Page 64 of Seasonal Fears

“Three hundred years ago,” says Harry, suddenly disgusted. He looks at his own hands, white-skinned and strong, and scowls. “Colonialist fuck.”

“He was,” Jack agrees. “It’s not your fault where you were born, as long as you try not to be an asshole about it. He, on the other hand, had choices, and all the choices he made were bad ones, and now the shape of a North American coronation looks a lot like a European one. Lots of blood on the barley. Lots of blood on the snow. Lots of bodies to step over on the way to ascending the throne.”

“You know, you keep using all this monarchist terminology, but I don’t think you’ve ever explained what it means,” snaps Harry. “Get better words or provide definitions for the ones you have.”

“Until you fell deep enough that you stopped denying any of this was real, it didn’t matter what words I used,” says Jack. “The crowns are real. They’re material objects, and they’re kept at the end of a labyrinth made by all four seasons coming together. That’s part of why the attendants matter. We craft and keep the labyrinth, and make sure it’s always ready, because we don’t always know when a coronation will be called. The current one is somewhere in the American South, I think, although I’m not sure exactly where—it would be cheating if I did. The attendants who maintain the labyrinth after it comes together are ones who stand for spring and fall. They don’t have any candidates of their own, so they don’t have anything to gain by cheating. If we can find the labyrinth, you can enter, both of you together. You can start along the scarecrow trail and make for the Impossible City.”

“And that’s where your entanglement—what Jack keeps calling ‘running parallel’—will work for you, instead of working vaguely against you,” says Erin, who emerged from the house while Jack was speaking and is now leaning up against the doorframe, arms folded, watching them. “Entanglement means you both fall deeper into your seasons faster, and once you go too deep, you’ll forget how to be like normal people. That’s what’s going on with Roger and Dodger. So much of them is taken up with hosting the Doctrine that there isn’t much room left for being ordinary. If you lose your humanity before you reach the labyrinth, you won’t be able to stand the sight of each other, and you certainly won’t be able to work together long enough to navigate it and claim the crowns. You’ll have lost by moving too fast. You still seem pretty human. You’re keeping your girlfriend from going under. Eventually she’ll start weighing you down, if she keeps dropping the way she has been.”

“I don’t care,” says Harry. “She’s my Mel and I love her and I’ll keep her from going too deep if it kills me.”

“It might,” says Erin.

“I still don’t care,” says Harry, and he means it, completely and utterly and down to the base of his bones.

People keep telling him his love for Mel only seems like the sun because he doesn’t have anything to compare it to; that eventually, he’ll be able to see it for the candle it truly is, because it will be set against all the other candles he’s lit in his lifetime. Maybe they’re right and maybe they’re wrong, because right now, he’s seventeen years old and his love for her is the sun, bright and burning and utterly all-consuming, and she loves him the same way, he knows she does, and all he has to do is keep her from freezing so completely that she forgets.

All he has to do is anchor her, the way he always has, the way she’s always anchored him.

Erin looks at him carefully, and after a moment, she shakes her head. “I really think you mean that,” she says, and turns to Jack. “Keep him alive if you can. I know he’s not your problem, or at least not your responsibility, but we’ve had shitty monarchs for a long time, and that introduces chaos into the system that I don’t like. I want this one on the throne.”

“Not up to me, but I’ll get him to the labyrinth if I can,” says Jack. “I can’t choose him over Melanie, but as long as they’re not in conflict, I’ll keep helping him.”

“That’s all I can really ask,” says Erin.

“Labyrinth,” says Harry. “Please. There’s so much that every time you start telling me what I need to know, you get sidetracked and stop actually answering my questions. What is the labyrinth, and why does running parallel help us there?”

“Right now, it’s a solo game,” says Jack. “You and Mel aren’t in competition with each other, since you’re vying for different crowns, which means you can cooperate, but you’re in competition with every other candidate for the Summer crown, and yeah, I like you, you’ve got a good reason to want to be coronated, but they all have stories of their own. There’s not another Mel out there, thankfully—as far as I know, Cosgrove was the only alchemist actively seeking to steal the seasons—”

She pauses there and glances to Erin, waiting until the other girl nods before she sighs in relief and keeps going.

“—but there could be Summer candidates with sob stories that would break your heart. You have to beat them. You don’t have to kill them if you can get them to renounce, but whenever you meet one of them, you have to walk away the winner, or this is all for nothing. This isn’t a game. It’s a competition, but it isn’t a game.”

“I already killed someone,” says Harry softly, and looks down at his hands. Is that a fleck of blood beneath his thumbnail? He knows it can’t be, knows he’s washed his hands too many times since then for it to be blood, but … is it? It’s impossible for him to say. So he takes a deep breath, not looking at Tim or Kim—as people his own age, their condemnation will hurt more than Erin’s or Jack’s. “I didn’t do it with the Summer. I did it with my hands. He was trying to hurt me or make me renounce, and I killed him.”

“And no one’s come to arrest you for it, even though I bet you made plenty of noise, huh?”

Harry’s head snaps up, eyes locking on Erin in a silent plea for her to explain. She shrugs.

“The alchemical world is all around us, just like the magical world was before things shifted. It protects itself. Not completely, but surprisingly well. If someone comes to drop a package on our porch, they’ll notice we have a bunch of flowers and vegetables that shouldn’t be doing this well out of season. They’ll see that we’re not entirely bound to the casual flow of time. And then, when they leave, they’ll forget. Unless their shell is already cracked a little, they’ll forget. If they come back too often, the forgetting will start to take longer, and eventually they’ll start to remember, and we’ll have to deal with that.”

“Our regular deliveryman comes to pick peaches from the tree Dodger has in the backyard,” says Kim. “It’s always August for the tree, and somehow that doesn’t make it stop flowering, just means it fruits year-round.”

“Eventually he’ll start asking questions,” says Tim. “He’ll start wondering about the tree, how it can do that, how any of this can be possible, and once that happens, either he’ll figure out what alchemy is—or sorcery, I guess, since that’s like, proto-alchemy, it’s easier—or he’ll fall apart and we’ll get a new deliveryperson.”

“How can you sound so calm about that?” asks Harry. “You’re talking about people not being able to see the world around them.”

“Right now, it’s keeping you from being arrested for murder, so maybe you could have a go at being chill about it, huh?” says Jack. She shrugs. “They don’t see alchemical things because they don’t want to get sucked into alchemical things. We inhabit the uncanny valley. We look human, almost, most of the time, and we’re just enough wrong that we can’t be trusted, can’t be interacted with, can’t be turned away from. The cops aren’t coming because the coronation is covering up any sign that you were the one in that motel. It’s weird and it’s impossible and it shouldn’t work, and you need to just accept it, because even if you don’t, it’s still happening. The more you accept, the easier everything else gets.”

“And it’s not like refusing to accept changes anything,” says Kim, and flounces down the stairs, high-stepping like a cheerleader, a physical tic Harry knows all too well from the time he’s spent with Melanie, to the patch of strawberries on the path. She crouches, filling her hands with ripe red fruit, before she comes prancing back. She offers her hands, full of fruit, to Harry. “Here,” she says, not ungently.

Harry takes a strawberry. “I know this is all happening,” he says. “I figured that out when a dude tried to kill me so he could be the Lord of the Summer, and my girlfriend started making snowstorms for fun. It’s real. It’s too stupid not to be real.”

“Summer King, please,” says Jack. “The Lord of the Summer is something altogether different and not important to what’s happening here and now, so we’re all going to forget you said His name.”

Harry blinks at her. But the implacability in her expression is unmistakable, and he can tell he won’t get anywhere by pushing, and so he doesn’t. After a moment of silence, Jack starts to speak again.

“When you reach the labyrinth, everything changes,” she says. “It’s not a solo adventure anymore. All the candidates who haven’t found someone to run parallel with will be frantic to pair up before they go in, and that’s when you’ll be in the most danger, because they’ll try to steal Melanie from you. They can form gangs as the labyrinth looms, packs of hunting wolves whose only goal is to catch a potential Winter for themselves. They can’t force a Winter to parallel them, but they can kill you and hope she chooses one of them.”