Page 93 of Wings of Reverie

“Ready?” she asked. He nodded.

They left Harlow digging a hole in the snow and catching snowflakes on her tongue, passed through the web, and stepped inside the workshop. For a moment, they just stood together, gazing around them.

“Periwinkle,” Weaver whispered. “We found it.”

The workshop was a globe of light and color. It had been built in a natural mountain cave, the walls one huge pale pink geode that sparkled and reflected all the moonlight and starlight that streamed in through the second star–side windows.

In one corner a huge silver frame for stretching woven material stood beside a row of dress forms, half-dressed in what looked like fairy sleep clothes. A woodpile, probably for melting ice to full fibers, stood beside a large fireplace carved directly into the pink geode walls. Crystal-topped workbenches made of silver and gold crowded the floor, covered in tools and half-completed projects, and a dusty row of niches in one glittering wall was filled with equally dusty jars of raw dye ingredients. And then there were the towering shelves of books.

It wasn’t a second Hall of Winter, high up in the mountain. But there were easily dozens—if not hundreds—of books in Stella’s collection. Periwinkle wasn’t surprised to see Weaver drawn to the shelves first.

She’d told him once that they were fairies, not pirates. But she felt like they’d found a lost treasure, all the same, and she could see Weaver felt it, too.

As she looked around at the tables and tools that filled the workshop, Periwinkle thought she could imagine Stella there, spending hours honing her talent, dreaming of ways to help her friend.

What she didn’t see—not anywhere—was a loom.

“We should hurry,” Weaver said. But Periwinkle saw thereluctance in his face, the longing as he ran his hands over the spines. A small sketch was propped on the bookshelf, as well. “Hey,” he said. “Look at that.”

The sketch was clean and minimal, a color drawing on a snowdrop petal a little smaller than Periwinkle’s hand, featuring three fairies hovering close beside one another. In the middle was a fairy with icy pale skin, pale yellow hair, and a serious look behind her glasses; two sparrow men flanked her, one dark-skinned with high cheekbones and elegant collarbones and dark hair cut close to his scalp, and the other stocky, light-skinned, brown-haired, and mischievous-looking, with an iridescent spider on his shoulder.

Stella, Orion, Morpheus. Periwinkle knew them immediately. Stella’s name was written in tiny letters at the bottom. Weaver blinked hard, and Periwinkle squeezed his shoulder before moving away to search the workshop.

She wanted to give him time. She knew what it meant to him to be here, to have come to the end of the thread and found himself not alone.

The problem was that finding the loom shouldn’t have taken any searching at all.

The workshop was large, the height of six fairies from floor to ceiling, at least. But it was all one story, with no other rooms or separate levels. There would have been nowhere to hide the huge frame of a loom like the one Weaver used in Floss’s workshop.

Still. Periwinkle scanned every corner of the room, trying to ignore the anxiety growing in her stomach as the loom continuedto not appear. She poked her head behind the stretching frame, shifted snow-dusted bolts of flax and cotton piled up by one wall, rummaged around a large cabinet full of sewing notions and, funnily enough, a pile of bodiless mannequin arms that all fell out when she opened the door. Periwinkle picked one up and turned to Weaver. “Need a hand?” she asked, giving a panicked laugh.

But the look on his face cut her to the heart. “What?” she asked.

She dropped the mannequin arm and crossed to where he stood at a workbench, staring down at a book and something shaped like a picture frame, looking bereft. “This is one of Stella’s journals.”

“What does it say?”

“Plenty.” Weaver cleared his throat, pointing to one of the pages. “But this is the most important thing.”

At first, Periwinkle didn’t know what she was looking at, or why his expression had nausea swelling like an oily bubble in her stomach. Then she noticed a drawing of something that looked a little like the picture frame on the table beside him.

A moment later, though, she realized that it wasn’t a picture frame at all. It was a simple wooden rectangle, with dozens of tiny, smooth sticks poking up from its edge like icicles.

“It’s a hand loom. The old kind,” Weaver said thickly. “It was Stella’s.”

He picked up the rectangle—or part of it. A few of the little sticks fell off when he lifted it. Most of the frame stayed on the workbench. That was when Periwinkle finally understood.

The loom was broken.

Found in the Snow Globe Mountain Workshop:

A Selection of Titles on Stella’s Bookshelf

Found by Weaver and Periwinkle.

Snow Globe Mountain’s Log-book (Vol. 11)

Snow Globe Mountain’s Log-book (Vol. 12)