Chapter 6 #2
As Weaver stared at her walls and the frost patterns she, Gliss, and Spike had made while they hung out, Periwinkle realized she hadn’t considered how odd it would feel to have a stranger in her home.
After all, Spike and Gliss stayed the night all the time, and she had get-togethers and dinners with the rest of their friends on a pretty regular basis.
But Gliss and Spike were gone, away on the Mainland. Weaver didn’t even know what was in which cabinet.
“Did you remember everything you needed?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said shortly.
“Have you eaten?”
“I’m fine, Sparkles.”
Is that why you’re standing in the middle of my living room like an ice sculpture? she wanted to ask. Was it possible he was a little nervous, too? It wouldn’t have occurred to Periwinkle that someone so arrogant could feel just as uncertain as she did, but she began to suspect he might be.
“Well, I’ve got tea steeping, super frosty,” she said, pointing back toward her kitchen corner.
“I made you a pallet over here by my wardrobe, so you’ve got a bit of your own space while you hang out.
It’s got extra-fluffy owl-feather blankets, and a few extra pillows, but let me know if you need more.
I need a lot of pillows to sleep.” Would Periwinkle be able to fall asleep with Weaver just across the room? Doubtful. But she’d have to try.
She thought again of her friends hard at work on the Mainland, of the winter fairies flitting in and out of Lattice’s and through the night market, and felt more determined than ever to protect the Pixie Dust Root, and the Winter Woods, and every precious piece of their magic.
Besides. Weaver knew her big secret—her dreaming. With that out in the open, it wasn’t like she had anything left to hide.
“Do you know what it will be like when you collect my dreams?” Periwinkle asked, padding through to the kitchen and coming back with their tea. She gave Weaver his, then sat cross-legged on her bed with her own.
He watched her narrowly. “What do you mean?”
“Well. Will I dream all night, or just for a little while?” she asked. “How much will you be able to get? Will it hurt?”
“I mean, I’ve never really done this before, either.
” Weaver settled awkwardly onto his pallet, so tall he made the drop to the ground look a lot farther than it was.
Then he nudged the feather blanket away, like soft, pleasant things made him uncomfortable.
“Anyway, I don’t know about how long or how much.
But—well. How did it feel before, when I took your dreams? ”
“I didn’t really feel anything.”
“Hm.” He considered this. “Well, they were already starting to drift.”
“Will you see what I’m dreaming?” Periwinkle wasn’t sure she wanted anyone to see right into her thoughts.
“Not really,” Weaver said. “I can get a vague sense of dreams when I look at them or hold them, but I can’t see them as long as I’m wearing my gloves.
I have to be actually touching them for that.
Like I told you, I didn’t have much luck experimenting with my own dreams in the early days, but I did figure that part out. ”
Periwinkle took a sip of tea, hoping her relief wasn’t totally obvious. Then curiosity struck her.
“Did you bring my dreams from before with you? Can I see them again? The—” She hesitated. “The bad dreams, too?”
Weaver seemed surprised. “All right,” he said cautiously.
Periwinkle clambered off her bed and sat beside his pallet. As she sat down, he put on a pair of heavily mended black spider-silk gloves, pulled two pouches of the same material from his pocket, and took a snarl of fiber out of each.
Set on her floor, they were both shapeless as a pile of snow, one the swirl of rose-peridot-aquamarine she’d seen the night before, the other a black that seemed to absorb light instead of giving it off, with a sickly purple sheen.
She wasn’t sure why she’d wanted to see the bad dreams as well as the good ones. Maybe it was so she could recognize them later. Or maybe it was because she was determined to look at them dead-on, to see what she and Weaver were up against.
Dreams. And nightmares. Her fingers drifted toward the fibers before she realized what they were doing.
“Don’t touch them,” Weaver said sharply.
Periwinkle yanked her hand back, thinking. Then she crossed to her wardrobe and opened a drawer.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“This is my drawer of found things,” Periwinkle said. “You know, things that I’ve—”
“Found,” Weaver interrupted. “Got it.”
Periwinkle resisted the urge to roll her eyes as she lifted a glass ball the size of her two fists from the drawer and carried it back to where Weaver sat.
The nightmares were bigger but no less hideous when she held the sphere over them—the spoiled purple of a bruise, the black of rot.
But when Periwinkle held the glass above the shimmering light dreams, she jumped a little in delight as rainbows suddenly appeared on her ceiling.
She angled the glass one way and then another, studying the way the pinks and greens and blues flowed shimmering and seamless into one another, the way their texture wasn’t quite like cotton or feathers or ice or fur.
Ethereal, just on the brink of being solid. She’d never seen anything like them.
When she finally drew back the glass and looked up, Weaver was staring at her with a funny look on his face. “What?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He looked away quickly. “Satisfied?”
Periwinkle nodded, returning the ball to her found things drawer. “Why collect the nightmares at all, though?” she asked.
Weaver’s jaw was tense. “I can’t just let them go free,” he said. “You saw how powerful their magic is. I need to get rid of them somewhere safe.”
Dread rolled down Periwinkle’s spine between her wings.
“So that’s what they were doing before you found out I was dreaming?
” she asked. “Just drifting away into the Winter Woods?” What if they had already done damage—crossed the Never Sea to do untold harm?
What if her fears from the night before were true, and they had created the rot in the Pixie Dust Root?
But Weaver shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what happened.”
“Can we destroy the nightmares somehow?” she asked. “When we find the magic tools, after we’ve protected the tree with our dreams, will they be able to break the nightmares’ power?”
Weaver looked thoughtful. “I think so. We’ll be careful until we can test the theory.” Periwinkle nodded, turning back to her good dreams, their twinkling tangle of prism on her bedroom floor a new and beautiful and astounding kind of magic.
It was hard to believe it was the evidence of her last night’s dream, before it had gone sideways. That it had come right out of her thoughts.
Yet when Periwinkle looked at Weaver, she didn’t see its glow reflected on his face the way she knew it was on hers.
“What?” His expression became suddenly defensive.
“You don’t think it’s wonderful?” she asked. “I mean, look at it.”
“It’s a dream,” he said flatly. “It’s barely real.”
“Are the sunbows the light-talent fairies make real? Is the wind the fast-flying fairies make real?” Periwinkle gave an incredulous laugh. “How can you say that? It looks like a star!” Weaver just shrugged, totally unmoved. Periwinkle tucked her legs underneath her, narrowing her eyes.
“You’re a cynic,” she said, wonderingly. “I didn’t know we had any of those in Pixie Hollow.”
His voice was wry. “Well, at least I’m an original.”
“But how?” she demanded. “Weaver, we bring the humans their seasons. We live in the most beautiful corner of Never Land. We can fly.”
“So what?” he asked. “The humans are always figuring out how to do new things, and I hear you still can’t throw a snowball on the Mainland without hitting a cynic.”
“Incredible.” She shook her head. He was like no one she’d ever met before. “You think wonder can’t touch you. In a place like Pixie Hollow, you think there’s nothing left to shock or awe you.”
“Oh, there’s plenty to shock.”
“And awe,” she pushed.
“We’ll see about that.”
“Yes,” Periwinkle said significantly. “We will.”
Because as she sat staring at him, Periwinkle was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t a second, secret part of her quest, sent directly to her by the dream magic she’d found: to show Weaver that Pixie Hollow was a beautiful place worthy of wonder.
To change his mind, and crack open his cynicism, and make room for magic inside him.
Every fairy that arrived in Pixie Hollow had a purpose. As irritating as Weaver liked to make himself, he was the first dream-talent to come to the Winter Woods in who knew how long.
Weaver was here for a reason. Periwinkle wanted to find out what it was.
Out through her room’s skylight, Periwinkle could hear music fairies playing on lutes and pipes, probably the sounds of a party starting up. But after the day—and the night—she’d had, she already wanted to lie down.
“Are you ready?” she asked Weaver, fighting a yawn. “Or did you want me to stay awake so we could talk some more?”
Weaver smirked. “You and I don’t have much in common, Sparkles. We shouldn’t use up all our conversation in one night. Besides, I don’t want to be nodding off at the Hall of Winter tomorrow morning while we’re doing research.”
“Look, if you’re boring, just say that.” Periwinkle yawned again as she turned off the lightcatchers, then lay down and pulled her blanket up to her chin. “I can talk to anyone.”
“You know,” he said, “I’m only now beginning to understand how true that is.”
Weaver was making fun of her, she knew; the stars outside were just bright enough to show the wry shake of his head. She wished she could think up something witty and devastating to say back.
Putting him in his place might not have been her top priority, but it was still on her agenda.
But the day had been too long, and she was too sleepy. So she rolled her eyes, and rolled over, and Weaver’s low laugh was the last thing Periwinkle heard as she drifted off and away like a feather.