Page 7 of Wings of Reverie

Because who was she anymore, hiding things from her friends?She felt like anotherpersonkeeping the truth about her dreams from Gliss and Spike. But would they understand? Periwinkle could never be sure.

Yet there was no denying her relief as she cleared Juniper Glade’s tree line and the night grew quiet around her. While Gliss lived in Snowlight Square, and Spike’s home was in an evergreen near Chilly Falls, Periwinkle lived in a little snowball of a place high above the Frost Forest. It was where she went to sleep every night, wondering where her dreams would take her next. Where every morning she woke up, trying to understand what was happening inside her own head.

It might’ve helped if she couldtalkto someone about it. Lord Milori might have known something, or Dewey, the Keeper of All Fairy Knowledge. But the dreams had to be kept a secret from them, as well as from her friends.

At first, she hadn’t felt the need to talk to anyone. Because at first, the dreams had just been hodgepodges of her thoughts. They’d been silly nonsense dreams, like the one where she’d sugared birch trees like bonbons. There had been a funny dream about a snowball fight with Gliss and Spike, and a mildly anxious dream where she’d been late leaving for the Mainland. She’d once had a very confusing dream where she’d tried to get an iced chamomile tea from her favorite tearoom, but they’d told her they only had ferrets and rabbits in stock.

But I don’t want a ferret or a rabbit, she’d said.I want tea!And the sparrow man running the tearoom had just shrugged and pointedto a group of animals in the corner. One huge white rabbit had blinked its glassy black eyes at her, like it didn’t know what it was doing there, either.

The nightmares had started a few weeks after that. And in them, she’d been afraid as she never had in her waking life.

It wasn’t that nothing bad ever happened in Pixie Hollow; accidents could happen anywhere. But one of Periwinkle’s nightmares saw the Winter Woods’ Pixie Dust Well completely dry up—just disappear, like the wind had blown it away. Another nightmare held a snowstorm so ferocious that it ripped trees from the ground by their roots, tore off whole branches. Periwinkle had been overwhelmed by an inexplicable sense of horror, ofsickness, both of them strange and terrible new feelings.

In the nightmares, a haze of violet obscured the world around her. There was chaos, there was destruction, there was bone-deep terror.

But there was also something else.

Even in Periwinkle’s darkest nightmares, there was always a spark of—something. She couldn’t remember what it was the next day. What it had looked like, or how she’d found it, or even, really, what it had done. But she knew it had been there.

It had felt like a friend standing beside her. Like a hand to hold in the dark.

These nightmares weren’t like her other dreams; they didn’t look anything like her life during the day. She couldn’t understand why they’d begun.

But she had come to realize that dreams were an in-between space. They were just as full of possibility as the borders between the seasons. Anything could, and did, happen there.

The nightmares had nearly driven her to ask Lord Milori for guidance, or Dewey. But Lord Milori wouldn’t have been happy to find out Periwinkle had been tiptoeing around near the border of Winter and Spring, for one thing. Dewey would’ve worried.

Still. If she’d only had the nightmares to reckon with, she might have done it. They probably would’ve looked for a way to make them stop.

And Periwinkle wasn’t ready for the dreams to go away.

Because the dreams felt like finding a new way to frost. They were like finding a new way to fly. Periwinkle felt like she’d found a new way to see the world.

Every dream, every nightmare, even, had that spark ofsomethingin it. A light that could outshine a nightmare. That hand reaching out to her.

And Periwinkle was determined to hold on to it.

Found in Dougal’s Apothecary, in Healer’s Bag:

List of Cures for Headaches

More Sleep

Patient merely groggier than usual.

Forehead Frosting

Nothing.