Periwinkle's Arc

Chapter 5 of 17

The winged woman was gone. Periwinkle stood alone at the bright door of her bakery, its gilded trim glowing, its windows warm. The oven was lit. The shelves would soon be full. But she had sworn to feed the lost, and the lost never walked the road that ran past her step. She had a shop no one would find. She went inside and pulled the loaves from the oven. The smell filled the room. She set them on the sill, hoping the wind would carry it. The wind only rattled the flower boxes. No one came. Periwinkle sat on the step and thought. The lost wandered off the road, into the dark places. So the bread had to leave the shop. It had to go to them. She stood and gathered a basket. She wrapped six warm loaves in cloth. Then she walked past the flower boxes, past the road, straight into the trees where the light thinned. The forest closed around her. She lost the path within twenty steps. Roots caught her feet. Branches hid the sky. This was where the lost would be. And now she was lost too. She almost turned back. Then she remembered the oath, warm in her chest like a knot pulled tight. She broke the first loaf and set half on a flat stone. She tore a strip of cloth and tied it to a branch above it, white against the dark bark. She walked on and did it again. A loaf on a root. A strip of cloth. Then again, and again, until the basket was light. Behind her stretched a line of small white cloths and broken bread, curving back toward the glowing windows of the shop. A trail. Not to the door, but from it. Any wanderer who found one loaf could find the next, and the next, and follow the crumbs and cloth to her warm oven. She tied the last strip and waited in the dark. For a long time nothing moved. The cold crept into her hands. Then she heard it. A slow, dragging step. A figure stumbled between the trees, thin and hunched, reaching for the pale loaf on the stone. The stranger ate, saw the next cloth glowing ahead, and shuffled toward it. Periwinkle followed at a distance, quiet. The figure moved from bread to bread, from cloth to cloth, until the trees opened. The glowing windows rose ahead. The stranger stopped at the flower boxes, staring at the light as if it could not be real. Periwinkle ran ahead and opened the door. Warmth spilled onto the step. "Come in," she said. "There is more inside." The stranger crossed the threshold. Her oath had found its first mouth to feed. But her cloth strips could rot, and her trail reached only one small stretch of forest. Tomorrow the lost would wander somewhere she had left no crumbs.