Page 73 of Wings of Reverie

He recognized this dream, of course. But this—this wasnothow his dreams had felt.

Weaver knelt in front of her, hands cupping her face; a falling branch had scratched her cheek and temple. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right. I’m here.”

“But the tree—” Periwinkle stifled a sob. The Pixie Dust Tree’s trunk was withered, split wide open and leaking spoiled sap. A few limbs clung to it limply; others lay broken among its fallen leaves and exposed roots.

Weaver shook his head, pressed his forehead to hers. “It’s just a dream.” A lavender haze filled the air as he held her. “It’s just a dream.”

Periwinkle rubbed hard at her eyes. “What are you talking about?”

Her broken whisper cut him to the heart. But he’d known; of course he’d known. She didn’t understand that all this was only happening in her head.

Periwinkle was a dreamer, but she wasn’t a dream-talent.

The night he’d seen her dreams floating in the sky, he’d hardly been able to believe the Winter Woods held any other dreamers at all. The lights had called to him, like a hearth to a lost human child.

He’d been more like that lost boy than he wanted to admit. But seeing the dreams had brought relief like the soft fall of snow.

And then, of course, he’d found out it was Periwinkle dreaming. Periwinkle the frost-talent, who saw nothing outside her elite little circle—who could barely see past the end of her own perfect little nose.

Perfect Periwinkle. Pretty Periwinkle. Popular, perpetually adored Periwinkle.

Everyone in Pixie Hollow knew who she was. Admired her. Wanted her party invitations, or her outfit advice, or her attention. Everyone wanted something from her. And Weaver was no exception, however much he wished he could deny it.

He’d been so certain he had her pegged when they’d met. So certain that he wanted as little as possible to do with her and from her.

And yet: he’d been just like everyone else. She’d drawn him in before he’d even known it was happening.

It had been a mistake, getting this close to her, letting her fill hishead and cloud his vision with her rose-colored view of the world. He knew it was a mistake. Periwinkle was untouchable for someone like him—entirely out of reach.

He had made all kinds of mistakes lately.

Watching her fall apart there in front of him, he knew he was going to make at least one more.

Weaver slid a hand into Periwinkle’s hair. When he drew it away, the mass of dream fiber he’d imagined producing from her thoughts was in his fingers—not an actual dream, of course, but as long as they were there in her dream, he could conjure up anything he wanted to.

Taking the spindle from her hand, he twisted a short leader from the mass of dream fiber and tied it to the spindle’s hook, then gave the spindle an efficient flick. It twisted in the air, a tiny hurricane at the end of the string, almost a mirror image to the storm clouds gathering overhead.

A moment later, he caught the spindle and began to feed more of the dream fiber into it, letting the leader’s twist roll into the rest of the dream, his fingers coursing over the newly spun thread with rough familiarity. Bit by bit, he added more dream fiber, spinning it and wrapping it around the bobbin as it lengthened.

Periwinkle chewed her lip as she watched him, and the curiosity and hope in her expression turned him inside out.

A moment later, he’d made lengths and lengths of dream-thread, blue and green and pink and glowing. “Help me,” he said. Handing her the spindle, he crouched beside the root.

“This is it?” Periwinkle asked. “This is all we have to do?”

Pain rolled through him again, like a thorn to the heart or a wing.

Of course she didn’t believe it would be so easy. Her mind might not remember what had happened in the Sapphire Mine, but her body hadn’t forgotten. Of course she was afraid.

Her hopes had been smashed beneath a heap of rocks and dust. And it could’ve been so much worse, if he’d been any slower.

Just another thing that would’ve been all his fault.

“Yes.” He touched her cheek, forcing himself to smile. “This is all we have to do.”

So there, in Periwinkle’s dream, he showed her what it would be to save the Pixie Dust Root.

Leaving the spindle in her hand, he began unfurling the dream-thread and ran a length of it over the main shoot first, the iridescent colors glowing brightly against the bloated, sickly wood. Once he’d conjured the dream-magic scissors, he cut segments of the thread to tie torn-off rootlets back together while Periwinkle tossed loops of it around forks that were still intact. Together they wrapped the dream-thread around the root like dancers around a maypole, the peridot-aquamarine-rose thread like a bandage around the unhealthy-looking bark.