“Do the other Courts have that kind of power?” I asked finally. “Memory that bites back?”
Her expression softened, though her tone stayed careful. “Each Court has its own truth. Its own form of control. You saw Winter’s—stillness and memory. But Summer, Autumn, Spring … they all think theirs is the truest.”
I waited. She didn’t continue.
“Then tell me,” I said. “What do they do?”
She sighed, but I caught the flicker of something in her eyes—amusement, maybe, or warning. “You humans never askifyou should know, onlywhat.”
“And you fae never answer directly.”
That earned a small laugh. “Fair enough.”
She brushed her fingertips over the frozen edge of the fountain. “Summer’s magic burns so fiercely it consumes what it loves. Creation and destruction are the same to them. To love a Summer fae is to be undone by warmth.”
“And Autumn?”
Maeryn’s smile faded. “Autumn bends what it touches. Charm, persuasion, deceit—they call it grace. But the price of such beauty is emptiness. They can make anyone see what they want them to see, until they forget what’s real.”
I thought of Kael, his easy smile, the way words seemed to fall into rhythm around him. “That sounds familiar.”
“Yes,” Maeryn said quietly. “Mixed-blooded as he is, Autumn runs through him like wine.”
“Mixed-blooded,” I echoed, watching her face. “You mean Kael.”
Maeryn nodded. “His mother was half of Autumn and half of Summer. The Frostfather made that alliance in the old way—through seduction and politics, in whichever orderserved him best.”
That explained a great deal. The warmth in Kael’s tone, the easy charm that softened even Winter’s edges. He carried his mother’s seasons like a secret perfume.
I folded my arms. “And Spring? What kind of power do they carry?”
“Spring is the contradiction of all things,” Maeryn said. “Creation and decay in one heartbeat. They heal what they harm and harm what they heal. Theirs is the cycle—growth, rot, renewal. But what they call balance, the rest of us call madness.”
I thought of the frostgarden around us, plants caught mid-bloom and mid-death. “So Winter preserves, but Spring remakes.”
She smiled faintly. “That’s one way to see it. The other way is simpler. Winter endures because Spring forgets.”
We walked slowly, our reflections warping through the frostglass walls. I tried to imagine these other lands—sunlit meadows that could kill you, gilded halls that made you believe lies. The more she spoke, the more I realized the fae world wasn’t built on beauty. It was built on balance—the kind that broke as easily as it healed.
“And the Dream Court?” I asked finally. “Kael mentioned it once, but he didn’t say much.”
Maeryn went still. “Dream doesn’t belong to a season,” she said after a moment. “It threads through them all. It’s older than any crown—older than even the Frostfather’s reign.”
“What kind of power does it have?”
She hesitated, and when she spoke, her voice had lowered, as if she feared the walls might overhear. “Dream doesn’tcreatelike Spring orconsumelike Summer. It remembers what never was and makes it real. It pulls from longing and loss. Some say it weaves what the world refuses to keep.”
The words settled in me like a slow chill. “That sounds more like mercy than power.”
Her eyes met mine. “Only if you believe longing is mercy.”
Something in her tone made me look away. The ice on the fountain had begun to fog faintly where we stood, clouding our reflections.
“What about Winter?” I asked. “If the others burn and bloom and deceive and dream—what exactly does Winter do?”
Maeryn’s hand trailed along the frozen rim. “Winter endures. It holds. It’s the spine that keeps the others from tearing the Veil apart. And that is why what’s happening with the Veil—and the missing Dreamstone—has everyone on edge. If the Veil falls, the world will unravel.”
“Sounds noble,” I said. “Until it decides it’s tired of holding.”
