Page 91 of Seasonal Fears

“You are,” says the Summer. “Which is why I need to get you comfortable with me, human man. If you claim my crown, you’ll never be alone again, never be free of me—or of your frozen maiden. She’ll walk with you all the days of your life. Consider carefully before you make any final decisions.”

Harry’s seventeen, too young to be thinking about marriage with any seriousness (despite his childhood determination to marry Mel when they both turned twelve), but he’s always known that one day, those thoughts would become a part of his mental landscape, and all her objections about her probable life expectancy aside, he’s always known that when that happens, he’ll be thinking of Mel. She’s his girl. It’s that simple. One day she’ll be his wife, if they both live that long. So he shrugs and answers Summer’s warning with “So? I figured that out when I was like eight. You’re promising me a world where we get to stay together. How could I do anything but agree?”

“You realize she’s not entirely human, even now?”

“You mean, do I understand that her dad’s some sort of Dr. Moreau asshole who built her in a lab so she’d be a better incarnation of the Winter? I’ll be honest. That sounded like bullshit when Jack started saying it, and that’s even with everything else that was already going on, which was…” He pauses, sighs, shakes his head. “So much. This is all so much. You get that, right? Human belief is big, but individual humans are small, and ‘Hey, you have to kill each other to win a crown that turns you into an anthropomorphic personification of a season and means you don’t get to be a person anymore, hope you’re cool with that’ is a little much to take.”

Summer blinks, slowly, looking at Harry with that level, cloud-streaked gaze for a long moment before he says, “Is that what they told you? Because that’s not entirely true.”

Harry jerks upright. “What do you mean? There’s a way to opt out?”

“No. But you don’t have to kill anyone. All you have to do is claim the crown.”

Harry’s confusion fades into a frown. “I don’t understand.”

“You can’t kill what’s already dead. Any candidates still standing when the crown is claimed will go away, swept out of the path of the new monarchs by the wind of their manifestation. And technically, you’re not killing anyone.”

“No?”

“As I said, you can’t kill what’s already dead.”

Summer says this like it’s perfectly reasonable, something Harry should accept without question, and it still makes him want to sit down in the flowery field, to dig his hands into the grass and scream. He’s known Mel was dead since her heartbeat disappeared. He’s been trying to ignore the little signs that say the same thing about him. The way he sleeps but doesn’t tire, eats but doesn’t hunger, sees habitually to the needs of the flesh that don’t trouble him at all, as if they were chores to be checked off a list before he can go and do something he’ll find more enjoyment in.

His body still functions the way he expects it to, if not slightly better; he’s hardly been sleeping for days, eating nothing but truck stop specials and diner food to the point where even his teenage boy’s digestion should be starting to object. He doesn’t have a headache. He doesn’t have so much as a case of the sniffles. He’s sleeping easy, waking easy, walking through his days without pain, driving for hours without eye strain or shoulder stiffness … really, if this is death, he should have died years ago.

Except he knows that death doesn’t usually let people off this easily. So he stares at the Summer in silent shock, unwilling to fully accept what he’s hearing, even though he knew most of it already. Mel’s been dead since this began. Mel’s the product of a mad scientist’s lab, because that’s what alchemists are, really, call them sorcerers and wizards all you want, like this is some kind of bullshit fantasy world, but he knows a mad scientist when he sees one. He isn’t going to lie about what they are.

“The ones who refuse their crowns keep me with them for a little while, as the attendants do,” says the Summer. “They have time to return to their homes and families and settle their affairs. And then the fragment of me that’s been animating them since the coronation began fades back into the whole, and they fade with it. It’s a death adjacent to the seasons, so their loved ones remember them, unlike the ones who choose to fall still fighting for my favor.” He laughs at the look on Harry’s face. “Oh, did your attendants not inform you? I suppose they may have forgotten, and there’s little point, as it changes nothing, but your parents aren’t looking for you, because at this point, they don’t remember you enough to realize that you’re gone.”

Harry supposes that isn’t more of a surprise than learning that he’s a dead man. The seasons have been hiding so much, so many things, even things that could have gotten them into serious trouble, what’s one more on top of that? “Will they remember me when I win the crown?”

“Yes. You need be absent only as long as no human will shapes my steading on this continent.”

Harry frowns a little as he puzzles his way through that sentence. Finally, he sighs. “You could talk a little less like a faux-deep Instagram post, you know.”

To his surprise, Summer laughs, long and loud and utterly without shame, like that’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard. When he gets himself back under control, he shakes his head and says, “No, I can’t. Not yet. When I am you and you are me, I might be able to. But I was William Monroe on this continent for the better part of three hundred years, and he was a small, petty man who chose cruelty whenever he had the opportunity, and never spoke with me enough to let me keep pace with how the world had changed.”

“How did he do that? If you were him, shouldn’t that have been enough?”

“Normally, it would have been. But he thought himself better than his season. He was the first on this continent to kill as a first choice. Before him, when the change of faces came, they fought, yes, they would compete gloriously and well, and they knew full well that loss would mean their death, but when they lost, they lost with honor. Not William. He was determined to win at any cost. He abandoned honorable challenges and fought to slaughter in every case. I am crueler from my time with him. I hope you can teach me to be gentle again.”

It sounds like a sincere desire, and so Harry only blinks, and says nothing. This is a lot. He knows it’s a lot, and he’s willing to keep listening as long as the season that will hopefully soon belong to him wants to keep speaking. What else is he supposed to do, run away into the meadow? Try to reach that bleak and frozen mountain in the distance, where for all he knows, Melanie is having the same conversation with her own season? No. Better to stay and listen and prompt where necessary, to keep the conversation moving forward, strange as it is. He’s learning things. He needs to know them.

“How much of you is you and how much of you is whoever wears your crown?”

“I’m a concept, a side effect of the natural world. Seasons exist because the planet rotates on its axis as it moves around the sun, or because an ancient goddess of the harvest cursed the world to win her daughter back from the lord of the dead, or because humans wanted their crops to come back and sacrificed their own on the snow. It’s hard to say. I’m all those things at once, and it doesn’t matter which you think is truer than the others, because they’ll all carry the same weight for you. Even if you decide one matters more, it won’t. One Summer soul isn’t enough to change the whole universe, no matter how much you may wish it were. But I’m not a person, Harald. You need to accept and understand that now, while we’re still distinct from one another, because you’re close enough to the labyrinth that you could win at this point, and once you claim the crown, you can’t set it aside. Not without killing the girl you claim to love.”

Harry blinks. “We’re parallel.”

“Yes, but you’re not tied to each other the way you will be when crowned. This is the birth of the alchemical marriage. There’s no backing out once you say you’ll do it, not unless you want to trigger another coronation and start the whole process again.”

Harry looks at the mountain in the distance for a long and silent moment before he shrugs and says, “Okay.”

“Okay?” echoes Summer, sounding baffled.

“Yeah, okay. I came this far, and I’m already dead, which makes this whole thing a kind of wacky afterlife, right? I can think of way worse afterlives than one where I get to keep having hands and legs and walking in the world, and stay with Mel at the same time. That’s just the cherry on top of the sundae of the nightmare my life has become. As soon as we’re not stuck with two other people all the time so we can make out more and start getting naked, it’ll be perfect. And if you’re going to say something shitty about how we’re both going to be dead for three months out of the year, don’t. I already know that whole part, I don’t need you to rub it in.”

Summer looks at him, a slow smile canting his lips upward until he’s smiling broadly. It’s not Harry’s smile, for all that he’s wearing Harry’s face. It’s something altogether different.