Periwinkle's Arc

Chapter 6 of 17

By morning the trail was ruined. Periwinkle walked the line of cloth strips and found them soaked and gray. Birds had eaten most of the bread. The dark places she had marked yesterday looked the same as every other stretch of trees. She had guided one lost woman home, but the forest was vast, and her crumbs reached only this small patch. Tomorrow the lost would wander far past it. She needed a trail that could move, one that could cover ground she could never walk on foot. She sat on the bakery step and stared at the trees. The oven glowed warm behind her. Then hooves struck the soft earth, and she looked up. A horse stepped from the trees into the clearing. Its coat was pale gold, its mane long and bright. Two great feathered wings folded against its sides. It stopped at the flower boxes, lowered its head, and sniffed the sill where the loaves cooled. It was no ordinary animal. It moved like something the winged woman might have sent. Periwinkle rose slowly. She broke a warm loaf and held out half. "Here," she said. "You look hungry too." The winged horse ate from her palm. Its breath was warm. When it finished, it did not run. It stood and watched her, patient, as if waiting to be asked for something. An idea struck her. Her trail failed because it could not move. But this creature could cross the whole forest in an hour. It could carry bread to every dark corner, drop a loaf and a cloth wherever the lost might wander, then return. She filled a basket with loaves and tied strips of cloth to its handle. She looped the basket over the horse's neck. "Take these deep," she said. "Farther than I can go. Leave one wherever the light thins." The winged horse spread its wings and rose. She watched it climb over the trees and vanish. For a long time she waited on the step, sure she had lost both her bread and her only hope. Then she heard hooves again. The horse landed. Its basket was empty. And behind it, stumbling from the trees, came two shapes. Not people. Two bears, one large and one small, thin from a hungry winter. They had followed the bread the horse dropped, loaf by loaf, all the way to her door. Periwinkle laughed and opened the door wide. "Come in. There is more inside." The bears shuffled past the flower boxes into the warm light. Her trail could move now. The winged horse could carry bread anywhere the lost wandered. But as the bears ate at her hearth, she understood the true size of her oath. It was not only travelers who were lost and hungry in this forest. Every creature that wandered here would follow the bread home. And she had only two hands and one oven.