Chapter 13
They left the Bobbin Wood together, parting ways over Snowcap Glade.
“I’ll see you soon,” Weaver said as he left for Floss’s workshop. But he wouldn’t quite meet her eye.
Periwinkle flew home more slowly than she usually did, after that. But the Frost Forest—that, she found, was unusually full.
All around her, fairies hurried through the dim evening, their arms full of snow and sticks and other tools, the forest floor strewn with little lights.
As Periwinkle landed and took in the dozens of glowing sculptures that filled the Frost Forest, made of snow and lit from inside by lightcatchers, she couldn’t help the smile that spread over her face.
A few of the fairies were clearly relaxing, building simple domes of snowballs over their lightcatchers while they laughed and sipped tea.
But most of them were shaping more elaborate projects, some even referring to art or architecture books from the Hall of Winter.
There were lanterns shaped like fir trees, lanterns shaped like owls, lanterns shaped like many-pointed stars, each of them glowing from within.
“We’re absolutely going to win,” one fairy bragged playfully. An art-talent, she thought, though it was difficult to see his face in the dark.
“Not a chance,” said the sparrow man beside him, brushing powder off a perfectly sculpted ice palace. Periwinkle thought she recognized him as a baking-talent. “The Lantern Cup is mine.”
So, it was a competition. Periwinkle’s interest sharpened as she fluttered farther through the lanterns.
She passed a snow-carved pirate ship, an oversized model of Chilly Falls, and even a flawless replica of Lord Milori.
Periwinkle sort of wondered if whoever had sculpted the Lord of Winter’s face hadn’t done it in too-loving detail.
She’d made a complete circle of the forest and come back nearly to where she’d started when Periwinkle felt herself back into something.
“Oh!” She turned around, and…she’d just knocked over a snow lantern.
Periwinkle clapped a hand to her forehead.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know there was anyone all the way back here.
” She dropped to the ground, frantically piling the snow back up, plastering it all together with a thick layer of frost.
“That’s all right.” A fairy crouched beside her, smiling wanly.
Periwinkle could hardly see her in the dark beneath the hood of the long cloak she wore, but she caught glimpses of pale skin and a thin frame, angular eyes and long dark hair.
“Honestly, my sculpture wasn’t that great, anyway.
” It looked like she’d been shaping a pair of wings, though whether they were butterfly wings or fairy wings or bird wings, it was hard to say.
Because—and Periwinkle wouldn’t have admitted it in a hundred years—the other fairy had been right, and they definitely weren’t that great.
Periwinkle paused clumping fistfuls of snow back onto the sculpture’s sides. Her frost held it all firmly together, but—“I’m not making it better, am I?” she asked glumly.
The other fairy laughed, dusting snow off her hands as she got to her feet. “I don’t think either of us is in line for the victory. It looks like a broken tooth.”
Now Periwinkle had to laugh, too. “I was thinking it looked like some kind of popover pastry. But I’m not here to make a lantern,” she said. “I was just passing by, and this is my first Frost Festival. I’m Periwinkle.”
“If you think that looks like a pastry, you probably need to eat something.” The other fairy paused. “And as for not making a lantern—well, that’s what I told myself. Unfortunately, my competitive nature chose a strange moment to show up, and there’s no point doing this if I can’t do it right.”
“You sound like my friend Spike,” said Periwinkle. “And when she says things like that at times like this, my other friend Gliss and I say that having a good time is doing it right.”
Periwinkle felt a little ache, thinking of her friends so far away. She glanced around the glade again at the snow lanterns taking shape—a little white ferret, an autumn scepter replica, a spinning wheel.
She wondered how Gliss and Spike would’ve shaped their lanterns.
Gliss would probably have tried to sculpt the three girls themselves (not that Periwinkle would’ve had much faith in the outcome).
Spike, who loved to go fast, might’ve built a sled, maybe, or a snowy owl, or a pair of wings, like the other fairy had. “What’s your name?” Periwinkle asked.
“Icaria,” the other fairy said. “I just got here.”
A new arrival! “Pretty name,” Periwinkle said. “Welcome to the Winter Woods!”
“Thanks,” Icaria said. “It means ‘reaching for the sky.’” Then she looked glumly back at the broken wings. “Think there’s any chance of salvaging them?”
Periwinkle shook her head. “Doubt it,” she said. “But you can always start again.”
Back at home, Periwinkle sat in her porch chair, absently tracing frost patterns over its surface, trying to be patient till it was time for Weaver to come collect her dreams.
Out in the Frost Forest, she watched a winner be chosen for the snow-lantern building competition—the pirate ship lantern, no surprise.
As the winter fairies began to flit off one way and another, Periwinkle kept her eyes on the sculptures, watching their soft lights glow against the blackening night.
Two books lay in her lap—the Keeper’s book on dream-talents, and the story collection she’d gotten Weaver.
She’d already read the dream-talent book cover to cover, of course, but she’d read it again while she waited there outside, mostly curious about the famous dream-talent fairies, Morpheus, Stella, and Orion.
Besides listing which workshops were theirs, the Keeper had hardly written about them at all, but they’d appeared in Weaver’s storybook, too.
They and the other dream-talents had all lived countless years ago, mysterious workers of a mysterious talent. Periwinkle only wished they’d left a little more behind for her and Weaver to go on than a few place-names and a story.
She also wished she’d gone back to have a second look at the maps before she and Weaver had left the Hall of Winter the other day.
They’d found the Bobbin Wood beneath the Drift because Periwinkle had made a lucky guess.
But the magic spindle was supposed to be in a place called the Sapphire Mine, which Periwinkle had never heard of and the Keeper’s notes had only specified was somewhere in the northeast.
She’d have to visit the stacks again, and soon.
Sighing, she set aside the book on dream-talents and spread the storybook across her lap.
As she flipped through it, she found all sorts of human tales, like the one about the princess who slept for a hundred years and was saved by three good fairies, and the one with the cinder girl whose fairy godmother changed her fortune, and the one where craft-talent fairies helped a poor human shoemaker.
And then there were the stories from Pixie Hollow.
One was about a storytelling-talent who freed a mermaid from Skull Rock by telling the pirates a story so dull they begged them both to leave.
Another had a fairy who ran out of pixie dust on the Mainland, and traveled in a pair of seven-league boots until she found her friends again.
And then, of course, there was the story about Stella and Morpheus and Orion, about a drum that could tame the Mainland’s wild animals into sleep. The drumhead, the story had said, had been woven by Stella of dream-thread on a magic loom.
Periwinkle read the story again, and wished again that it had a more cheerful ending.
Down in the Frost Forest, the snow lanterns still glowed brightly. Up above her porch, the moon drifted farther and farther on its circuit as Periwinkle sat waiting.
It was getting late. But still, Weaver didn’t come.
She couldn’t stop thinking about the look on his face as he’d walked through the workshop. How carefully he’d run his hands over the pieces of the ivy arches and studied the bobbins of spider silk, how reverently he’d held the dream-magic scissors.
How he’d pulled away, when something had begun to spark between them.
Periwinkle set the books aside, hopped down from her chair, and began to pace. She scuffed a little chip of ice across the porch floor with her shoe, watching her cotton puffs wobble on her toes. Fluttering toward the ceiling, she tapped absently at the glowing suncatchers and set them spinning.
Weaver had looked so different there in the Bobbin Wood workshop.
Maybe I knew they were real before.
Maybe I just didn’t understand what it would be worth to find them.
He’d seen it all the way she did, just for a little while. He’d opened up.
And now, he was trying to avoid her.
Periwinkle stopped pacing and straightened. She shuffled the cotton puffs off her shoes and set them aside, setting her jaw as she did. In a jingle, she was racing through the night air.
If Weaver wanted to hide, that was fine.
She already knew where to find him.