Chapter 30
They found Harlow waiting out in the gap in the mountainside, right where they’d left her. But Periwinkle and Weaver left Stella’s workshop feeling much different from when they’d arrived.
“Let’s go, Harlow!” Weaver called, glancing back toward the entrance as he hitched her up to the sled.
Periwinkle knew he hated to leave. She also knew he’d be back, and soon. And as they left, she felt her heart rise.
Because the wind up on Snow Globe Mountain was high.
But the sky—the sky was finally clear. With Harlow running downhill, on a path they’d already ridden over, they went back more quickly than they’d gone out, and Periwinkle couldn’t help remembering the night she’d dreamed she was Selene knifing down the mountain like a gust of wind.
Still, she was counting the minutes as they tore back over the path, back toward Juniper Glade.
The Keeper, Lord Milori, so many others—their friends had already been trapped inside their nightmares for far too long.
The moment they crossed the line of junipers, Periwinkle and Weaver jumped down from the sled—and Harlow took off, dragging it behind her.
“Where is she going?” Weaver asked. But it didn’t matter. Even a little way from the hall doors, they could hear the fairies trapped in their nightmares.
Harlow was gone. But Periwinkle and Weaver’s job was inside. And they found the hall worse than they’d left it.
Legs had bound up the nightmare scraps before they left.
But the nightmare-thread was thick and wiry, slick as oil and tougher than snakeskin, and just like Weaver said had happened before, the spider silk had burned away in contact with it.
Nightmares flowed through the room like smoke, rampaging among the sleeping—but not resting—winter fairies.
“This is over,” Weaver said, looking around the room with a shake of his head.
“We’re finishing this.” Periwinkle held her breath as he produced the dream tapestry from his jacket pocket, unfolding it and handing her two corners.
She took them, extending her arms, and the two of them fluttered into the air above the hideous purple scraps of nightmare-thread.
Periwinkle hadn’t gone to the Mainland this year to bring winter and rest to the human world.
But as she and Weaver let go of the tapestry and watched it flutter down slowly like a blanket over the nightmares and the nearest sleeping fairies, Periwinkle could feel peace begin to return to the Hall of Winter.
Even with the weaving blocking her view of what was happening underneath it, she could sense the air growing clearer, and she knew the nightmare fibers were being destroyed.
And as the shadows faded from the room, the sleeping fairies began to wake.
“Weaver,” she whispered. His eyes met hers, hopeful, and the two of them swooped toward the floor.
The fairies roused slowly, one and then another and then dozens and scores more, their confused murmurs rising into loud talk and questioning.
Some rubbed their eyes and stared around; others seemed calm but drowsy; a few sat up gasping in fear, clutching at their neighbors.
Nearly all of them began pulling their friends upright or helping them flutter weakly to their feet as they stared around the hall, clearly waiting for someone to explain what had happened.
Periwinkle and Weaver hurried through the crowd, urging them out into the fresh air.
“Weaver,” Periwinkle called, working her way toward him. “There must be hundreds of fairies in here, and they’re going to need to be looked after. What should we do?”
“I don’t know,” Weaver said. Neither of them had thought much about what would happen after they’d woken everyone up.
Periwinkle hadn’t thought about how welcome a familiar voice would sound, either.
“Periwinkle!” Lord Milori’s voice cut through the clamor. His eyes were red, as if he’d been fighting hard to stay awake before the nightmares had taken him. Beside him, the Keeper hobbled toward the hall doors, wiping sleep from his eyes. “Periwinkle, what happened?”
“Dewey! Lord Milori!” Periwinkle surged toward them, grateful to find them upright. “Are you both all right?” she asked.
“Yumpin’ Yetis,” the Keeper mumbled. “I’d rather not go through that again, but yes, I’m all right.” Relieved, Periwinkle hugged him, then surprised Lord Milori by flinging her arms around him, as well. After that, she explained everything as briefly as she could.
“I’m so sorry. I thought you were keeping the danger to the Pixie Dust Root a secret, but it was Dougal. He had a plan to trap all the winter fairies in a nightmare,” she finished.
“Oh, Periwinkle.” Lord Milori shook his head.
“I saw the blight near the well and recognized it as a dark magic from long ago, but I wasn’t sure how it had returned.
And so I kept the truth to myself.” He grimaced.
“I should’ve listened to my suspicions and taken you to the Mainland myself as soon as your wings were dry.
Not that your friends do much to keep you out of trouble. ”
“Milori.” Dewey gave him a sidelong glance and a sidelong elbow.
“My apologies.” Lord Milori cleared his throat and met Periwinkle’s eyes, his own thoughtful—humble, even. “Perhaps I, myself, should have been more open.”
Weaver crossed to Periwinkle’s side, steeling himself as he took in the two sparrow men. “It wasn’t just Dougal’s plan,” he said. “But I want to make things right. I need to talk to both of you. I—” But Weaver broke off as a voice cut across Juniper Glade.
It was Dougal’s.
“You,” the healer snarled, pointing at Weaver—and then at Lord Milori. His eyes were burning, his face carved in miserable lines, fixed in a mask of exhausted, hopeless anger.
He looked like something captured in ice, Periwinkle thought. Frozen, unable to change, with no room to move or expand. Trapped in one place forever, forever reliving one terrible experience.
And then, before anyone knew what was happening, he was in front of the hall.
Shouts went up all around the courtyard as Dougal threw himself at Lord Milori, his swings wild, his elbows and fists everywhere.
Almost as soon as the fight had begun, though, it was over.
Lord Milori watched Dougal with an expression of severity and sadness as two other fairies gripped the healer’s wrists.
“You,” Dougal howled, “are never going to understand.” He glared at Weaver, nearly weeping in his fury and betrayal.
Weaver winced. But Periwinkle squeezed his hand, giving him an almost imperceptible shake of her head.
“I understand more than you think,” Lord Milori said. He held a hand to his jaw; at least one of the healer’s punches had landed. “I know how much you have lost. But your life is not over. Selene would not have—”
Dougal exploded. He wrenched away from the fairies restraining him. “Don’t talk to me about what Selene would’ve wanted,” he said, raging, swinging again for Lord Milori even as tears began to fill his eyes.
“Stop!” Another shout came from across the glade, carried on the wind along with a familiar howl. “Dougal, stop!”
The speaker was still hidden in the juniper trees, close to where Dougal himself had called out to them all. But the healer suddenly paled, knuckles white, knees giving way.
“Dougal, you have to stop this,” said the voice again—familiar to Periwinkle, she suddenly realized, and growing closer by the second.
With a bark, Harlow crashed through the nearest snowdrift, not dancing or dawdling but running at full tilt ahead of the sled she’d pulled up Snow Globe Mountain.
Holding the reins was Icaria, the newly arrived fairy Periwinkle had seen at the ball that night, the one she’d met at the snow-lantern competition.
Murmurs filled the glade as she steered the sled close to the hall doors, driving with more strength and grace than either Periwinkle or Weaver had managed that night. Beside Periwinkle, Weaver gasped, his face going as white as Dougal’s.
“What?” She frowned, putting a hand on his shoulder. Legs nestled against Weaver’s neck, all eight dark eyes wide and worried for his friend. But Weaver only shook his head.
When Dougal finally spoke, his voice was airless, more like the croak of a raven or Harlow’s barks than a fairy’s voice. “Selene,” he rasped out. Then, louder—“Selene!”
Over and over again, the name swept through the crowd. Selene, Selene, Selene.
Periwinkle couldn’t understand.
The fairy on the sled had called herself Icaria. Periwinkle recognized her angular dark eyes, her sharply cut black hair.
But the night Periwinkle had met Icaria in the Frost Forest, they’d both been standing in the shadows, and Icaria had been cloaked, and at the ball that evening, both of them had been wearing masks.
If the other fairy hadn’t introduced herself, was it possible Periwinkle might’ve noticed her resemblance to someone else?
Beside her, Weaver’s eyes were wild with guilt, with disbelief, with hope unwilling to admit to its own existence. “It—she can’t be.”
“It’s okay,” Periwinkle said, not even sure what she meant. But if she herself was surprised, she knew Weaver and Dougal’s world had turned itself inside out.
Because Selene, who’d died, had come back to them.
It was like sun coming up after an endless winter on the Mainland: beautiful, but more light than the humans could bear at first, after so long in the darkness.
When Periwinkle had met her as Icaria, the fairy had seemed tentative and tired. But she’d shaken that off now like a layer of snow. Selene leapt from the sled the same way she’d screamed up on it, ease and agility in every line of her body, her sharply cut hair whipping in the breeze.
“I met her,” Periwinkle whispered to Weaver. “The other day.” Weaver gaped at her. “She said she’d just arrived.”
Or had she? Periwinkle hadn’t heard anything about Icaria’s Arrival or her talent-choosing ceremony. Abruptly, she remembered exactly what Selene had said. I just got here.
As she walked through the crowd toward Dougal and Lord Milori, Periwinkle realized it was the first time she’d seen the fast-flying fairy cloakless.
And for the first time, she could see that both her wings were shattered like ice.
Periwinkle thought of the wing-shaped snow lantern Selene had sculpted in the Frost Forest, and about the name she’d given herself. Icaria. Reaching for the sky. Unbidden, tears came into her eyes.
“A dramatic entrance, as always.” Lord Milori swept a bow, and the fast-flier cocked an eyebrow. “It’s good to see you home, Selene.”