Velveteen vs. The Seasons

by Seanan McGuire

  “You survived,” she informed herself sternly. “You don’t have to do this for another six months. Now be a big girl, and wash your makeup off while you still have a chance.”

  It didn’t help. She was still exhausted, and her face was still a sea of cosmetics.

  She could have called the raccoons to come and wipe it off, she knew, but they always used too much makeup remover, and they weren’t good about keeping it out of her eyes. It was almost better to risk sticking to the pillow.

  Someone knocked on the doorframe. The Princess brightened immediately, turning her chair around and leveling an accusing finger at the figure standing there. “You are late,” she said, sounding almost triumphant about it. “The press conference ended ages ago. You missed an honest-to-goodness supervillain. The birds carried him off. Now what do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I got hung up at the North Pole,” said the woman in the doorway. She was plump and pretty, with pale skin that glittered slightly when she moved, like all that glitter that the Princess had been slinging around earlier had somehow become a part of her. Her hair was white, but not just white, no: it held all the hidden colors of the aurora, sprinkled through it like secrets. Her cheeks were rosy, and her lips were faintly pursed, like she was fighting not to smile. She looked tired. “I’m sorry. I would have been here sooner if I could have.” She stopped then, looking at the Princess hopefully, like she was expecting something.

  “Aw, honey, I’m sorry,” said the Princess, rising from her stool and pulling her robe a little tighter around her waist. “I shouldn’t pick at you, I know that. I just was really hoping you’d make it. What with Vel gone and everything, I feel like you and me should stick together as tight as we can. Do you need some cocoa? I know mirror travel takes a lot out of you, I don’t understand why your daddy doesn’t set you up with some flying reindeer of your own…”

  Jacqueline’s face fell. “Santa Claus is a very busy man,” she said, in the sort of tone that managed to imply problems at home and beg for understanding at the same time. It was a nice trick. She’d clearly had a great deal of practice. “I’m fine with using the Snow Queen’s mirror if that’s what’s easiest for everyone.” She looked at the Princess carefully. “Is that…is that all you wanted to ask me about?”

  The Princess frowned. “I don’t know what else I could have needed, sugar. I wanted you to be here, but it’s all right that you weren’t. I’ll tell you what. Help me get this makeup off, and we can go spend the afternoon slumming around the park, playing tourist. You know you get to skip lines when you’re with me.”

  Jacqueline Claus, daughter of Santa Claus, heir to the North Pole, did her best to force herself to smile. It felt weak and insincere to her, but the other woman didn’t seem to notice. The Princess was already digging for makeup remover and a clean washcloth, chattering a mile a minute about the press conference and all the fun that they were going to have at the park. It should have been reassuring. It should have felt like normalcy, and home.

  But this wasn’t normal, and this place wasn’t her home, and no one seemed to notice that anything had changed. The world had been sliced open and had healed around her, substituting her for another girl, one with skin like a winter sky and hair like a blizzard in the process of forming. She didn’t belong here. She had no idea how she was going to find the way home.

  “Jack? Honey, you still with me?”

  Jacqueline turned toward the Princess, forcing herself to smile. It was easier than it should have been. This woman looked so like her own Carrabelle, and she was so lonely. “Sorry. I was just thinking. Come over here, and let me get that makeup off of you.”

  The two women sat together, the one helping the other to restore her sense of normalcy, even though her own normal was something far away and half-forbidden, and everything was peaceful, for a time.

  Cradled in a bed of moss and new spring leaves, draped in a blanket of flower petals and thistledown, Velveteen slept. Her skin was back to a healthy brown, and her hair had grown six inches since the last of the cold had bled out of her and her body had remembered what it was to be a living thing. That was the only sign of how much time had passed while she was in Winter, and while there had been some discussion of cutting it before she woke, Persephone had pointed out that Velveteen was likely to have better things to worry about, and wouldn’t realize the significance of the change anyway. So the sleeping heroine’s hair had gone untouched as she slept on.

  She had been asleep for six days as the ice passed out of her heart and her dreams came creeping back to her, their hats clutched in their hands and their eyes cast toward the distant idea of the ground. Snow did not dream, after all, and she had been frozen for so very long. So much longer than she knew.

  On the seventh day Velveteen gasped and opened her eyes, staring at the tangled ceiling of vines and intertwined branches. A few squirrels and brightly-colored songbirds were perching there, staring down at her with cartoonish curiosity. Velveteen blinked.

  “Oh, good,” said a voice. It wasn’t familiar—she was quite sure she’d never heard it before—but she knew it all the same. It was the voice she sometimes heard in her dreams, when she had been beaten badly on a patrol and was trying to sleep despite the pain in her ribs and knuckles. It was the voice of slow growth and swift decay, and she knew it loved her, even as she knew that it wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice her if it saw the need. “You’re awake. I was starting to think you were going to sleep straight through to Summer, and since they’re the only season that doesn’t have a claim on you, that would have been awkward for all of us.”

  Velveteen attempted to speak. Her mouth barely moved, and the sound that escaped it was no louder than a butterfly’s sneeze. Her eyes didn’t widen, exactly, but the muscles around them tensed, her pupils constricting in temporary panic.

  “It’s all right,” said the voice. “Please, try to stay calm; don’t get yourself worked up. Winter had twined itself into your bones. That’s what Winter does. It chills you until you think you’ll never be warm again. We’ve been pulling the cold out of you, a little bit at a time, like churning the earth in the garden before planting. It was necessary, you see, but it would have been extremely painful if we hadn’t numbed you first.”

  Velveteen managed, with an extreme effort, to blink. The motion seemed to knock a little bit of feeling loose from the numbness: she felt threads anchoring her to the ground, rooted deep in her flesh and feeding on whatever substance she possessed.

  Velma “Velveteen” Martinez was not prone to overreaction. A lifetime spent defending her community and working minimum wage jobs to make ends meet had left her tough, determined, and capable of rolling with almost anything. This was a step too far. Closing her eyes, she allowed unconsciousness to take her back.

  Persephone, seated next to Velveteen’s bier, smiled and continued knitting. Patience was a virtue, and she had always been a virtuous woman.

  Besides. She wasn’t going to need to wait much longer.

  *

  The Seasonal Lands are interesting from a scholarly perspective, mainly due to the contradiction which they represent. They are living mirrors of the human subconscious, painting humanity’s ideas about faith and death and the wheel of the year across metaphysical space. They are primal manifestations of the forces of the universe, immutable and malleable at the same time, constant only in that they will always, always change. Changes to the real world will echo in the Seasonal Lands. Changes in the Seasonal Lands will do the same in the real world.

  This phenomenon has been well documented but remains notoriously difficult to prove, as it requires both access to the Seasonal Lands and a means of implementing and measuring change. The anecdotal data is strong. The proof is not. Regardless, it seems certain that what impacts one will impact the other, keeping the two realities inexorably connected, regardless of the desires of their respective occupants.

  Spring has historically been the most mercurial of the s
easons. It is the time of rebirth and new growth, of the world coming back to life after the long, slow days of winter. It is also the time of heavy rains and fierce winds, of destructive recovery. Everything has a price, in the spring as well as in Spring itself, and nowhere is this more perfectly embodied than in the patron goddess of the country, Persephone, who watches over both life and death. No one has ever called her cruel. No one has ever called her particularly nice, either; she is not the place to turn for succor without judgment.

  But she is kind. On that, most everyone agrees. Persephone holds life in one hand and death in the other, and while she is too rarely merciful—mercy is not a strong suit of her season—she is almost always kind. It seems like a small thing. To those who have come before her, helpless and hurting, it is everything in the world. She is not the only member of the Greek pantheon to have endured into the modern day. Her husband, Hades, remains an active part of Winter, although he has long since turned all management of the season over to his jolly successor. Aphrodite can often be seen in Summer, and Demeter has been known to meet with her daughter in the golden fields of Autumn, bringing the Harvest in. So Persephone is not unique. She is simply the only goddess of her line to still take an active interest in humanity.

  Where Persephone walks, new growth follows. This does not always endear her to people, as growth can be a very difficult, very painful thing. But she tries her best, and she keeps her season growing green, despite the changing ideas of humanity about what the spring should represent. She has learned to share her space with fertility icons and talking rabbits, and still she has managed to remain essentially, at her core, a good person.

  May such high praise one day be heaped upon us all.

  *

  When Velveteen woke for the second time, she was no longer numb. She gasped and sat up, flailing at the small roots that dangled from her arms like cobwebs. They withered and broke off at her touch, falling to the ground, where they dissolved into so much dust.

  That was the last straw. “Ew ew ew!” Velveteen wailed, leaping to her feet and running her hands down her legs, wiping still more roots away. Part of her noted the color of her skin and how warm it was, how wonderfully, realistically warm. That part of her was content. The rest of her was a little busy freaking out over the fact that she was still covered in tiny dangling roots, implying that whatever strange fruit they had sprouted was now embedded in her body.

  Eventually, all the roots she could reach had been wiped away, and she was panting from the effort. Slowly, Velveteen calmed and took a deep breath, feeling the sweet, warm air feel her lungs. There was that word again: warm. She was warm, because she was no longer frozen.

  She was also naked, surrounded by trampled greenery, and alone.

  “Oh, this is good,” she muttered, turning to take a slower, more careful look around herself. She was standing in a grotto that seemed to have been crafted entirely out of living vegetation. It was sort of like being back in the Crystal Glitter Unicorn Cloud Castle, except for the part where if she’d been there, the Princess or one of her kangaroo butlers would have appeared by now to scold her for stomping on the flowers. No. This was not familiar ground, and any similarities they shared would only serve to lower her guard.

  This was the Spring, and in a very real sense, this was a foreign country. There were three seasons with a claim on her. This was the only one where she had never really spent any time.

  “Look at it this way,” she said, speaking in part to hear her voice. It sounded different when it was supported by actual breath, and not just by air. In the Winter, she had breathed only to speak. Here, she was doing it to survive. That mattered. That mattered so much more than she ever could have guessed before it had been taken away. “You thought Santa was your friend, and he let the Aurora Bitch-e-alis turn you into a snow bunny. Spring thawed you out first thing. Maybe this won’t be so bad.”

  She had a lifetime’s practice in the fine art of lying to herself. Even so, she couldn’t quite make her words sound believable, not even to her own ears. Yes, Santa had allowed Aurora to transform her into a snow creature, but he hadn’t been happy about it: she could see that now, with her emotions waking up and quietly recoloring her memories of her time in Winter, like Turnerization of the heart. He had always looked so sad when he’d seen her walking, frozen, through his winter wonderland. Given his druthers, he would have kept her as she was, patchwork and damaged and alive, and allowed her to serve the season as a friend, and not as a captive.

  And none of that changed the fact that when she’d arrived, she had been dropped into the storm; none of that could give her back the days she’d spent frozen to her core, transformed by whatever strange magic dwelt in Aurora’s mountain. Maybe he’d been her friend once, and maybe he still thought of himself in that manner, but when she had needed him most, he had allowed someone else to step in and hurt her direly. That was the sort of treatment she had received from her friends here on the shivering side of the calendar. What kind of courtesy could she expect from her enemies?

  Spring wasn’t her enemy. Not like Autumn sometimes was. So she couldn’t trust them the way her sudden warmth made her want to, but she didn’t need to fear them either.

  What she needed was a way out of this room, and maybe something to cover her ass. A sudden wave of fear hit her, and she clapped both hands over her tailbone, feeling for the cotton ball plume of a rabbit’s tail. Sometimes the seasons and their associated holidays could be a little too literal. Halloween, especially, had a tendency to turn her into an anthropomorphic rabbit just for the hell of it.

  Her fingers found some more roots that needed to be brushed away, but they didn’t find a tail. A similar check of her ears revealed a lack of other lapine features. She was still, for better or for worse, shaped essentially like a human—but that had been the case in Winter, too, at the beginning. She vaguely remembered a voice telling her that she’d been asleep for a week. So was this the beginning, then, or had she already been here long enough to be absorbed? It was impossible to tell.

  “Hello?” She lowered her hands and raised her voice, looking around the small green space. “I’m here. I’m awake. I’m ready to talk about whatever it is this season wants from me, and P.S., I’ll be a lot friendlier and more reasonable if you give me some pants first. I’m not down with the casual nudity.”

  The green walls did not reply. Velveteen sighed. “See, apart from making me talk to myself, which is a little cruel, you’re putting me in a position where I have to choose between property damage or being trapped in a weird room made out of plants. I’d really rather not start out by pissing you off, so if you could just come here and tell me what you want me to do, that would be awesome. Super awesome. Seriously.”

  The green walls still did not reply. Velveteen, who was starting to feel rather foolish, crossed her arms and scowled at them. “Do you really want to see me force my way out of here?” she asked. “I just finished spending I don’t know how long in Winter, and we were not on friendly terms for most of my stay. Let’s not make this any harder than it has to be.”

  Silence from the greenery. It didn’t even have the decency to look nervous. Velveteen sighed.

  “All right, you asked for it,” she said, and lowered her arms, and reached out with the part of herself that knew how to stir a teddy bear to strange and temporary life, the part of herself that had, in Winter, crafted an army out of snow and set it against her enemies. Her power had always been there, as calm and constant as the air she breathed, even when she hadn’t wanted it. Even when she’d tried to bury it. Too many of the anima of her generation had died for Supermodel’s vanity, and she was stronger than she should have been. So she reached—

  —and screamed, hitting the mossy ground on her knees as pain, immediate and intense, washed over her. It felt like she was the one being ripped out by the root, and not whatever strange flowers had been planted in her flesh. She gasped, trying to stop reaching, but she had started the p
rocess; she couldn’t stop it, even now that it was out of her control and hurting her. She had to keep reaching until she found something, anything, to take the pain away.

  Her questing mental fingers touched something bright and pulsing with hot, eager life. They shrank back for a moment, aware that this was wrong; this wasn’t what they were for. But the pain was so great, and the reach had been so far, that they couldn’t help themselves. They snapped closed around the bright, pulsing thing like a trap, and pulled it into themselves. From there, it spread to Velveteen. The pain stopped, like a switch had been flipped somewhere. As the flowers that Persephone had planted in Velveteen’s flesh burst through the skin of her back and bloomed into riotous color, the anima herself wobbled, trembled, and collapsed.

  Everything was still.

  *

  “That went well.” The speaker was a six-foot-tall anthropomorphic rabbit. Somehow, this didn’t make him the strangest member of the little assemblage that looked down on the sleeping superheroine. The standards were slightly different, in Spring. “I mean, she didn’t throw up or explode or anything.”

  “Most people don’t explode,” said the woman next to him. She was dressed in a sequined ball gown, a feathered mask over her eyes and a dozen strands of brightly colored beads around her neck. She sounded bored, and sat like she would rather be at a party, drinking champagne and dancing the night away in the arms of a stranger. Lady Moon had that sort of air about her, regardless of the hour. “It’s a thing that people are, in fact, not terribly inclined to do.”

  Geb was not present, being notoriously reclusive in these modern times, and much more inclined to hole up in his palatial palace near the fields of eternal harvest and write long, passionate letters to his wife, the sky goddess Nut. Several geese were attending the convocation in his stead. They hissed at Lady Moon in what might have been agreement, or might have just been avian cussedness. Even being the chosen avatars of the Egyptian god of Earth and Harvest couldn’t make geese good-tempered.