Page 21 of Wings of Reverie

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’tseethem 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 theyhadcreated the rot in the Pixie Dust Root?