Chapter 28
“Good Harlow. Good—good Harlow!” Periwinkle’s voice was shaking.
She’d never had a flight as wild this one. And she wasn’t even actually flying.
Periwinkle gripped the sides of the sled as she and Weaver raced off from the Hall of Winter to look for Stella’s workshop, pulled by an extremely rambunctious wolf pup. Snow Globe Mountain loomed in the distance, its slopes the deep, moody purple of a bruise.
The storm around them was vicious. But despite it—or maybe because of it—the good news that she’d shoved away outside the Hall of Winter earlier had begun to settle inside her.
The storm was just a storm. The Pixie Dust Tree was safe.
And whatever happened that night, her friends would come home from the Mainland.
But they still had to destroy the nightmares back at the hall. They still had to wake the slumbering Winter Woods.
“How are we going to find this place?” Periwinkle asked. The wind tore at her hair, carried her voice away. “Remind me what the Keeper’s notes said?”
“They said to find the thread,” Weaver said grimly, shifting the reins to steer Harlow toward the mountain.
Though Legs had peered out with an eye or two to see where they were going, he’d gone back afterward to hiding safely at the bottom of Weaver’s pocket.
“That should be easy in a blizzard. Luckily, the story about Stella and the drum mentions that she sat and looked out a second star–side window while she planned. Meaning—”
“There has to be an entrance on the second star–facing side,” Periwinkle finished. “A window, or a door—something.”
The wind rose. Harlow threw back her head and howled along with it. Somewhere in the distance, Periwinkle heard the crash of a falling tree.
Find the thread. It seemed impossible, between the dark and the storm and all the caves and covert places the Keeper had warned her about on the mountain.
It was also impossible not to think about Selene, who’d gone missing on a night like this, in a storm like this.
If it had happened to Selene, it could happen to anyone.
Glancing at Weaver, Periwinkle wondered which he felt more strongly: fear, or grief.
She herself was a whirl of more feelings than she’d ever felt at a time. Weaver had broken her heart and spun her nightmares, but he’d also spun her dreams and tried to undo the damage he’d done. She’d hardly been able to believe it when she saw the dreams glowing in his hands.
But she’d chosen to forgive him and believe in him, just as she’d chosen to believe in the dream magic. To trust the web that had caught her friends, the needle and the thread that had guided her.
It had terrified her, to forgive and believe and make herself vulnerable again. But there was no way forward without doing it. And Periwinkle—Periwinkle was not going back.
Standing next to her in the sled, Weaver caught her hand and squeezed it. Periwinkle gave a trembling squeeze in return.
Then suddenly, something—caught.
For a second, Periwinkle thought the sled had hit a rock.
But the catch wasn’t beneath their runners; it was inside Periwinkle, knotting itself through her chest, through her heart, through her wings.
An invisible something looped her up and tugged her forward.
When Weaver gave a startled gasp, the two traded glances, and Periwinkle knew he felt it, too.
Just as she had in her dream the night before. A thread, anchoring her through the gale.
Connecting them to each other, and to something else.
“Find the thread,” she said, and Weaver nodded.
It was nothing she could see to follow, not like in the Bobbin Wood or the Sapphire Mine. No one could have marked it on a map for them. But the feeling was unmistakable.
They hadn’t found the thread. But the thread had found them. And they were meant to find whatever lay at its end.
So the two of them rode on. The sled bumped and juddered over rocky ground and brush, swishing past wildly rocking fir trees and small frozen ponds with leaves and pebbles and debris skittering across their surfaces.
The wind bayed, interrupted now and again by Harlow’s own cries, and periodically the path split up ahead of them.
But the pull inside Weaver and Periwinkle guided them onward, carrying them around to the second star side of Snow Globe Mountain.
Soon, the path began to climb. The wind beat even harder. “Do you see anything?” Periwinkle called. She blinked hard against the fierce wind, searching desperately for a window or a door or any sign of a fairy’s presence.
Weaver shook his head, hollering over the wind. “Nothing.”
They were just rounding the mountainside when it happened.
A burst of wind kicked up, throwing snow into their eyes. A tree ahead of them crashed onto the trail; Harlow yelped and tore away to the left, knocking the sled off balance.
“Harlow!” Periwinkle cried.
“I’ve got her,” Weaver yelled back. He crouched, then sprang into low flight, landing quickly on Harlow’s back as the sled regained its balance.
But the wind was too strong. Rounding a bend in the trail, the sled’s runners hit a bump and tipped sideways—and Periwinkle, Weaver, and Harlow were flung against the mountainside.
For a moment, Periwinkle was afraid she’d actually hurt herself. She tested her body slowly—wings, back, neck, arms, legs, hands, feet. Finding piece by piece that she was all right, Periwinkle moved slowly to stand. “Weaver?” she called into the storm. “Harlow?” But no response came.
Periwinkle thought of Selene, alone here on Snow Globe Mountain at the end of her life, and felt sick with fear.
But she could also feel the tug of the thread in her chest. It had led them here. She had to keep going.
Squinting through the snow, Periwinkle saw no sign of the sled or her friends. She staggered forward, clinging to the side of the mountain. “Weaver!” she called again. “Harlow!”
Nothing came back to her but the shriek of the wind. She kept moving, left hand on the mountain’s stone face.
Suddenly, Periwinkle found herself looking into a gap in the rock. Weaver was there, pushing himself slowly to his feet beside Harlow, who was panting heavily.
Periwinkle gave a gasp of relief. “There you are!”
“Yes.” Weaver grimaced. “But where are we?”
Periwinkle shook her head. She had no idea; she’d never been up on this mountain, and she couldn’t make out anything down on the ground below their path.
But suddenly, through the heavily falling snow, Periwinkle spotted something glittering above the horizon. She stared hard, holding her breath.
And there, from the gap in the mountainside, she saw a gap in the clouds. Through it was the second star, twinkling over the Never Sea.
“Weaver!” Periwinkle whirled around.
“I know,” he said. But he wasn’t staring toward the sea or the sky. He was looking inward, farther into the gap, toward the heart of the mountain. She moved to his side, staring in disbelief at what he’d found, and gave a gasp of wonder.
Not a window to the workshop, she saw. Not a door.
It was a web. A golden web, as delicate as starlight and glittering with icicles like tiny diamonds, was strung between the icy rock walls. From top to bottom it was half again as tall as Weaver, and its smallest opening was the size of a fairy’s hand.
Periwinkle had seen the web before, of course. But she’d never been close enough to appreciate how beautiful it felt. Not enough to sense the light and the joy and the craft pouring off it, there in the gap in the rock.
This, she knew, was the end of the thread.
When Periwinkle laid a hand on the web, it stretched, fibers shifting and sliding to create an opening large enough for them to step through. Weaver and Periwinkle exchanged glances.
“Ready?” she asked. He nodded.
They left Harlow digging a hole in the snow and catching snowflakes on her tongue, passed through the web, and stepped inside the workshop. For a moment, they just stood together, gazing around them.
“Periwinkle,” Weaver whispered. “We found it.”
The workshop was a globe of light and color. It had been built in a natural mountain cave, the walls one huge pale pink geode that sparkled and reflected all the moonlight and starlight that streamed in through the second star–side windows.
In one corner a huge silver frame for stretching woven material stood beside a row of dress forms, half-dressed in what looked like fairy sleep clothes.
A woodpile, probably for melting ice to full fibers, stood beside a large fireplace carved directly into the pink geode walls.
Crystal-topped workbenches made of silver and gold crowded the floor, covered in tools and half-completed projects, and a dusty row of niches in one glittering wall was filled with equally dusty jars of raw dye ingredients.
And then there were the towering shelves of books.
It wasn’t a second Hall of Winter, high up in the mountain. But there were easily dozens—if not hundreds—of books in Stella’s collection. Periwinkle wasn’t surprised to see Weaver drawn to the shelves first.
She’d told him once that they were fairies, not pirates. But she felt like they’d found a lost treasure, all the same, and she could see Weaver felt it, too.
As she looked around at the tables and tools that filled the workshop, Periwinkle thought she could imagine Stella there, spending hours honing her talent, dreaming of ways to help her friend.
What she didn’t see—not anywhere—was a loom.
“We should hurry,” Weaver said. But Periwinkle saw the reluctance in his face, the longing as he ran his hands over the spines. A small sketch was propped on the bookshelf, as well. “Hey,” he said. “Look at that.”
The sketch was clean and minimal, a color drawing on a snowdrop petal a little smaller than Periwinkle’s hand, featuring three fairies hovering close beside one another.
In the middle was a fairy with icy pale skin, pale yellow hair, and a serious look behind her glasses; two sparrow men flanked her, one dark-skinned with high cheekbones and elegant collarbones and dark hair cut close to his scalp, and the other stocky, light-skinned, brown-haired, and mischievous-looking, with an iridescent spider on his shoulder.
Stella, Orion, Morpheus. Periwinkle knew them immediately. Stella’s name was written in tiny letters at the bottom. Weaver blinked hard, and Periwinkle squeezed his shoulder before moving away to search the workshop.
She wanted to give him time. She knew what it meant to him to be here, to have come to the end of the thread and found himself not alone.
The problem was that finding the loom shouldn’t have taken any searching at all.
The workshop was large, the height of six fairies from floor to ceiling, at least. But it was all one story, with no other rooms or separate levels. There would have been nowhere to hide the huge frame of a loom like the one Weaver used in Floss’s workshop.
Still. Periwinkle scanned every corner of the room, trying to ignore the anxiety growing in her stomach as the loom continued to not appear.
She poked her head behind the stretching frame, shifted snow-dusted bolts of flax and cotton piled up by one wall, rummaged around a large cabinet full of sewing notions and, funnily enough, a pile of bodiless mannequin arms that all fell out when she opened the door.
Periwinkle picked one up and turned to Weaver.
“Need a hand?” she asked, giving a panicked laugh.
But the look on his face cut her to the heart. “What?” she asked.
She dropped the mannequin arm and crossed to where he stood at a workbench, staring down at a book and something shaped like a picture frame, looking bereft. “This is one of Stella’s journals.”
“What does it say?”
“Plenty.” Weaver cleared his throat, pointing to one of the pages. “But this is the most important thing.”
At first, Periwinkle didn’t know what she was looking at, or why his expression had nausea swelling like an oily bubble in her stomach. Then she noticed a drawing of something that looked a little like the picture frame on the table beside him.
A moment later, though, she realized that it wasn’t a picture frame at all. It was a simple wooden rectangle, with dozens of tiny, smooth sticks poking up from its edge like icicles.
“It’s a hand loom. The old kind,” Weaver said thickly. “It was Stella’s.”
He picked up the rectangle—or part of it. A few of the little sticks fell off when he lifted it. Most of the frame stayed on the workbench. That was when Periwinkle finally understood.
The loom was broken.