Page 57 of Wings of Reverie

It was like wind chimes. Like the shimmer of jingle bells on crisp winter air. It was the sound stars would make, if the Never Fairies could hear them.

And when Weaver dared to looked around again, the frozen pond was covered in a delicate, glittering layer of frost.

15

When the sun came up outside the workshop, it brought light but not color to the day. The sky overhead was gray and harsh, the clouds slower than they had been the night before but closer, too.

“I’ll come back as quickly as I can,” Periwinkle said as she moved toward the door. “Cover for me to Floss if I’m late?”

Weaver nodded. “I will. Be careful,” he added, nodding toward a nearby window.

They hadn’t talked about their kiss that morning. But Periwinkle felt dizzy every time she looked at Weaver and remembered it.

As she left for the Pixie Dust Well, then flew on toward the Hallof Winter, she did her best not to let her eyes wander skyward. Everything was fine at the well, at least, and Periwinkle’s dreams were going to keep it that way. First, though, they had to figure out where the Sapphire Mine actually was.

When she and Weaver had come by a few days earlier, the hall had been humming with activity inside as fairies searched the shelves for Book Flood gifts. Today, though, Juniper Glade itself was bustling with winter fairies, noisy with the barks and yelps of excited animals as the few animal-talents who’d stayed behind wrangled a group of three wolf pups and two white-furred foxes into sled harnesses. The smallest fox rolled on its back in the snow, paws flailing, as a fairy tried to clip her to a sled, and two dark gray wolves kept throwing back their heads to give tiny howls to the sky. A third little wolf pup dragged his harness behind him as he ran around after a holly leaf caught on the breeze.

Sled would’ve loved to watch them. Ignoring the twinge of loneliness she felt at the thought, Periwinkle gave a laugh and slipped through the hall’s front doors.

Despite the commotion out in the glade, the stacks inside the hall had returned to their usual quiet, only the books themselves snoring and mumbling and gossiping among themselves. It wasn’t hard for Periwinkle to go back unnoticed to the first set of shelves she and Weaver had searched.

“Hello,Maps and Atlases,” she said around a determined sigh. “Good to see you again.” Still, she hesitated before she began digging through the shelves.

Periwinkle couldn’t be sure whether the Sapphire Mine had been forgottenbeforethe dream-talents, or after. Either way, she figured it had to be an ancient place, so this time Periwinkle concentrated on the oldest records she could find as she searched.

The work made her nervous, if she was honest. The bindings on some of the books were so worn she could hardly read their titles, and a few maps were so delicate she was afraid they would flake away into pieces if she handled them. One ancient atlas had a woven bookmark that swatted her hand for even reaching to pick it up. But once she’d picked out her materials, she gingerly scooped up the pile and made her way upstairs, to her favorite chair by the window where she and Weaver had been only a few days before.

Periwinkle felt hopeful as she settled onto its cozy snowdrop-petal cushions, telling herself she’d read carefully through the whole stack of material until she found something. But Periwinkle read (and reread) the atlases and maps for over an hour before she had to admit they didn’t have the details she needed.

Maybe the books and papers were all from the wrong time period. Maybe the mapmakers hadn’t been focused on the mines. Whichever it was, this route was a dead end.

Periwinkle frowned, wondering what to try next.

Her first thought, unsurprisingly, was to check again in the Keeper’s private section. There were hundreds of books there, all of them special, and plenty of them old enough to be relevant. Still, Periwinkle rejected the idea almost immediately. She wouldn’thave the Book Flood for an excuse a second time, and Dewey might have questions.

Dewey. If only he’d left clearer notes in the dream-magic book, or at least taken a stab at explaining them.Chase the dreams.Count the sheep.Periwinkle bit her lip, trying to remember what he’d written about the Sapphire Mine.

It had been something about a needle.Chase theneedle—no.Find the needle.No, that wasn’t right, either. Anyway, it had been something to do with a needle. And then Periwinkle had an idea.

Compasses had needles. Compasses showed people where to go.

Were they looking for a compass?

Carefully, Periwinkle gathered up all her maps and atlases again and flittered downstairs to return them. And once she had, it was time to go on another treasure hunt.

There were hundreds of books on artifacts in the Hall of Winter, of course, and Periwinkle cast a longing glance at the door to the private section, knowing she would probably have found something useful about old magic compasses there, too. But soon, she landed on a four-hundred-year-old encyclopedia that was as thick as her arms were long and heaved it back upstairs, sneezing as she sat down and opened the book to a cloud of dust.

“Bless you,” said a nearby book about fairy distemper.

“Thank you.” Periwinkle dabbed at her nose. Then she shifted in her seat and began to turn pages again, careful not to send any more dust flying. “The bookworms had better not have been at this one,” she added under her breath.

Not that she could blame any creature for loving books, and Dewey said the bookworms were helpful in the warm season libraries. But it was kind of inconvenient for books to leave the Hall of Winter in one piece and come back with tasty little chunks taken out of them.

To Periwinkle’s relief, though, the book seemed to be fine. Settling back in her chair again, she thumbed through pages as delicate as frost, in search of a magic compass.

As it turned out, there weremanymagic compasses mentioned in the encyclopedia. There were compasses that could survive the coldest temperatures in the Winter Woods. There were compasses that pointed south instead of north, or to your true love, your true friends, your true talent. There were compasses that pointed out spoiled food, bookworms who’d been snacking (aha!), and snowballs coming toward you during a snowball fight.

But at the end of the list—at which point she went back to the top, and read the whole thing all over again—Periwinkle found she’d come up empty a second time. She’d found nothing about the compass they needed, if it existed. Frustrated, she slumped back in her chair and sighed.