Elowen Briar had waited eleven years for the old woman at the seed market to sell her the seasonal tree seed, and this morning the old woman finally named a price. Elowen counted out the coins on the wooden counter. Her hands shook. Her flower crown slipped forward over one eye. She pushed it back and asked to see the seed before she paid. The old woman opened a carved box. Inside sat a cluster of shimmering pods, packed tight like a small pinecone. The colors moved as Elowen leaned closer. Green at the crown. Yellow in the middle. Deep purple along the bottom. Each pod caught the light like wet glass. Elowen had grown moonvine and singing moss and flowers her great-grandmother had bred by candlelight. None of them shimmered like this. "One seed," the old woman said. "Grown right, it becomes a tree that holds every season at once. Grown wrong, it rots the soil for a mile." Elowen paid. She walked home with the box pressed to her chest and did not stop to speak to anyone. Her greenhouse stood behind the cottage her family had tended for six generations. Inside, the air smelled of wet clay and crushed mint. She cleared the center bed. She mixed loam from four corners of the garden, one scoop from each, the way her grandmother had written in the margins of an old journal. She pressed the seed cluster into the soil and covered it. Then she reached for the tools she had spent a year preparing. The potion sat on the shelf in its glass bottle, the liquid inside moving in slow bands of color. She uncorked it and let three drops fall onto the soil. The bands shifted from pink to green as the drops left the bottle. The soil darkened where they landed. She opened the greenhouse door and whistled twice. The moth came down from the rafters, wings wide as her outstretched arms, each panel patterned with a different season. It settled on the rim of the planting bed. It touched the soil once with a long antenna and then lifted away to wait. Elowen sat on the floor and watched. For a long time nothing happened. Then a green shoot pushed up through the dirt. A second shoot uncurled beside it, brown and bare. A third came up crowned with a white blossom. A fourth carried a single red leaf. Four shoots. Four seasons. All from one seed. Elowen laughed once, sharp, and pressed her hand to her mouth. Then the shoots began to fight. The bare winter stem thickened and shoved against the spring bud. The summer shoot arched over the autumn leaf and blocked its light. The soil at the base cracked. A thin line of frost spread across the clay pot and met a curl of steam rising from the other side. The seed had taken. The tree was at war with itself.