Chapter 2 #2
Dougal’s Apothecary was an inconspicuous little place in Snowlight Square with a stone face and carved-ice windows, near Gliss’s house and Lattice’s Bakery.
Periwinkle had never been inside the apothecary, but she’d peeked in at its shelves filled with jars of herbs and tiny bottles full of tinctures.
She’d always thought it must smell nice inside.
Periwinkle didn’t know Dougal personally. But everyone knew what had happened to him.
“Your priorities are misplaced,” Dougal said too loudly, jutting a finger. “The winter fairies are clamoring for the start of the Frost Festival and the First Frost Ball, but the threat of illness—”
“I am not distracted with the Frost Festival or the ball,” Lord Milori said sternly.
“But I mean, even if he were, who could blame him?” Gliss whispered, making a face.
“Everyone says the Frost Festival’s really exciting, and we’ve all worked so hard.
Fairies who aren’t going to the Mainland should get a break and a chance to celebrate.
Even if, like, we can’t go.” The Frost Festival would begin after the fairies bound for the Mainland left.
It would be six days of feasts and games and celebrations, with the First Frost Ball—a masquerade, at the Hall of Winter—marking its end.
Periwinkle and her friends always missed it while they were away, but the Frost Festival was supposed to be one of the most fabulous events held in the Winter Woods.
“True,” Fletcher said. “But healing supplies feel kind of important.”
Spike just frowned. “Poor Dougal.”
“As I said, our supplies will arrive in a timely fashion,” Lord Milori said. “We will not have to go to extraordinary lengths to retrieve them.”
“Forgive me if I struggle to trust your assessment of the situation,” Dougal said, lips pursed tightly. “Last time, we were the ones to pay the price for your mistakes.”
Periwinkle drew in a sharp breath, glancing wordlessly—instinctively—to Spike and Gliss.
The music fairies had stopped playing and singing by now, and snowflakes had stopped tumbling down from the trees. Periwinkle and her friends exchanged knowing looks.
They knew what Dougal meant. The whole Winter Woods knew.
Dougal’s wife, Selene, had gotten lost retrieving flu supplies last year—near Snow Globe Mountain, everyone thought.
Nobody could be positive, though. Because Selene had never come back.
“I have much on my mind,” Lord Milori said.
His voice was as even as ever, like somehow Dougal’s accusation hadn’t ruffled him at all.
“The Winter Woods are mine to lead and protect. The festival and the ball are, indeed, priorities. But if you’re truly insinuating that merrymaking has distracted me, you’ve become more contrary than I believed, Dougal. ”
“And you remain blind to your own limitations,” Dougal snapped. “Do let me know when you’ve remembered them again.”
He flew away from Juniper Glade then. And though Lord Milori gently gestured to the music-talents and snowflake-talents that they ought to continue, the whole party felt like a snowflake knocked off course on its way to the ground.
Gliss was always the best at smoothing over a situation, so she was the first to go back to dancing, dragging Slush back along with her as the musicians struck up again.
When Flare went back to fussing over pastries and Spike asked Sled something about winter animal movements, Periwinkle was left more or less alone with Fletcher, watching snowflakes fall sporadically from the juniper trees overhead.
“Do you want to dance?” Fletcher asked. Periwinkle hesitated.
“It’s not that I don’t,” she said. “But…”
Her voice trailed off. Fletcher waited patiently for her to finish whatever she’d meant to say.
Periwinkle prodded her feelings experimentally, just once more. Her feelings rolled over like a possum playing dead.
“But it’s not that you do, either,” Fletcher finally supplied, when she’d been quiet for too long.
Fletcher had heard a lot of but from her over the last few months.
Staring up at him, searching his face for something even Periwinkle herself couldn’t name, she wondered desperately if maybe Spike was right, and they were inevitable, and she was just being too picky.
Periwinkle didn’t dislike spending time with Fletcher; that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that being with Fletcher felt like waiting—and not like she was holding her breath, anticipating something. It felt like hanging around, passing the time.
But Periwinkle knew the anticipation of searching for magic, of waiting on dreams. And she wanted that feeling. She wanted to feel like she was waiting for something, not waiting for something to pass.
“I’m going to call it an early night,” she said to him quietly. She nodded toward Lord Milori, who was making his way toward his snowy owl. “Apart from anything else, all of that was kind of upsetting.”
Fletcher nodded, ever gracious. “I understand,” he said. “Do you want me to fly home with you?”
Spike and Sled looked over, surprised. “You’re leaving?” Spike asked. Periwinkle avoided her eyes.
“Thanks, Fletcher. But I’m good,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning, okay?” she added, feeling a pang of guilt at Spike’s curious expression as she flew away.
It seemed like Periwinkle felt guilty more and more often, these days. Over Fletcher’s feelings, over her own secrets.
Because who was she anymore, hiding things from her friends? She felt like another person keeping the truth about her dreams from Gliss and Spike. But would they understand? Periwinkle could never be sure.
Yet there was no denying her relief as she cleared Juniper Glade’s tree line and the night grew quiet around her.
While Gliss lived in Snowlight Square, and Spike’s home was in an evergreen near Chilly Falls, Periwinkle lived in a little snowball of a place high above the Frost Forest. It was where she went to sleep every night, wondering where her dreams would take her next.
Where every morning she woke up, trying to understand what was happening inside her own head.
It might’ve helped if she could talk to someone about it. Lord Milori might have known something, or Dewey, the Keeper of All Fairy Knowledge. But the dreams had to be kept a secret from them, as well as from her friends.
At first, she hadn’t felt the need to talk to anyone.
Because at first, the dreams had just been hodgepodges of her thoughts.
They’d been silly nonsense dreams, like the one where she’d sugared birch trees like bonbons.
There had been a funny dream about a snowball fight with Gliss and Spike, and a mildly anxious dream where she’d been late leaving for the Mainland.
She’d once had a very confusing dream where she’d tried to get an iced chamomile tea from her favorite tearoom, but they’d told her they only had ferrets and rabbits in stock.
But I don’t want a ferret or a rabbit, she’d said. I want tea! And the sparrow man running the tearoom had just shrugged and pointed to a group of animals in the corner. One huge white rabbit had blinked its glassy black eyes at her, like it didn’t know what it was doing there, either.
The nightmares had started a few weeks after that. And in them, she’d been afraid as she never had in her waking life.
It wasn’t that nothing bad ever happened in Pixie Hollow; accidents could happen anywhere.
But one of Periwinkle’s nightmares saw the Winter Woods’ Pixie Dust Well completely dry up—just disappear, like the wind had blown it away.
Another nightmare held a snowstorm so ferocious that it ripped trees from the ground by their roots, tore off whole branches.
Periwinkle had been overwhelmed by an inexplicable sense of horror, of sickness, both of them strange and terrible new feelings.
In the nightmares, a haze of violet obscured the world around her. There was chaos, there was destruction, there was bone-deep terror.
But there was also something else.
Even in Periwinkle’s darkest nightmares, there was always a spark of—something. She couldn’t remember what it was the next day. What it had looked like, or how she’d found it, or even, really, what it had done. But she knew it had been there.
It had felt like a friend standing beside her. Like a hand to hold in the dark.
These nightmares weren’t like her other dreams; they didn’t look anything like her life during the day. She couldn’t understand why they’d begun.
But she had come to realize that dreams were an in-between space. They were just as full of possibility as the borders between the seasons. Anything could, and did, happen there.
The nightmares had nearly driven her to ask Lord Milori for guidance, or Dewey. But Lord Milori wouldn’t have been happy to find out Periwinkle had been tiptoeing around near the border of Winter and Spring, for one thing. Dewey would’ve worried.
Still. If she’d only had the nightmares to reckon with, she might have done it. They probably would’ve looked for a way to make them stop.
And Periwinkle wasn’t ready for the dreams to go away.
Because the dreams felt like finding a new way to frost. They were like finding a new way to fly. Periwinkle felt like she’d found a new way to see the world.
Every dream, every nightmare, even, had that spark of something in it. A light that could outshine a nightmare. That hand reaching out to her.
And Periwinkle was determined to hold on to it.