Chapter 17
The problem with the book Periwinkle had found on the Pixie Dust Tree wasn’t that it wasn’t thorough, or that it wasn’t new enough, or that it wasn’t old enough. She sat beside Weaver’s workbench, waiting as he finished his final task that afternoon before they could leave.
No. The problem with the book was that it only told her things she more or less already knew.
It told the history of the tree’s planting, and showed diagrams and illustrations of how it had grown over the years.
The book went into detail about how the tree made pixie dust, and how the Pixie Dust Depot had been created beneath it, and it spent a long, long time theorizing about the path of the root extension that brought pixie dust all the way to the Winter Woods.
Maybe most importantly, it explained what the Autumn Revelry did every few years to produce blue pixie dust, which multiplied its production of gold pixie dust, which all strengthened and restored the tree.
But it didn’t mention the story about dreams protecting the tree as a sapling, and there was nothing at all about preventing or stopping rot. In fact, there was nothing to show that the Pixie Dust Tree had ever suffered the degree of damage Periwinkle had seen in her dreams.
Worst of all, there was nothing to show that the tree could ever survive that sort of trauma.
“You’re frowning,” Weaver said quietly as he finished cleaning up his station. It had already looked clean to Periwinkle, but what did she know?
“I’ll explain once we’ve left,” she said back softly. Weaver nodded, but his brow when she looked up at him was still furrowed.
Her worrying had him worried. She didn’t know what to do about this, exactly. She just tried to remind herself that they had a plan.
Now she just had to hope they hadn’t missed something important.
True to her word, Periwinkle explained everything as they made their way to Chilly Falls. The neighborhood was full of fairies snowboarding and sledding and ice sliding, as noisy and busy as the falls were silent and still.
“The Pixie Dust Tree book doesn’t mention the story you told me,” she’d said. “So as far as we know, the strategy of using dreams on the tree was only to strengthen the tree when it was a sapling, to keep damage from happening.”
Weaver frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It means we still don’t know anything about using dreams to fix things,” she said. Agitation crept into her voice. “Does that worry you?”
“I guess.” He chewed the inside of his cheek. “But just because we don’t have the evidence you want doesn’t mean this won’t work.” Periwinkle considered this for a moment.
“Maybe you’re right,” she finally said. “Maybe that’s why we’re getting these dreams. If the rot is a new problem for the root and the tree, of course we won’t find anything on how it was handled in the past. We’ll just have to trust that the dream magic is showing us what we need to know.”
Weaver only answered this with a smile. Seeing it, though, Periwinkle felt a surprising jolt of happiness.
He was finally beginning to understand what the magic meant. What it meant to trust it. Your days as a cynic are numbered, she wanted to tell him, like she’d done earlier that day.
She held the words in. But as she flew with Weaver above the river, she couldn’t quite hold back her smile.
Periwinkle knew the neighborhood of Chilly Falls pretty well from visiting Spike and getting brunch at Blizz’s, but the winding path the Chilly River took northeast was unfamiliar to her.
She’d never ventured near where the encyclopedia had put the mine, and the land grew sharper and rockier as they moved toward their goal, the day around them as silent as the frozen river’s surface.
There were no trees, and the dusting of snow on the ground only partly softened the hard landscape.
“Follow the needle,” Weaver sighed, glancing toward the dream-magic book in Periwinkle’s bag. She had brought it, a lightcatcher, and not much else.
“I still don’t know what the reference to the needle means,” Periwinkle said. “I looked through the encyclopedia for a compass, and nothing turned up.”
Weaver scowled. “Needles. Dreams. It’s like whoever wrote the directions only knew how to do it with cryptic notes,” he complained. “Would it have killed someone to draw a map?”
“I could draw us a map.” Periwinkle grinned at him. “It’ll just be a wavy line for the river with a big circle at the end, but I’ll do it if you want.”
“I was thinking someone could’ve included, you know, a concrete detail or two,” he said pointedly. “Like, start at this tree, fly at twenty knots for twenty minutes, turn due east for thirty paces. X marks the spot. Enjoy your treasure.”
“We aren’t pirates, Weaver.” He laughed at this, and Periwinkle felt absurdly pleased. And when Legs surprised them both by hopping onto her eucalyptus-leaf dress and settling on her shoulder, Weaver called him a traitor, and Periwinkle couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so happy.
They flew for a long time—longer than Periwinkle would’ve hoped, and long enough that she began to wonder if she’d misread or missed something. Finally, though, they spotted the river’s end.
“There it is!” she called, pointing into the heavy gray of the late afternoon.
Relief hit her square between the wings.
“The riverbed disappears underground here. The mine must be close.” Both of them surged ahead, eager to find the mine and start their search, but Weaver put on a burst of speed and landed ahead of her.
Periwinkle saw his face fall before she saw anything else.
“What is it?” she called, hurrying to catch up. “Do you see the mine?”
“Just—well.” Weaver ran a hand through his dark hair, his eyes looking shadowed and drained. “You’d better just come here.”
Periwinkle landed hard on the rocky ground and dashed over beside him. Her heart hit the ground not long after her feet did.
There wasn’t a mine at the end of the Chilly River.
There were a dozen of them, their entrances set in a circle around the center point where they now stood.
Weaver hung his head. Periwinkle sat wearily down in the snow.
They’d made progress; they’d made it this far.
But from this new bend in the road—Periwinkle had no idea where to begin.
There were no markers at the mine entrances, no signposts to show which was which.
Just a clock’s worth of tunnel entrances and no way to know which tunnel would lead them to the spindle they needed to save Pixie Hollow.
What Periwinkle wouldn’t have given for that needle the Keeper had written about.
She flopped back into the snowbank then, and just for a second, she let herself lie there. Just a second, to throw Pixie Hollow’s shortest ever pity party.
It was not the kind of party Periwinkle usually accepted invitations to. In her defense, she was very, very frustrated.
Still, Periwinkle only gave herself a second. Then, when it was over, she pushed up to her feet.
“We’d better get going,” she said. “Finding the spindle could take a while.”
“Sparkles…” Weaver sounded exhausted. “This would’ve been hard enough with only one mine to search. Now we’ve got twelve—”
“It’ll take longer the longer we sit here.”
“—not to mention they all look sort of dangerous.” Weaver gestured at the nearest mine. Its round door was hanging off its hinges, and the entrance supports sagged beneath a thick layer of frost and snow. The other eleven looked more or less the same.
“Weaver, the spindle’s inside one of these mines. We’ll be careful, but we have to find it,” she said, hurrying toward the mine he’d pointed out. “Let’s go. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
They didn’t get lucky.
They walked carefully down the first mine shaft, taking turns raising the lightcatcher Periwinkle had brought and switching as their arms got tired. (Weaver’s arms got tired less quickly than Periwinkle’s, which she was quick to remind him was only because he used them so much at work.)
Periwinkle sighed. “You know, for a gemstone mine, I’d expected more—”
“Gemstones?” Weaver said. “Me, too. Although I guess that’s why it’s been abandoned. Mines are like forests; it takes a long time for gems and metals and things to grow back, once they’ve been collected. And we use a lot of them, for decoration and lightcatchers and things.”
Periwinkle rubbed at her eyes, then ran a hand over the mine wall.
It felt damp, and cool, and a heavy fall of dirt came away beneath her fingers.
“Follow the needle,” she said, for what felt like the hundredth time that day.
“You know, as a direction, it makes more sense than chase the dreams. But if the clue was talking about a literal needle, wouldn’t they all be inside the workshop?
” she asked. “How would that help us find out where it is?”
“Dewey’s your friend,” Weaver said. “If you can’t figure out what he means, there’s not much chance I will.”
“We still don’t know who wrote the clues,” Periwinkle said. “But if I ever find out, I am going to get them an atlas for next year’s Book Flood and show them how these things are usually done.”
She wished Legs could guide them like he had in the Bobbin Wood. But he’d hidden himself in the folds on Periwinkle’s dress, hardly more of him visible than his eyes.
They flew on for half an hour or so, eyes peeled, the dark even denser there in the tunnel than it had been beneath the Drift. Their problem, of course, was the same one that had started bothering Periwinkle aboveground while they’d flown along the river.
She had no idea how far they should go inside the mine. With no way of knowing if they’d picked the right one, she constantly found herself questioning if they’d maybe gone too far, or missed something, or if they should’ve tried exploring some of the branch tunnels off the mine’s main path.
Weaver must have thought the same thing, because a moment later, he paused. “There’s no sign of a workshop here,” he said. “I think we should try one of the others.”
“I know. We’ve barely explored this one, and we may have already spent too much time here.” Periwinkle grimaced. “Still, if this was the right mine, surely there would have been a marker. A sign. A needle,” she said through her teeth, frustrated. Weaver sagged.
Neither of them was at all sure they were making the right choice. But they flew back up the tunnel the way they’d come, and then they tried another mine.
And another one. And another.
Dusk had turned fully into night as they moved on to the fifth of the twelve mines.
“Maybe we should come back in the morning,” Weaver said heavily. “It’s getting late.”
“I know,” Periwinkle said. “But the First Frost Ball is tomorrow night. We have to be ready with the dream-thread before that, or we miss our window.”
She couldn’t deny she was exhausted, though. Even as Periwinkle was speaking, she draped herself against the mine’s round doorframe, eyes sinking shut. Crusted frost and snow scraped against her wings and back, sifting off the doorframe and onto the ground.
They had to keep going. But it was discouraging to push forward without a sense of direction, or of whether they’d already missed what they were looking for.
When Periwinkle straightened up again a moment later, bracing herself to keep looking, she thought she heard something in the earth shift, the noise a little like wind through the trees.
But when she paused to listen, the only sound was a clump of snow falling behind her, disturbed by her wings or the wind.
“Wait,” Weaver said, frowning. “What is—?”
“Did you hear it, too?” she asked.
But Weaver only nudged her to one side, squinting at the spot in the doorway she’d just left. “Scoot over,” he said, swiping away more of the snow. “Look at this.”
Periwinkle bent closer, raising her suncatcher. It lit on a gleam of color.
Set into the doorway was a metal tile studded with precious stones. Emeralds, maybe, she thought.
“It’s pretty,” she said. “What about it?”
But Weaver was already darting away to the mine they’d searched just before.
Brushing at the doorframe, first one side and then the other, the suncatcher shone on another sparkling tile.
“This one’s different,” he called, beckoning her.
“It’s different from the one over there.
” Periwinkle followed him, feeling a low thrum of anticipation she didn’t quite understand.
“These stones are all brown,” she said, peering at the tile. “Reddish brown. Pinkish brown. Brownish…brown. But the ones over there were emeralds.”
“I know.” Weaver nodded, eyes intent. “I think they’re markers.”
Periwinkle straightened. “Markers?”
“I think they show which mine held which stones. So if we can find the sapphire marker—”
“Then we find the Sapphire Mine,” Periwinkle finished. “Come on. Let’s check the others.”
One mine entrance after another, they cleared away the snow and ice that coated the doorframes.
There were the brown stones and the emeralds they’d already seen, plus amethysts, rubies, diamonds, and glittering yellow stones Periwinkle didn’t recognize.
One mine had a streak of silver at its entrance where the others had tiles.
At the eighth mine, Periwinkle found it.
It was a metal tile set with sapphires, hung just above her eyeline. Melted-ice blue, sky blue, midnight blue. Below it was a streak of gold, just where the other mine had had a streak of silver.
Someone had embellished the exposed vein, carving the rock and the gold visible underneath into something like a needle.
Weaver traced its outline, a faint expression of awe on his face. “Follow the needle,” he said, facing her. A smile split his face. But Periwinkle could hardly breathe.
“Weaver,” she said. “I think I saw this in my dream.”
“What?” He glanced from her to the needle and back. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Periwinkle said. “Things like this just keep popping up in the middle of my nightmares. This gold needle. A golden web. A long gold thread leading me somewhere.” She turned to him, shaking her head in confusion. “I don’t know what they mean. Do they show up in your nightmares, too?”
“No,” he admitted. “I haven’t seen anything like that.”
Periwinkle stared far down the mine shaft, drawing in a long breath. Follow the needle, the clue had said.
“Sparkles.” Weaver paused at her side. “Maybe we should wait. I think—”
But he broke off. There was no point finishing the sentence. Like always, Periwinkle had already gone ahead.