Page 72 of Wings of Reverie

Periwinkle gave a startled, damp laugh. Her cheek was wet and sort of sticking to her pallet. But she didn’t want to move.

“See?” Weaver raised his eyebrows. “You don’t want nice. Fletcher was nice to everyone. How could you have actually known if he really liked you?”

Periwinkle’s eyes sank shut. “I think it was the fourth time he asked me out that finally clued me in.”

“You let that poor sparrow man ask you outfour times?”

“More than that, I think, if you want to get technical,” Periwinkle said sleepily. Weaver gave a long, low whistle.

“I take it back,” he said. “It’s not that you don’twantnice, Sparkles. It’s just that no one nice would survive you.” He paused, looking grim. “Not that I’m going to, either,” he seemed to say.

But Periwinkle couldn’t be sure. With Weaver’s hand stroking her hair away from her forehead, she was finally drifting off to sleep.

Reverie

The storm was all-consuming. And Periwinkle couldn’t do anything to stop it.

Beneath her feet was the Pixie Dust Root. It was visibly sick, weak and spotted and bloated, looking ready to wither completely at her first misstep. The Pixie Dust Tree stood close by, pitching in the wind that wrenched at her hair and drooping wings.

And in her hand, she gripped a spindle.

Spindles were for making thread; Periwinkle knew this. She just didn’t know how, or with what. She stretched toward the storm clouds, hoping to draw them down and twist their fibers into something manageable—but it was no use. She couldn’t fly with wet wings,and even as she struggled upward, she found the Pixie Dust Root had wrapped itself around her ankle. It smelled spoiled, and its touch burned her skin.

It yanked at Periwinkle’s leg, pulling her down, down, down.

And then, before her very eyes, the rot inside the Pixie Dust Root crept all the way to the trunk of the Pixie Dust Tree.

The tree decayed and died in rapid motion. Spots crept over the rest of its roots and its trunk and branches; it grew soft and slimy before shriveling and turning black all over. The Pixie Dust Well at its base and at the base of the root evaporated, glittering gold turning to dry brown dust.

Cries broke out behind her, and Periwinkle twisted in the root’s grasp. She choked on her own sob when she saw fairies falling from the sky.

And then, suddenly, her view stretched farther, and somehow she could see all the way across the Never Sea, all the way to the Mainland.

Her friends were there. Gliss, Spike, Sled, Slush. The land was covered in winter, its animals trapped in sleep, its ground covered in frost and snow. And for the first time, Periwinkle realized the complete, horrible truth.

The Pixie Dust Tree had died, and life in Pixie Hollow was never going to be the same.

But the Mainland would be changed, too.

Without pixie dust, the Mainland would be trapped in winter forever. The warm season fairies would never be able to bring spring and wake it up. And the winter fairies would never be able to fly home.

A dead Pixie Dust Tree meant Periwinkle would never see her friends again.

Her wings stopped fighting, with that realization. And the rest of her did, too.

But as Periwinkle sank, wings unresisting, she felt—something. A spark of something that caught at her, hooking her through the heart.

A golden thread appeared in her hand.

She looked up, and there he was, racing toward her faster than the wind, faster than her own thoughts.

Weaver, connected to her, just at the end of the thread.

“Periwinkle!”

Weaver streaked across the sky toward the root and the tree. The world around him was a horror. But all he could see was Periwinkle.

Her wide, terrified eyes. Her shaky breathing, her face pale where it wasn’t red from crying. But Weaver could hardly blame her.