The Sisters of Straygarden Place

house was a stranger to her.
Lying still, Mayhap could feel the Mysteriessa against the tender muscle of her heart. She thought that maybe the girl would unfurl — appear to her, talk to her — but she stayed within Mayhap’s chest, stubborn as ice on a window.
Mayhap wanted to sleep. She wanted to forget about all of this — who she was and who she wasn’t — for only a short while.
But they had taken Seekatrix from her, and so she couldn’t.
Unless.
She wasn’t a Ballastian — not technically. The Mysteriessa had made her. Maybe she hadn’t been robbed of sleep after all. Maybe she’d had the ability to sleep all along.
If she hadn’t lost sleep, though, how had the house’s magic touched her? She didn’t know. But she’d had something else taken from her: a piece of her heart, like a bite out of an apple.
She held her eyes shut, waiting for the white, searing heat to fill the chamber of her mind, bracing for pain.
But it didn’t come.
With relief like cashmere, she shut her eyes and let darkness pull her under.

Mayhap dreamed of a white-haired girl.
The girl walked through a field of silver grass that reached up into the sky.
It wafted around her, brushing her cheeks. It whispered to her.
And it told her stories.
Stories about trees, and birds, and pebbles. Stories about seas, and clouds, and lakes. Stories that ended with princesses. Stories that ended with queens.
“Would Quiverity like to be a queen, like the ones in the stories?” it asked.
Quiverity only ran through the grass, giggling, not taking the question seriously.
But the grass kept asking it, over and over.
“Would Quiverity like to be a queen, like the ones in the stories?”
The girl pushed the grass away and laughed again. Mayhap could see that she did not think of it as a genuine question. She thought it was an affectionate joke. A game she played with the grass, only make-believe.
Eventually, she curled up on the black earth, wet soil kissing her cheek. The grass hung over her like a canopy.
She had slipped halfway into sleep, her eyes closed, the silver covering her like a twilit quilt, when it whispered into her ear.
“Would Quiverity like to be a queen? We would only take something small from her. A small grief, to let the magic in.”
Quiverity Edevane nodded her head, and the grass rushed over her like a burial, and even as the silver swallowed her up, still she had the look of someone peaceful, someone loved.


And then Mayhap was awake.
She was so awake that the hairs on her arms were standing to attention.
The house was shaking — the walls trembling like the teeth of shivering children, the little windows cracked and open to the darkness and the drifting wanderroot trees outside. The second Straygarden Place swayed.
There was a voice inside Mayhap, and the voice was screaming, “Get out of my house!”
When someone who lives within you screams, it feels as though every one of your veins is a sparking wire. Mayhap curled up and clenched her eyes shut, as though she were trying to hide from lightning.
But the lightning was inside her.
She had to move. She had to speak. She had to tell the Mysteriessa to calm down. Otherwise she didn’t know if she would survive.
She breathed.
And breathed.
And staggered to her feet.
She would speak to the noise within her. To the storm.
She would speak to the Mysteriessa. To the girl named Quiverity Edevane.
Quiverity Edevane, who was shaking the walls and splintering the windows, making the world tilt.
Winnow was not the only one in danger now.
If the house fell, they would all be crushed by the rubble. Faintly, over the howling that came from within her, Mayhap could hear panicked cries.
The Mysteriessa had locked them in. The mother, the father, the sisters — Mayhap could not bring herself to call them her sisters anymore. And the droomhunds. Seekatrix. Mayhap’s heart was sticky as a wound.
Let them try to get out, said the Mysteriessa from the echoing hollow of Mayhap’s chest. Let them try to escape. Let them beg.
Everything she knew and loved would be destroyed if the Mysteriessa continued like this. The Mysteriessa was powerful enough to do it. To destroy it all. She had magic in her like raging fire, and she’d kept it more or less dampened for seven years, but it was as though someone had stoked it now.
“But why?” Mayhap said. “What made you so angry?”
Then Mayhap remembered the dream. If she had dreamed it, then the Mysteriessa had seen it. And it had made her rage.
They hate me, screamed the Mysteriessa inside her, still from within the cage of Mayhap’s bones.
She’s hurting, thought Mayhap. I need to stop this. I need to make her feel better.
The Mysteriessa had said that you had to hide to be loved, had to trick and fool — that there was no being true and being loved at the same time.
And only Mayhap could prove her wrong.
For Mayhap, in the irony of her living, had been loved — unconditionally, fully, lavishly. By her droomhund. By the girls she had once called her sisters. Her little sister, Pavonine. Her older sister, Winnow.
Before, snarled a breath inside her. Before Winnow grew curious and went walking in the grass. Before she was led by the silver grass to the house on the other side of the estate. Before she was reunited with her parents. Before she found out what you really were.
Yes — before Winnow had gone walking in the grass. But there had been a before. And that was the point. There had been a time when Mayhap was loved.
And she could give that love to the Mysteriessa. She could give Quiverity the belonging she needed, the belonging she had stolen from another family, placed in a little ring box. Maybe that would calm her. Maybe that would prevent her from wrecking the world that Mayhap knew. The world of silver grass and so many windows, of velvet