Chapter Seventeen

I’ve spent most of my life trying to make the people I love smile. Stupid jokes and quippy one-liners and acts of self-sabotaging nonsense but none of it was ever enough, and I had gotten to the point where I wasn’t sure what else I could do. My job, my duty, would be to bring joy to the world through Christmas, but how could I ever do that when I couldn’t bring joy to my brother, to Iris, hell, even to my father?

But what I’d spent my life trying to generate wasn’t joy, necessarily. Fun, sure. But not joy.

Because every morning now, my pillow smells like citrus and spice. I lie facing him and I watch the lights from outside rise up his body, illuminating crevices and cliffs I know by touch and taste. He wakes up next to me and I know, I know, god, I hope we have created enough joy that the reality of not having to worry is ours.

I float through these days, and it’s easier and easier to find ways to spread the joy I’m generating, like I’m my own sort of Merry Measure. I don’t think about it half the time now—there’s another concert, and I suggest we go caroling instead, and Dad permits it. But instead of grabbing whatever pre-arranged songs are laid out, I go up to the members of House Caroler and ask what they think we should sing. What songs are in their past, our past, that don’t get the stage space they should?

They confer for a few minutes, then songs are decided on, music sheets are found, and we haul ourselves through the palace, singing at the doors to the Route Planners and the Toy Factory and everywhere else. Our court belts out rather screechy renditions of songs I’ve never heard, but they’re filled with well-wishes and cheer and laughter. The staff at the open doors stares in stunned amusement, and I see more than a few instances of our court lingering at these stops to talk to the staff working, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen our court talk to our staff before. Do they even know their names? I introduce them when I can, Renee and Lacie and Lucas and all the others who have been fixtures throughout my life.

And for the next event, our own cookie decorating party, it’s usually stiff and formulaic. But I invite all the staff I run into on my way and tell them to spread the news and there are dozens of people packed into Renee’s kitchen. It’s a madhouse of elbows and sprinkles, and at the end, a member of House Frost asks where these cookies are going, and most of them are disastrous piles of icing at this point. But we arrange to turn them into gift boxes and ship them out, a dash of pre-Christmas magic for the people of North Pole City.

I clean up with the staff, and more than a few nobles, who linger too. I don’t know what is happening but they’re smiling in ways I’ve never seen, not the smiles of formality, but really smiling.

I grab Wren in passing one day and ask her why we don’t have more decorations that signify all of our houses in our décor. The next morning, there are delicate paper bags housing softly pulsing lights lining the staircases, and Wren tells me she’s working on getting woven tapestries from House Jacobs and other decorations too. Whatever that woman’s paid isn’t enough.

When I look at the tabloids, both those focused on Christmas and wider—okay, that does kill my soul, but I make myself do it—the photos are messier than the older ones. More candid. Smiles and genuineness. The ones that show our staff intermingled with our nobles are going crazy, likes and shares and effusive comments. It’s hard to tell where the support is coming from, our people or any of the other Holidays who can see these tabloids, but I’ll take it, wherever its source.

And then responses start appearing on my desk—the other Holidays, saying they’ll come to the Christmas Eve Ball. I do what research I can on these various ruling families, trying to keep it under Dad’s radar, but I won’t be ignorant anymore. The responses from my invitations say they’re eager to talk about the future with Christmas’s heir, but will the reigning Santa be involved in these discussions as well?

Yes. No. He will but I’m dreading it and I have no idea what I’ll say when they all show up here and I’ll have to face the music, shit will hit the fan, and other such final colorful phrases.

I keep expecting Dad to flip out. For him to discover the coming guests or see the pictures in the tabloids and realize I’m changing his image of us. I keep expecting him to ban me from events or snap at me about my relationship with Hex, which I’m getting better at hiding in public but it’s obvious that he’s the focal point of my existence now.

But Dad doesn’t intervene. He doesn’t stop me. He makes eye contact with me at events and doesn’t glower and I think, maybe, he’s impressed? But that’s impossible. Categorically. Metaphysically. I’m ruining his carefully sculpted persona of us.

Aren’t I?

Maybe it’s been this easy the whole time. Maybe all I needed to do was exactly what I’ve done and choose to act instead of wallowing in my own shit.

Maybe one fuckup didn’t have to define the rest of my life like I let it.

I come up beside Kris at an after-dinner mixer in the courtyard and I’m at war with hating myself for taking so damn long to improve and pride that hey, this all seems to be working? Tall space heaters warm the area—and it only takes one second of thinking back on the text fantasy I’d tormented Hex with to realize that I’m probably the first person in history to be turned on by a space heater—but we’re in coats still, and I’ve just left Iris with Hex after yet another round of staking my claim for the cameras. It’s easier to play pretend now, knowing it’ll come to an end soon.

Dad isn’t here. Which isn’t odd that he opted out of a low-key event, but something about his absence triggers an itch in the back of my mind.

I shrug it away, fighting to breathe through the well of anxiety.

The Christmas Eve Ball is only three days away. We’re so close.

It’ll be fine. It’ll work.

It has to.

“I need your help,” I say to Kris, but my eyes are on Hex. He’s next to Iris by an ornamental pine, nodding along to something a noble says to them both.

He tugs on one of the tree’s limbs. Idly. Like he’s not aware he’s doing it.

Then he makes me watch as he elegantly arches his middle finger and runs it all the way down the center of the branch.

My body rocks in place. I feel that finger as if he’d run it down my stomach.

He pops me a playful smile.

Is it possible to shake apart from loving someone too much? They’re going to feel tremors all the way down in North Pole City and think it’s an avalanche but no, it’s me, combusting because of the calamitous power this one man has over me.

“Coal?” Kris snaps in front of my face.

I jump and spin on him.

He’s laughing. “Good lord, dude. You walked over to me, said you needed my help, then immediately zoned out to stare at the guy you’re sleeping with. You are the poster boy for disaster bisexuals.”

“They’re sending me the trophy any day now.” But I shake my head, press my thumb to my forehead, and get my brain to switch tracks. “Your help. Yeah.” I turn to my brother. “I need you to help me write out what to say to the winter Holidays when they get here.”

Kris’s face smooths from mockery to understanding. “Oh. Yeah, of course. But I kind of assumed you were going to wing it?”

“You think I’d leave this to chance?”

He gives a look I can’t decipher. “What’d you have in mind?”

I shove my hands into my pockets to cover the roiling, panicky urgency in my stomach, the feeling of possession that’s been growing, day by day.

“We can talk about the potential we all have together,” I start. “And how much more capable we could all be if we pool our resources. And how Christmas never should’ve tried to stretch globally on our own because we can’t be everything to everyone, but together? Together—” My mouth goes dry, and this is why I need Kris to write it out, to take these thoughts and figure out what I’m trying to say because I want to say it all and it needs to be coherent. “Together we can be the start of everything. People have a masterful capacity for creating something solid out of the smallest seed of joy, and we all contribute to giving them that. And we can—”

I stumble to a halt when I see the look Kris is giving me: surprise. Soft, startled surprise.

I’m careful to still keep my voice low. “And, uh, lots of apologizing. Obviously. Add a fair bit of groveling. And put ample redirects if and when Dad tries to cut in. Then more apologizing.”

Kris’s grin comes so fast it’s blinding. “All right,” he says. “Santa.”

“Oh, god, I’m not ready for that.”

“Too bad. You’re embodying it fully. Careful, you’re gonna sprout a fluffy white beard.”

“Shut up.”

“I hope Hex likes facial hair.”

I elbow him, and he laughs.

It’s late already, so it doesn’t take much longer before everyone starts to trickle back into the palace and to their rooms. I make sure to position myself next to Hex as we duck inside, and I pretend the press of the crowd bumps me into him, letting my hand rest on the small of his back, my lips dangerously, achingly close to his ear.

“I can’t believe you did it.”

Hex intently removes his gloves, long fingers stretching in the hall’s yellow lighting. “Did what?” he whispers, all innocence.

“You fondled that Christmas tree.”

He tries to suppress a smile. “I have no idea what you are speaking of. I would never stoop so low to stir a reaction from you.”

“Hm. Well. I must have misread that entirely.”

“You certainly did.”

“So you don’t need me to come to your room tonight?”

“Of course not.”

“And you don’t need me to”—the crowd is separating, and we’re pushing it already, but I lightly, quickly, drag my finger up his spine—“reenact anything you did?”

I watch his breath catch, throat bobbing emptily. He shoots me an exasperated frown.

“You always win this game of chicken,” he relents, and I beam.

“Oh, sweetheart, I’ll make sure you always win in the end.” I wink.

He hisses, eyelids fluttering, but he’s grinning.

A few last members of the court are heading up the hall. Iris, in their midst, leans on Kris to kick off her shoes then continues on barefoot, one arm looped through his.

Kris must feel my smirk. He glances back, spots me lingering with Hex, and rolls his eyes at my expression.

I wait until they’re gone and the bulk of people have dispersed ahead of us before I laugh. “I’d think she was actively trying to kill him if she wasn’t so oblivious.”

“You have never spoken with her about it? Not even subtly?”

“Kris would kill me. It isn’t my secret to tell.”

Hex rests his hands in his coat pockets, pensive. He holds for a beat too long.

“Hex?”

At my questioning frown, he nods towards the hall. “You think she may not reciprocate.”

Shit, he nailed that fast. “Maybe. A little.” It’s just been obvious that Kris likes her for so, so long. If she felt even a flicker of attraction to him, she would have noticed years ago, right?

The hall around us is empty now. Gotta love these late-night hijinks—they let me step closer to Hex in one of our too rare moments of public affection. Or, well, public in this empty hall.

“I think the larger risk will be what Easter needs.” His fingers hook into the seam of my coat.

“Why would Easter’s needs get in the way of her being with Kris?”

Hex goes quiet. His energy is… off.

I press closer, fingers fixing under his chin. “Hex? What’s going on?”

He smiles. It’s forced and sets me on edge. “It’s not important.”

“It is. What’s wrong? This isn’t about Iris and Kris.”

“It’s nothing. I have morbid tendencies, if you’ll recall. Please. We can discuss it later.”

“You’re worried about us.” The words have been pinballing around my head for the past few weeks but it doesn’t make the way I say them any more confident. They come out shaky and a little desperate. “About after all this.”

His smile wavers. “We only have a few days left now.”

“I’m so close to fixing everything, I swear.”

That sad tinge to his smile doesn’t wane. “I know.”

“Even if you think it’s—”

Footsteps patter up the hall. The cadence is too fast, frantic, and the rhythm triggers a fight-or-flight response deep, deep in my chest.

There’s a crack. Something, somewhere, in the past two seconds broke, a massive split shattering, shattering—

Iris comes tearing around the corner. Her whole demeanor sets me on edge, eyes emanating defeat. Under my hands, Hex’s arms go rock solid.

I don’t release him, but pivot to her. “What’s wrong?”

The question sounds muted. Like I’m asking it through water.

“You need to get to your room,” she says. “Now. Your father—”

I put one hand up and point at her and a hot swell of anger mixed with fear burns right through my chest.

“Don’t,” I tell her. “Don’t say—”

“He found the letters. The responses from the winter Holidays.”

He went through my room? The air sucks out of my lungs.

“Kris is trying to calm him down,” she continues, and my hand drops. “He’s furious.”

I swing back on Hex. That feeling of being underwater is overtaking my senses and makes everything delayed until all I can do is drop my lips to his forehead.

“I’ll come to your suite later,” I promise.

“Do you want me to be with you?” he offers. A wince ripples across his face.

No, he can’t. Not if he wants to keep his Holiday out of this.

“It’ll be fine.” The words are weather-beaten. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. It’ll be—

Hex lifts his head, rests his lips against mine. “I’ll be waiting,” he says into my mouth.

One last kiss, and I break away, giving Iris a forced smile as I pass her. It’s fine, see? I’ll go to my room, and—

And explain how I’m usurping my father right to his face. No one here to back me up. Nothing at all put in motion except those letters, those damn letters.

I keep walking, and I don’t look back at Hex or Iris, and my mind goes blank under the storm of everything hitting down on me at once.

Staff shut up rooms I pass with nods of good night, and then I’m at the door to my suite.

Kris is in there.

So I don’t give myself the luxury of stalling.

The knob twists under my fingers and I push in to see Kris standing off to the side, arms folded, incensed, and Dad, seated at my desk, a stack of letters in his lap. The responses I’d hidden in the back of my closet.

My suite has been tossed.

Clothes everywhere. Cushions removed from the couch and chair. Drawers pulled out of my desk and papers rifled through and he tore it apart.

I’m in my coat from the after-dinner event still, and I rip it off, sweating and shaking but neither hot nor cold.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I hear myself ask. “This is my room. You can’t—”

“You are in no position to get righteous on me, Nicholas. Kristopher,” Dad doesn’t look at him, “you are not needed.”

“Yes, I am,” he shoots back.

Dad’s mouth purses, but he turns away without another word. “I had begun to think you were serious in your attempts to change.” He pushes up from the chair, letters in his fist. “This month, you have shown a renewed dedication to your position. I allowed your changes to our events, and while these have been unconventional celebrations, our approval ratings are increasing. Because of your choices.”

His expression darkens.

The room grows cold and frost starts to crawl across the windowpanes at his back. My stomach twists, but I won’t show my nerves.

“But then I heard rumors,” Dad says. “My contacts told me that plans are being made in other winter Holidays to travel here. And your change in behavior felt too… convenient.” He holds up the letters. “Did you honestly believe you could conspire behind my back?”

“Yes.” No sense denying it. No sense cowering to him.

Dad flinches. “I told you Christmas’s ambitions in confidence.”

“Your ambitions are harmful and cruel,” I say, and I try to sound level.

This is it. This is my one chance to convince him, somehow, someway, that what he’s doing is fucked up. That he can still be the Christmas King I believed he once was. I have to be calm. I can’t mess this up.

Not this.

“We can’t control everyone,” I tell him, hoping my voice isn’t shaking as much as I think it is. “We can’t be the singular force at the head of something so large. Christmas, Easter, whatever Holidays you’re thinking of controlling—it’s too much. This isn’t how it has to be. This isn’t how it should be.”

“And you, who calls himself Coal and has only ever made a mess of our Holiday, believe that you have a better vision than decades of work? You went behind my back and tried to undo all the systems I have put in place to ensure this Holiday, your Holiday, is secure.”

“Whatever security you feel you’ve gotten has only come at the cost of destabilizing other Holidays. You’re terrified of Christmas losing joy, of us slipping into obscurity; I get that, Dad, I do, but you’re creating the very thing you’re afraid of. Don’t you see that?”

“All I have done, everything, has been to make sure you and your brother never have to worry about your future. To take care of the millions of people who depend on us.”

I pity him and I’m terrified of him but this anger has grown into something bigger and wilder and it will chew me to pieces. “I care about them too. This has always been about them. You told me once it was our job to make the world happy. I’ve always believed that, and I always held onto the belief that you still felt that way. All the people in North Pole City who think we’re so infallible—we should live up to their opinion of us. We should try to be—”

“And where would we get the resources we need to keep Christmas afloat if not for the joy gained through these Holidays? What is your plan to care for our responsibilities, to provide the services to the world that people have come to depend on, if we undo our whole structure?”

“We don’t need that joy, and you know it. If we stopped focusing on spreading globally, we wouldn’t need the extra joy. We can share success with the other winter Holidays. We can partner with them. If we bring the other winter Holidays into our ruling, if we work on a fair, balanced collaboration and use our magic to focus on things that foster actual joy, we can stretch so much further, together, not one—”

“You got these ideas,” Dad interrupts, his mind working behind his narrowing eyes, “from that Halloween Prince. Didn’t you?”

I’ve seen fury on him before.

This is new.

Pointed.

And that’s where my confidence bucks. Where I can’t hide the cyclone gaining ground in my lungs, ripping the breath out of my body, and I know Dad sees that little flutter of a gasp.

“Leave him out of this,” I say.

He takes a step forward, and I go perfectly still, a deer in a hunter’s sight. Kris, he comes closer, beside me, and I flash back to one of the first times after Mom left, one of the first times I’d actively gotten in trouble, and Kris had stood by my side and we’d both watched Dad lose his mind at me, and it hadn’t felt real. This couldn’t have been our father, this screaming, terrifying man.

He’s real now.

Dad studies me, his rage held at bay by what he’s reading on me. “Their prince has been manipulating you. I had thought inviting him here would serve to remind Halloween of the benefit in staying out of Christmas’s path. What would their allies think, I wonder, if they found out that Halloween’s heir was plotting to overthrow me? How does something like that fit into the autumn collective’s ideals of fairness?”

Cold horror spiderwebs out across my body.

I stammer. “That’s not what—”

“You were not manipulated?”

“ No, I—this was me, this was just me—”

“Then this is your mistake only. And you will write to those leaders you summoned.” He tosses the letters at me; they rebound off my chest, scatter to the trashed floor around us. “You will write and tell them that they are not to set foot in Christmas unless I, personally, invite them.”

My lips part, I have no idea what I’ll say, but Dad cuts me off.

“You have proven to be only what I most feared you would become, Nicholas: unworthy of this role. You are still nothing more than the careless, selfish person who endangered our entire Holiday with the New Koah fiasco. You are a disappointment to this family, and—”

I blink, and Kris is in front of me.

“How dare you,” Kris hisses. “How dare you speak to Coal that way.”

Dad whips his glare on Kris. “Do not think you are exempt from this, Kristopher. Nicholas has long been the negative influence holding you back, and I—”

“He’s not a negative influence, and if you keep talking about him like that—”

“Do not interrupt me! For too long, I have allowed him to slander our name —”

Kris’s shoulders hunch. “Shut the fuck up!”

Years overlap in this moment. Years of breaths held because every time I asked how much worse he could get, he’d stun me speechless, until we arrive here, the birth of all my worst fears.

Dad’s arm moves. It moves and Kris screamed at him and they’re fighting, all out fighting, over me.

I grab Kris in an agitated scramble and yank him back and hurl myself in front of him, hands up, body all fragile, breakable eggshells.

My eyes slam shut. And I hold. And go, “Please, please,” because that’s what I’ve been saying for years.

Eternity passes. Remakes itself in the air around my lifted arms, in the gasps of Kris who fell to the ground behind me, and I wait.

I reached too far. I forgot who I am, I forgot everything and tried to become someone too different, and this is my punishment, an extricating reminder that this is what happens when I try.

I did this. I caused this, again, and I’m falling apart.

“I’ll do what you want,” I say from far, far away. “I’ll write to the other Holidays. I’ll stop it. I’ll stop everything, I swear.”

I cut my eyes open.

To see Dad, his hand only stretched out into the distance, raised to make a point.

I watch him realize what I’d thought was happening. I watch the connection sizzle across him, his gaze going to his hand, to my lifted arms—my thumb, with Hex’s skull ring—to Kris, on the ground.

Dad’s glare goes blank.

I’m standing in front of Kris but I’m standing in front of Hex too and I’m more barricade than person.

Kris climbs to his feet. I hear him say my name, muffled, a soft plea.

Still unreadable, Dad pulls a small tablet out of a pocket on his suit coat and hits a button. “Wren.”

A static crackle. Then, “Yes, sir?”

“Have the Halloween Prince begin packing. He is no longer welcome in my palace.”

A beat. “Yes, sir.”

Dad shoves the tablet back into his coat.

His gaze is on the wall behind my head. He speaks to it. “You will marry Iris.” His voice is entirely emotionless. He, who can conjure emotion at will to appease cameras, has none to show us now. “You will shore up Easter for us. It is the least you can do to fix what you have damaged.”

“Don’t blame this on Hex,” I say, brokenly. “I’ll do it. Just… stop.”

Dad twists to me. His eyes are bloodshot, maybe, or I just want to see something like regret in him. “Everything you’ve done, and that’s all you have to say?”

I lower my hands. It’s the only response I give.

“Send those letters rescinding your invitations, stop interfering in matters that do not concern you, and there will be no repercussions,” he says.

Dad steps around Kris and me. I flinch; I can’t help it, all my senses have been ripped to the surface of my skin.

He leaves, door shutting behind him.

I thought I could change things.

Me.

And I almost got Kris—

I can’t think. Can’t find it in me to do anything that could fix this—why can’t I fix this —

I hear Kris texting. Then Iris is here, and she’s next to me on my bed, arm around me.

Kris swings a chair close and sits in front of me. “Coal? Say something.”

I sniff and shake my head, at nothing, at everything. “I have to go.”

Iris tightens her grip on me. “Coal—”

“I have to go .” I shove out of bed, but Kris rises up to meet me and doesn’t step aside.

It’s going to gut me, looking into his eyes. So I do.

His are strained. Downright desolate.

I was the one to drag us here, because of course I would be. Even when I try to change, I fuck it all up.

“I have to go,” I beg him.

His jaw works. He dips his head and steps aside.

Dad is sending Hex back home. It’s what Hex wants, what I want for him, what he was always meant to do.

But I tear out of my room like a madman.