Page 64 of Wings of Reverie

Worst of all, there was nothing to show that the tree could eversurvivethat sort of trauma.

“You’re frowning,” Weaver said quietly as he finished cleaning up his station. It had already looked clean to Periwinkle, but what did she know?

“I’ll explain once we’ve left,” she said back softly. Weaver nodded, but his brow when she looked up at him was still furrowed.

Her worrying had him worried. She didn’t know what to do about this, exactly. She just tried to remind herself that they had a plan.

Now she just had to hope they hadn’t missed something important.

True to her word, Periwinkle explained everything as they made their way to Chilly Falls. The neighborhood was full of fairiessnowboarding and sledding and ice sliding, as noisy and busy as the falls were silent and still.

“The Pixie Dust Tree book doesn’t mention the story you told me,” she’d said. “So as far as we know, the strategy of using dreams on the tree was only to strengthen the tree when it was a sapling, to keep damage from happening.”

Weaver frowned. “What does that mean?”

“It means we still don’t know anything about using dreams tofixthings,” she said. Agitation crept into her voice. “Does that worry you?”

“I guess.” He chewed the inside of his cheek. “But just because we don’t have the evidence you want doesn’t mean this won’t work.” Periwinkle considered this for a moment.

“Maybe you’re right,” she finally said. “Maybe that’s why we’re getting these dreams. If the rot is a new problem for the root and the tree, of course we won’t find anything on how it was handled in the past. We’ll just have to trust that the dream magic is showing us what we need to know.”

Weaver only answered this with a smile. Seeing it, though, Periwinkle felt a surprising jolt of happiness.

He was finally beginning to understand what the magic meant. What it meant to trust it.Your days as a cynic are numbered, she wanted to tell him, like she’d done earlier that day.

She held the words in. But as she flew with Weaver above the river, she couldn’t quite hold back her smile.

Periwinkle knew the neighborhood of Chilly Falls pretty wellfrom visiting Spike and getting brunch at Blizz’s, but the winding path the Chilly River took northeast was unfamiliar to her. She’d never ventured near where the encyclopedia had put the mine, and the land grew sharper and rockier as they moved toward their goal, the day around them as silent as the frozen river’s surface. There were no trees, and the dusting of snow on the ground only partly softened the hard landscape.

“Follow the needle,”Weaver sighed, glancing toward the dream-magic book in Periwinkle’s bag. She had brought it, a lightcatcher, and not much else.

“I still don’t know what the reference to the needle means,” Periwinkle said. “I looked through the encyclopedia for a compass, and nothing turned up.”

Weaver scowled. “Needles. Dreams. It’s like whoever wrote the directions only knew how to do it with cryptic notes,” he complained. “Would it have killed someone to draw a map?”

“I could draw us a map.” Periwinkle grinned at him. “It’ll just be a wavy line for the river with a big circle at the end, but I’ll do it if you want.”

“I was thinking someone could’ve included, you know, a concrete detail or two,” he said pointedly. “Like, start at this tree, fly at twenty knots for twenty minutes, turn due east for thirty paces. X marks the spot. Enjoy your treasure.”

“We aren’t pirates, Weaver.” He laughed at this, and Periwinkle felt absurdly pleased. And when Legs surprised them both by hopping onto her eucalyptus-leaf dress and settling on her shoulder,Weaver called him a traitor, and Periwinkle couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so happy.

They flew for a long time—longer than Periwinkle would’ve hoped, and long enough that she began to wonder if she’d misread or missed something. Finally, though, they spotted the river’s end.

“There it is!” she called, pointing into the heavy gray of the late afternoon. Relief hit her square between the wings. “The riverbed disappears underground here. The mine must be close.” Both of them surged ahead, eager to find the mine and start their search, but Weaver put on a burst of speed and landed ahead of her.

Periwinkle saw his face fall before she saw anything else.

“What is it?” she called, hurrying to catch up. “Do you see the mine?”

“Just—well.” Weaver ran a hand through his dark hair, his eyes looking shadowed and drained. “You’d better just come here.”

Periwinkle landed hard on the rocky ground and dashed over beside him. Her heart hit the ground not long after her feet did.

There wasn’t a mine at the end of the Chilly River.

There werea dozenof them, their entrances set in a circle around the center point where they now stood.

Weaver hung his head. Periwinkle sat wearily down in the snow.