Velveteen vs. The Seasons

by Seanan McGuire

  Winter celebrates the freeze, in all its forms. There is generosity in Winter, but only for Santa Claus. Everything else is about the cold.

  *

  Velveteen stopped outside the Workshop and waited. Waiting came easy to her now, even though it never had before; she rather thought that she could patrol forever in her current state, sitting on rooftops for hours or even days as she waited for a crime to be committed, without ever getting restless or bored. Of course, that was never going to happen, since Santa was never going to let her leave the Winter: she was going to be captive to the cold until her term of service was up. The small part of her that was still warm enough to worry wondered whether she would be given back her flesh and blood when her service ended, or whether he would send her to the Spring still frozen through.

  When she had agreed to serve the seasons, she had promised to give each of them a fair chance at winning her over. She was starting to realize that they had never promised the same to each other. If Winter wanted to make her constitutionally incapable of giving her allegiance to someone else, she couldn’t stop it. She wouldn’t know where to begin.

  She had expected this to be easier. She had expected it to be brutally hard, but she had still expected it to be easier. She had expected to be among friends, in a body that had a heartbeat, not frozen through and alone.

  The Workshop door creaked open, and an elf appeared. He had the pointed green hat of a senior plaything engineer, and the anxious expression of a man who had drawn the short straw and was now being forced to walk straight into a lion’s den.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Velveteen,” he said, eyeing first the woman and then the logs. “You got the wood we needed? That was very kind of you.”

  “True Christmas pine, harvested from the forest of the dire wolves,” said Velveteen. “They didn’t like me being there. I don’t think they appreciate having their trees taken.”

  “No, they never have,” said the elf. He searched her face for signs of amusement, or at least interest, before he added, “There are parts of Winter that can’t be tamed. It’s counter to the idea of the season. It can’t all be toys and hot cocoa and skating with your friends, now can it?”

  “I suppose not,” said Velveteen, who was none of those things. “Why do we need to take their trees, though? Why can’t we just leave them in peace? There’s plenty of pine near here, without wolves protecting it.”

  “True enough, true enough, but it’s not the real pine if you don’t at least risk bleeding for it. We’ll use this to make things that need spirit, to go to the places where they’ll do the most good. Getting these trees was an act of heroism, even if it wasn’t heroic as you might understand the word.”

  Velveteen turned to look at the trees, trying to imagine them becoming building blocks and rocking horses and given to children like she’d been, before her powers manifested and got her “rescued” by The Super Patriots, Inc. There had always been anonymous gifts through church groups and kindly strangers. Maybe some of them had been stranger than she could have dreamt at the time. She wanted to be happy to be helping those children. She wanted to be delighted to have made their lives a little brighter.

  All she felt was cold.

  “Do you need me to help you get the logs inside?” she asked. The elf shook his head, expression losing the slow ease that it had been acquiring. He was remembering what she was. He was remembering that here, in Winter, she was more weather than woman. “Good,” she said, and snapped her fingers.

  The snow reindeer dissolved where they stood, creating shallow snowbanks that would soon blow away. The logs and the sled remained.

  “Thank you again,” said the elf.

  “I do what Santa commands,” said Velveteen, and turned to walk away. Her feet left no dents in the fresh-fallen snow. She might as well never have walked there at all.

  Behind the elf, the door opened again, and another elf stuck her head outside. She had a red hat, and bells on her braids. “Is she gone?”

  “She’s gone,” confirmed the first elf, turning to face his colleague. “I know we’re not supposed to think ill of Santa’s choices, but I hope she doesn’t stay. She’s too cold for this Winter.”

  The second elf, who had been there longer, and had lived through more Spirits of the Season than she cared to think, nodded. “She belongs to an earlier time. Now come on. Let’s get these logs inside.”

  There was always work to be done, in Winter. It helped to prevent dwelling on things that weren’t as pleasant as the process of building toys.

  *

  Velveteen had no other chores to do: no trees to fell or snow monsters to fight. She made her way back to her little house on the outskirts of the Village, which would never feel like home, but at least felt like a place where she wouldn’t have to endure the stares of the elves or the cold regard of the Snow Queen, whose mild dislike of the anima seemed to have blossomed into full-blown hatred somewhere between Velveteen’s arrival in Winter and her attempts to serve the season properly. It would have been easier to endure if Jackie had been around, but Vel’s so-called friend was still absent, and her parents wouldn’t talk about her.

  At least she still slept. She might not have a heart, and she might not be alive in the classical sense, but she still got tired, and she was still capable of sleeping. If she hadn’t been capable of sleeping, she wasn’t sure she would still have been sane. Not that she was entirely sure about it anyway. She was a woman made of snow, living in a world that bowed and danced at her command. If that wasn’t the definition of some sort of breakdown, she wasn’t sure what was.

  She waved her hand over the cutting board on her table. Carrots and parsnips and turnips appeared, all of them made out of snow. She sighed as she picked up the ice-bladed vegetable knife that rested next to the board. She hated root vegetable night. The snow roots would taste the way she thought they should, but they would still be nothing more than frozen water, melting on her tongue. She missed chewing. Out of all the things she’d ever expected to miss in her life, she had never thought she would have to miss chewing.

  She was dicing the snow carrots when a voice at her elbow said, “You should really cut away from yourself. Cutting toward yourself makes it more likely that you’re going to get hurt.”

  Velveteen yelped, dropping the knife, and whirled to see a pale, dark haired girl in a white dress standing behind her. The girl was wearing a wreath of candles around the top of her head, and their warm, golden light filled the room with dancing shadows. She was lovely, in a fragile, porcelain angel sort of way.

  Velveteen scowled at her.

  “Lucy,” she said, trying to pack as much irritation and disdain as possible into that single syllable. Years of practice had made her an excellent packer. “What are you doing here? I got Santa his Christmas pine, just like he asked, and I told Mrs. Claus I wouldn’t show up for another community skating night. Once was enough.” Snubbing she could have handled. The running and screaming had been a bit much.

  “Oh, no, it’s not about the trees, you did a great job with the trees,” protested Lucy. “It’s not about the skating, either, even if I do think you should give them another chance. They just didn’t expect the big snow grizzly bear, that’s all.”

  “It’s not my fault that they’re short-sighted.” Velveteen knew, distantly, that she should have felt bad about frightening the elves. But regret and shame both lived in the heart, and she didn’t have one of those anymore. If Winter didn’t want her terrifying its permanent residents, then Winter shouldn’t—in its manifestation as Aurora—have taken her heart away.

  “I guess,” said Lucy. Then she sobered, looking at Velveteen with eyes that were older than the face around them, and asked, “Vel, do you know what time it is?”

  “Sorry, I left my watch with my other body,” said Velveteen.

  “It’s about to be the Spring Equinox in the Calendar Country,” said Lucy. “Persephone is going to walk from Winter into Spring, and since yo
u’re supposed to go there next, we figured you could go with her. It’ll be a little easier for you to grow back into yourself if you’re in the company of a harvest goddess. They tend to simplify things.”

  Velveteen’s unnecessary breath caught in her throat as she went perfectly still, trying to make herself believe what the girl was saying. “I could…you mean I get to leave? I get to move on?” I get to have skin again, real skin, the color of worn brown velvet, and not this snowy bullshit? I get to have a heart, and a heartbeat? I get to be real?

  “Yes, you get to be real, just like the rabbit you were named after,” said Lucy, and for once Velveteen was so overcome with joy and terror and delight than she couldn’t even get angry about her mind possibly being read. All the feelings were muted, but they were stronger than anything she had felt since the Winter had stolen her heart away. “You just have one more task to accomplish, and then you get to go. We’ll wait here for your word, and hope that you’ll choose us.”

  “What do you need me to do?” Velveteen asked.

  Lucy told her.

  Velveteen stared. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, you have got to be kidding,” she said.

  Lucy just smiled.

  *

  The edges of Winter were abrupt. One minute she was walking over frozen tundra, with an army of snow creatures behind her: the next, there was nothing but blackness, and the soft sound of melting ice dripping down into the nothingness on the other side. Santa flicked the reins of his sleigh, bringing his team of reindeer to a halt. Next to him, Mrs. Claus fidgeted with her knitting and tried not to look at the pale, silent girl who was standing so close to the edge. She wanted to call her back, to beg her to step away from the abyss. She didn’t say anything. Everything they had given up, everything they had risked, had been for this moment. She wasn’t going to ruin things now.

  Jack Frost drifted down from above as Lucy stepped out of the trees. The Snow Queen did not walk, or float, or anything so common; she simply appeared, forming herself out of the elements as easily as one of Velveteen’s snow bunnies. Velveteen glanced at her, a calculating expression on her face, and then looked away.

  If she could control the creatures she called out of the snow, and the Snow Queen was made out of snow, maybe she could control the Snow Queen. But only if she had to: only if the Winter refused to let her go. Some part of her still remembered what it was to have a heart, and that part of her urged caution. If she crossed that line, it said, she might not be able to find the way back.

  There was a glimmer of light in the sky overhead. It intensified, and Aurora appeared, shining at the center of it all like a star. Velveteen turned her impassive gaze on the living soul of Winter. Any capacity she might have had for being impressed was long since gone; all she had now was waiting.

  Velveteen waited.

  “Hello, Velveteen,” said Aurora, and smiled with a thousand shifting faces, so that it was impossible to say what she had looked like when the smile ended, only that she had been beautiful in her delight. “Have you enjoyed your time with us?”

  “Oh, it’s been a real treat,” said Velveteen. “Lucy says I get to move on to Spring soon.”

  “Lucy is correct,” said Aurora. “You’ve been an excellent servant of the season, Velveteen. I hope you will consider that we have been kind to you, when the time comes to make your final decision about where you belong.”

  Silence would have been the wiser course of action, especially here, where the world dropped away, where her term in service to the Winter was almost at an end. Velveteen struggled to keep her lips pressed together, willing them to meld like two sheets of ice. But she couldn’t. Waiting had become a skill of hers, now that she was frozen solid; silence was never going to be that easy.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” she demanded. Her voice was too big and too loud for the silence at the edge of the world. It echoed, knocking snow off the trees and sending birds scattering into the air. “You froze my heart. You turned me into snow. You refused to let me have any contact with the one person in this season who’s actually my friend, maybe because oh, hey, this is a shitty way to treat someone who came to you in good faith. Now you hope that I’ll consider coming back to work for you forever? Why the hell would I want to do that?”

  “I know you’ve been tired since you came here,” said Aurora. “I know you’ve been angry, and frustrated, and thwarted in the things you wanted to accomplish. But you haven’t cried, have you? You came here wounded and heartsick from the things you witnessed, and none of those wounds have pained you, because they belonged to another world. Did we freeze you? Yes. We took your pain away. We took your weeping away.”

  “Tag needs me,” said Velveteen, voice unsteady. She didn’t want to believe what Aurora was saying. Sadly, even though she didn’t have a heart anymore, she remembered having one. She remembered how much pain she’d been in when she stepped through the wall between the worlds and landed in Winter’s eternal cold. She remembered funerals, and tears, and believing that nothing would ever be all right again.

  She hadn’t had a single nightmare since she’d walked through the heart of Winter. There was something to be said for a life lived under a sheet of ice. It was a cold, cruel something, but still. It was there. She couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t.

  “You would have woken him before you came here if you’d been certain that you had it in you,” said Aurora calmly. “The fact that you didn’t tells me you were unsure of your own heart, even before we had to take it away. All that uncertainty will return when you step into Spring. All that pain. All that grief. It was never destroyed, you know. It was only deferred.”

  Velveteen was silent for a moment, considering Aurora’s words. Then she shook her head, and said, “Damn. I mean, I knew you were manipulative and willing to do whatever you needed to do in order to protect your season, and maybe I even respected that a little bit, but damn. You literally blocked off my ability to process grief, and now you’re going to dump me on Spring? Are you warning them? Do they at least get some sort of ‘how to handle your emotionally damaged superheroine’ pamphlet?”

  “You chose who you would come to first,” said Aurora calmly. “It’s not Winter’s fault that we needed you to be capable of doing your job.”

  “Right,” said Velveteen. “The part where it makes you emotional heroin is just a fun side effect. Let’s get down to it, okay? I don’t feel like listening to you anymore. Lucy said you had one last job for me to do. You want to tell me what you think I’m going to do for you?”

  “You’re going to do what you were made to do, Velveteen, anima, most powerful life-bender of her generation, even if you never choose to embrace it the way you could. You’re going to save us all.”

  “Swell,” said Velveteen. “That’s just what I always wanted to do.”

  “No, it’s not,” said Aurora. “Isn’t it lucky for us that you don’t have a choice in the matter?”

  *

  Aurora led her to the very edge of the world, the place where the snowy landscape crumbled down into nothingness. The footing there was uncertain: Velveteen could feel the ground shifting and sinking beneath her feet, threatening to dump her into the abyss. Unlike Aurora, she couldn’t fly—she sometimes felt as if hers was the only power set in the world that hadn’t come up with some crappy excuse to let her take to the skies. She watched the snow falling into nothing with a wary eye, and wondered whether the last thing she was supposed to do for Winter was die.

  “People used to think of Winter as an endless palace of snow, where the black mountains broke against the twilight sky, and the sun never fully rose,” said Aurora, as calmly as if they weren’t standing at the edge of everything. “They dreamt snowmen and ice bridges and cold. The Snow Queen and I both come from that era, you know. We’re older than anything else that remains in this world.”

  “Uh, congratulations?” said Velveteen. “I’d really rather not plummet, if it’s all the same to you. Gravity and I have a so
rt of tumultuous relationship. I think it sucks.”

  “Isn’t it convenient for you that the anthropomorphic ideas about emotions and the heart didn’t put sarcasm there?” asked Aurora. She was starting to look annoyed. Velveteen could only see that as a good thing. She found the living incarnation of Winter to be plenty annoying, and it was finally time to return the favor. “Winter has changed. Everything changes.”

  “And now you’re a Hallmark card,” said Velveteen.

  Aurora, who had not maintained her position as the living incarnation of Winter by being easily thrown off track, ground her perfect, ever-changing teeth together before she said, “Jack Frost came before your beloved Santa Claus. He was the beginning of a sea change, of people learning to love the cold, to see it as something other than an excuse for blood on the snow. The Industrial Revolution didn’t put an end to people freezing to death, but it certainly slowed it down. ‘Wintering in Hawaii’ became something people talked about doing.”

  “I get that you’re being all mystic and ‘this is the folk process of reality’ here, but I’m pretty sure the people who lived in Hawaii had always wintered in Hawaii. Colonialism and having better boats doesn’t rewrite the world.”

  “No, but it changes the stories people tell about the world—and while there were always Hawaiians, there were fewer of them than there were people who lived where the Winter had always been frozen to the core,” said Aurora. “The more people tell a story, the more sincerely true that story will become. So when the people who had previously lived in the cold began viewing snow as optional, the story changed.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Velveteen.

  “Winter began to get smaller. The country, not the season itself: we lost land as the concept of our eternal snowfall lost minds,” said Aurora. “More people were being born all the time, of course, so there were more people to believe in us, which kept us from melting away completely. It’s been a delicate balance for quite some time.”