Chapter 3
Periwinkle woke up looking at the night sky.
Her thoughts were slushy, sluggish. She knew she’d fallen asleep in her bed, tucked beneath her favorite feather blanket, the dregs of an iced chamomile tea on her nightstand.
When Periwinkle had finally shut her eyes, she’d expected to be in her own room the next time she opened them, seeing the sunrise the day of their trip to the Mainland.
But though she glimpsed what might’ve been the dawn in her periphery, the moon was still high, and the stars shimmered brightly overhead.
Still, an unpleasant heat lingered somewhere around her stomach. Why?
And then Periwinkle remembered. She’d had a nightmare.
Somehow, it had brought her here—barefoot, deep in the woods, not far from the Pixie Dust Well. And when she looked to the sky again, she saw that what she’d taken for the sunrise was something else entirely.
Strangely colored lights hovered in little wisps just over her head, some of them luminous green and rose and blue, others a slick, oily black-purple hardly visible against the night sky.
They floated around her temples and the crown of her head like a halo, as if they’d been sprinkled with pixie dust. Periwinkle sat up and nudged at one small, rose-colored wisp of cloud with her index finger, but it disappeared into her skin the moment she touched it.
“What are you?” she whispered to the night.
Periwinkle didn’t expect the night to answer. But it did.
“They’re your dreams,” said a voice behind her. Periwinkle turned, startled to find that she wasn’t alone, and fluttered up from her place on the ground.
The owner of the voice was a sparrow man.
Another winter fairy, of course, but she couldn’t quite place him.
He was much taller than she was but just as pale, with thick, tousled black hair that curled around his ears and forehead and just above the high collar of his raven-feather waistcoat.
Despite his relaxed posture—he was almost slouching, really—his cheeks were flushed, like he’d flown over to wherever they were in a hurry.
His most striking trait, though, was his eyes.
They were almost black, the dark of a night that promised something—a party, a story, a dream.
But despite that promise, the look in them made Periwinkle feel like she was reckoning with a nocturnal animal in the dark.
Like he could look at her and see everything, and she could see nothing at all.
“How did you know I was dreaming?” she asked. His brow furrowed.
“Because,” he said, like it was simple. Obvious. “I dream, too.”
Obvious, like seeing dawn on the horizon when the second star was still out. Simple, like waking to find yourself wearing the aurora borealis like a crown.
Just four little words. And yet, hearing them, Periwinkle could hardly breathe.
“You dream, too?” Her voice sounded airless. “How?”
The sparrow man frowned. “It started right after my Arrival. Didn’t you…?”
He trailed off. When Periwinkle didn’t fill in the silence, he spoke again. “I was nearby when I heard you cry out. I thought someone might be hurt.”
“No, I’m not h—What is that?” Periwinkle yelped.
A spider the size of her pinky nail had just hopped out of the sparrow man’s breast pocket. It sat on his shoulder now, glowing iridescent and staring at her out of eight liquid black eyes.
“He’s a spider.”
“I know he’s a spider.” Periwinkle grimaced, fluttering backward a bit. She couldn’t decide if she was more curious or repelled. “Why is he on your shoulder? Why is he the same color as my dreams?”
The sparrow man shrugged. “I think he is a dream. I haven’t quite figured him out. But I woke up one day, and there he was. His name is Legs.” He paused. “Because, you know. He has so many legs.”
“Yeah,” she said faintly. “I got it.” Periwinkle felt almost dizzy, like she might drift out of her own body and float wingless into the sky.
For three whole months, she’d kept her dreaming to herself. She’d been living half inside her own head, mesmerized by what her mind could do, unable to tell anyone else for fear of being misunderstood or losing the dreams completely.
And here he had appeared, like magic, somehow able to understand without any explanation at all.
She realized then that she knew what to call his spider, but not him. “Um, my name’s Periwinkle, by the way,” she added uncertainly. “I’m a frost-talent. I—”
“I know who you are.” He dipped his head, eyes significant, never leaving hers. “I’m Weaver.”
She bit her lip. “I know I recognize you. We’ve just never—I mean, I’ve never—”
“We move in different circles,” he said. “It’s fine.”
He said it almost neutrally. Periwinkle might not have noticed the hint of sarcasm in his voice if she hadn’t been paying attention. But Periwinkle was paying attention, and for her part, she felt more than a hint of embarrassment.
She should know him; the Winter Woods weren’t impossibly large. And it hadn’t escaped her that it was the second time that night she’d met someone and not known their name.
But Weaver ignored her sheepishness, looking again to the lights drifting over her head, floating higher and higher like snowflakes caught on a breeze. “What were you dreaming about?”
Periwinkle tensed. “Why?”
“Long story,” Weaver said. “Hold still.”
Periwinkle held more than still; she held her breath. The world seemed to slow around her as he stepped close, slid a glove over each long-fingered, broad-knuckled hand, and caught at the dreams, pulling them out of the air to cup them in his palms.
He worked at them carefully, separating the dark-colored dreams from the lighter ones, their glow reflected in the deep wells of his eyes. Then he put the dark ones in a black spider-silk pouch and stuffed it in his pocket.
Periwinkle’s breath caught. “How did you do that? You touched them, and they didn’t melt away.”
“Of course they didn’t.” Weaver frowned. “I’m a dream-talent. I work with dreams.”
Periwinkle had never heard of a dream-talent. She thought hard, heart beginning to race. “My dreaming doesn’t feel like a talent. It’s not like when I’m working frost magic,” she said. “Frosting is something I do. Dreaming is just something that happens to me.”
It didn’t sound like it just happened to Weaver.
It sounded like maybe he could help her understand what was going on inside her head.
“Ah.” His shoulders fell, almost imperceptibly. “So if your dreams didn’t start when you arrived, when did they start?”
Periwinkle hesitated. “I found something,” she said. “Near Spring one evening.”
His eyes narrowed. “What did you find?”
“Nothing. I mean—well, not nothing.” She was babbling now. “Something. But I find stuff all the time. It’s kind of my thing.”
“Okay, Sparkles.” He exhaled slowly through his nose. “Specifically, what did you find that you think caused you to start dreaming?”
Sparkles? Periwinkle’s hackles went up, but she pushed past her irritation. “It looked sort of like—” Then she stopped and nodded at the light-colored dreams Weaver still held cradled in his palm. “Like that.”
The dream was like a soft white-petaled flower, or a tuft of cotton. Like fiber made of shimmer and light and color.
It looked like the thing she’d picked up off the ground three short months before.
“I found it near the border of Spring. And when I picked it up, it melted into my hand. Inside my skin. The dreams started after that.”
She was whispering, though they were the only two there in the woods. But Periwinkle wouldn’t have broken the delicate quiet between them any more than she would have shredded a bird’s nest or shattered a line of icicles.
In the wide, strange light of the moon, Periwinkle almost thought she could have been dreaming then, except for the piercing look Weaver was giving her from beneath his eyelashes.
“What were you dreaming about tonight?” Weaver asked again.
Periwinkle didn’t particularly want to talk about her nightmare. But she remembered at once where sleep had taken her.
In her dream, she’d been frosting a field on the Mainland with Spike and Gliss.
It had been early morning, the grass spiky and dry and winter-pale, the sky as white as a pearl.
The air had been so cold and clear that Periwinkle could see the breath of a family of soft-eyed cows trundling out of their barn.
And there had been something in her hand—something like a thread, bright as gold, both running ahead of her and trailing behind like her glow.
When the world had turned a hazy shade of violet, as it always did during her nightmares, everything but that thread had disappeared. Somehow, then, Periwinkle had known she was back in the Winter Woods.
Somehow, she had sensed danger.
But the thread hadn’t left her. She’d held on to it as she flew over woods and glades, as the wind had blown up and batted her around, carrying the overpowering smell of something gone sick or rotten.
She’d been nearly to the Pixie Dust Root and the well when she’d heard a horrible creaking, wrenching sound.
Periwinkle had woken up after that. But even now, remembering the dream turned her stomach.
She crossed her arms, shifting uncomfortably beneath his scrutiny. “What if I don’t want to tell you?”
Weaver seemed to decide something, at that point.
He took a little bag from his pocket, tucked the light dreams inside it, and put it away as he’d done with the dark dreams before. Then, with a flutter of his wings, he moved deeper into the woods.
“Where are you going?” Periwinkle asked.
“Follow me and find out,” he said with a shrug, hands in his pockets. “Or don’t.”
He flew into the woods without a backward glance.
For just a minute, Periwinkle thought about letting him go and taking herself back home. About going back to her bed, back to sleep, to wake up ready for the Mainland like she’d meant to do all along.
But Periwinkle had never known how to let things lie. She’d always wanted to know what magic lay hidden, waiting to be found. She wanted to understand her dreams, and where they’d come from, and what they meant.
She’d have been lying if she’d said she didn’t want to know more about Weaver, too.
She watched his retreating back as he flew away, the wind catching at his dark curls, the starlight catching on his wings.
Then Periwinkle pushed herself into the air and flew after him, wondering if she’d completely lost her mind.