the way to Winter, even though she has to be the best candidate it has if we’re going to win these crowns you keep talking about, and we have to do it while assholes keep showing up and trying to kill us. So how do we do that?”