Page 5 of Seasonal Fears

She looks exactly as she did on the day they ascended, dark of hair and dark of eye, wearing a white dress that once would have made her seem like a maiden of the spring, and now resembles nothing so much as a winding shroud. She isn’t holding up her arms, isn’t making any dramatic gesture of defiance or triumph: she’s just standing there like the risen dead, silent as the grave, unmoving in the face of the plane that barrels down on her.

William has had centuries of his own way, unfettered by the woman who was meant to be his opposite and equal.

“Turn, damn you!” he howls. “Turn!”

He lunges for the stick, and the pilot, unsure of what to do in the face of a woman clearly committing suicide by airplane, is too slow to stop him. The plane, which is tiny by the standards of the great commercial jets, accelerates.

It’s small compared to its brothers, but it’s big enough to do the job. Diana dies without a sound, smeared across the tarmac.

William’s heart stops beating at the same moment Diana’s does, and both of them are gone.

Zib had more experience with wells than Avery did. Her father had been born on a farm, and his parents still owned the property. She spent every summer with them, running feral through the fields of corn and strawberries, getting twigs tangled in her hair and stealing warm eggs out from under broody hens. She felt around until her hands found the handle on the well’s side, and then she began to crank, reeling in the rope and the bucket at its end.

When it finally came into view, it was sleek and silver, with not a hint of rust or tarnish, and filled with water so clear and perfect that Zib knew even without tasting it how sweet it would be. She reached for it with shaking hands, as the others walked up behind her.

“This is a wishing well,” said Niamh, sounding pleased. “They’re generally harmless, and not home to misplaced river hags or unspeakable curses.”

“They grant wishes?” asked Avery, as Zib pulled the bucket toward herself.

“No, not at all,” said Niamh. “What a queer notion, a well granting wishes! Might as well ask for grass to set the table, or clouds to control the weather. No, wishing wells are wells that have been wished for. They go where they’re most needed. Or where they’re brought. I suspect the improbable road went and fetched this one for us.” She gave the bricks at her feet a hard look.

The improbable road twinkled in the sunlight, silent and smug …

—From Along the Saltwise Sea, by A. Deborah Baker

… the Doctrine of Ethos, although it has never before been embodied in material form, is an underpinning ideal of the universe. It guides thought, memory, even creation. And as such, it must be assumed to play by the rules governing other such embodiments, which our world throws up of its own accord when given the space and opportunity to do so. Consider, if you will, the near-universal tendency to embody ideas such as death, nature, and the seasons themselves into human form. No alchemist has summoned these guiding principles, no hand shaped the vessels which contain them, and yet they are contained, they are summoned into being by the need and necessity of the world itself.

It is my argument that the world needs the Doctrine of Ethos in order to function as the universe intends, but that the Doctrine is so diffuse and integrated that the universe has never figured out how to force it into physical form. As the oyster learns the art of pearl-making from the presence of the sand, we must begin to change the world if we wish the world to realize it needs to change itself. In that change, the Doctrine will be born, and our ascension can finally, properly begin.

—Address by Asphodel D. Baker to the American Alchemical Congress, 1901

BOOK IIThe Beginning

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day …

—Emily Brontë

Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it.

—George Halas

Gardener

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 11TH, 2017: WINTER, UNDER THE WORM MOON.

Pamela Covington—“Jenny” to her friends, and “Corn Jenny” to her colleagues, not that she has many of the former—closes her apartment door with a sigh, digging for her keys with one hand and holding the strap of her purse in the other. She’s been called to the hospital again, another round of flu shots delivered months after best efficacy, children with crayons up their noses, and teens who fell out of trees and sprained their wrists. It’s a living, and one she still enjoys, even after doing it for the better part of a decade.

Her candidate is sleeping. If the oracles are right, her candidate may die sleeping. Unless that changes, this is all that she can do.

She’s still searching for her keys in the voluminous pocket of her coat when someone slaps a cloth over her nose and mouth, the paint-thinner scent of chloroform filling her sinuses. She wobbles, immediately woozy, but she doesn’t fall down. Her reserves are slightly deeper than the average person’s, after all.

The young man behind her, who has a smooth, handsome face that she would recognize if she could see him, leans forward and murmurs, lips right next to her ear, “Hi, Pammy. Let’s you and me head back inside.”

The door isn’t locked yet. It’s easy enough for him to push it open and shove her inside.

Her apartment is sparse and simple. Most of her materialism has been burned away by the decades. She has a theory that the elderly tend to become hoarders because they’re trying to externalize their memories as much as they reasonably can, tying important moments to objects and artifacts as they sense, in some indefinable way, that their minds are growing close to capacity. That will never happen to her, who can offload so much onto the winter, and she was taught to fear discovery, whether by superstitious neighbors or, worse, the local alchemists, with their endless greed and conviction that everything can be codified and controlled. So she pares down, strips away the extra, and keeps herself as tight and efficient as she can.