The Sisters of Straygarden Place

by Hayley Chewins

  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 and painted teacups. The world in which her family was alive, in which droomhunds ran along hallways and lived on the dreams of their owners.

  Maybe.

  She thought.

  She hoped.

  She breathed.

  And then she spoke.

  “Quiverity,” she said. “Quiverity, please — there is something I can give you. I didn’t see it before, but I do now.”

  A voice swelled like a rain cloud, within her and without her. You can give me nothing, Quiverity told Mayhap.

  The ceiling cleaved above Mayhap’s head. The curtains whipped past her. Tapestries were yanked off their hooks, dragged across the floor like the trains of dresses. The door to the locked room flew open, ripped from its hinges. It went flying over Mayhap’s head and crashed into a wall, falling to the floor.

  “Stop!” yelled Mayhap.

  But the Mysteriessa only screamed louder. Mayhap curled up on the floor again, covering her head with her arms.

  Then she felt fur against her cheek, the wet slick of a tongue.

  “Seeka!” she cried. “You found me!”

  Seekatrix only looked at her in the silent way that was his habit. She held him fast against her body as though he were a lifebuoy in a jostling sea.

  He had been looking for her.

  She had not been as alone as she’d thought.

  And Quiverity was not alone, either.

  But Seekatrix’s presence seemed to make Quiverity’s anger worse. It shrieked within Mayhap. It gusted and groaned.

  Mayhap could not scream louder than the Mysteriessa. She would have to do the opposite. She would have to speak softly.

  Silently.

  The way Seekatrix spoke to her every day: with the sort of presence that said I will never, ever leave you.

  The Mysteriessa was inside her heart, after all. She was a part of her and also not a part of her, like peppermint tea in a porcelain cup. Maybe Mayhap could hold a silence so deep that Quiverity would be drawn into it.

  Mayhap had never been less certain of anything in her life — but she had to try.

  Quiverity, she thought, holding the Edevane girl’s name in her mind, I am your family.

  The house stopped shaking. The walls settled like creaking bones.

  And the Mysteriessa spoke right into Mayhap’s heart.

  I am not worthy of family, she said. You insult me by saying otherwise.

  She lifted a cry so devastating that Mayhap was sure the entire house had gone up in flames. Mayhap closed her eyes. But when she opened them again, Seekatrix was still pressed against her chest, and the house was still standing.

  The blaze had been in her.

  The room was still.

  She spoke again, this time with the tongue the Mysteriessa had fashioned: “Quiverity — the grass tricked you. It got you to agree to something you never would have agreed to if you’d known —”

  “I did know! I had to know! I
knew what would happen, and I accepted anyway.”

  “You didn’t,” Mayhap said quietly. “I know you didn’t. I saw you — I saw you in my dream. Quiverity, you made me so that you could have your family back. You loved them. You wouldn’t so easily have given them up. You said yourself — you were half-asleep when the grass asked you. You loved us. Tutto — all that time, all those stories he read to Pavonine, how kind he was. That was you. You made him come alive. For us.”

  The Mysteriessa’s rage cooled within Mayhap.

  “I am your home. Your family,” continued Mayhap aloud. “I am here for you. I love you.”

  The Mysteriessa wept, and Mayhap did the same, crying into Seekatrix’s fur.

  “You can’t take back the past,” said Mayhap. “But you can decide what you want today to be like.”

  “But they hate me,” said the Mysteriessa. “They have always hated me —”

  “You took their sister — their daughter — away,” said Mayhap. “I know you gave them me to replace her, but —”

  “I kept her safe. I made a second Straygarden Place only for her, a house that would always look after her. Her parents wanted to fetch her back. But I couldn’t let them. I only wanted to belong — to belong to something, to someone. I loved the Ballastians. I really loved them. And Winnow — I never meant for her to get so sick. I only wanted her to stay asleep. To keep my secret. I didn’t know it would all go so horribly wrong.”

  Mayhap spoke as though her words were being chiseled into stone. “I know,” she said. “I know. And you do belong to someone. You belong to me. With me.”

  The windows began to rattle again, a crystalline crescendo. And then they all shattered at once, each a leaf in a forest of glass. The walls shattered, too. The floors. The ceilings.

  In a moment, the second Straygarden Place turned to dust.

  And Mayhap was thrown into the cold night air.

  The grass caught Mayhap gently, handling her as a girl would handle a moth’s lost wing.

  When she opened her eyes, she was surrounded by silver. Seekatrix was still against her chest. Her heart danced, and she felt the droomhund’s smaller heart dancing, too.

  Bright white stars burned their patterns into the black sheet of the sky. Wanderroot trees drifted past. The grass hoisted her higher so that she could see the clearing where the second Straygarden Place had once been.

  It was gone.

  Every tapestry, every chair, every carpet, every painting. All of it had turned to dust, and that dust hung around Mayhap like starlight. She turned her head to see that the first Straygarden Place still stood. It looked small, like a dollhouse.

  Mayhap couldn’t see her family in the grass. Her stomach was a nest of withered branches.

  She had made a terrible mistake.

  And now everything had been destroyed.

  “Pavonine?” she said. “Winnow?”

  Seekatrix stirred in her arms.

  And the Mysteriessa spoke.

  She spoke the way rain falling on moss would speak, soaking Mayhap through. It was like diving into a river headfirst, like stepping into a field of silver grass and letting it sway over you, filtering the evening’s dusk.

  Whatever that voice was, she was beneath it, under it, in it. She was it.

  Did you really mean it? said the Mysteriessa. Did you really mean it when you said that I — that I belonged to you?

  Mayhap took a breath. “Yes, I did,” she answered.

  It was no lie. She had been made by this girl. She belonged to Quiverity the way a garden belongs to the sun. And that meant that Quiverity belonged to her, too. For good. For bad.

  The grass settled her on her feet, and something in Mayhap relaxed, a ribbon unwound. But she could not stop thinking of her family. “Are they safe?” she asked.

  “They’re safe,” said Quiverity Edevane, appearing beside Mayhap. “They’re in the grass. Let me show you.”

  Mayhap and Quiverity found the Ballastian family — mother, father, three sisters, and five droomhunds — in a space the grass had made for them. It looked like a silver cave.

  Before, the grass had been eager to grab hold of Mayhap, to twist about her arms and legs. But now it stood apart from her — apart from all of them — as though it were watching. Waiting.

  Mayhap’s skin prickled. She didn’t know what the grass was waiting for, but while it stood still, she could try to make Winnow better.

  She could try to save her sister.

  Winnow was lying in the center of the clearing, the grass making moonshadows on her skin. She looked like a sculpture. All the words Mayhap couldn’t say caught in her throat like barbed hooks. She wanted to say her sister’s name — she was her sister, she was — but she couldn’t.

  The Ballastians were standing around Winnow, bowing their heads.

  Bellwether was speaking very quickly: “I don’t understand. It should have worked. After all our research on the subject —”

  Cygnet squeezed his shoulder. “Bell,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything else we can do.” Her face was as white as a winter moon. “We’ve — lost her.”

  Her droomhund whined.

  “We can’t have lost her,” said Bellwether.

  “But we have,” said Cygnet, leaning over to place a cheek against Winnow’s. “She’s not breathing. She has no pulse.”

  Tears were dripping off Pavonine’s chin as she looked at the dirt beneath her feet.

  It was other-Mayhap who spotted Mayhap and the Mysteriessa.

  “Mamma,” she said, pulling at Cygnet’s sleeve. “Mamma, the other Mayhap is here.”

  Cygnet turned her head to see Mayhap and Quiverity standing hand in hand, their backs to the grass that framed the silver cave. She moved to stand between them and Winnow. Other-Mayhap and Pavonine stayed where they were. Other-Mayhap whispered, “Who’s that?” and pointed at the Mysteriessa. Pavonine said, “Shhh.” Bellwether stiffened.

  The grass began to whisper.

  “Ours, ours, ours.”

  “You can’t have her,” said Bellwether.

  “I’ve come to help,” said Mayhap. “I know what’s wrong with her. I know what will make her better. Please. Let us try. Otherwise we really will lose her. You will lose her.”

  On her bed of dark earth, in her green coat, Winnow looked like a princess, her hair blown away from her face by the breeze rushing through the grass, her skin as shiny as mercury.

  “Mamma,” said other-Mayhap. “You’ve been looking for my sisters for so long, hurting yourself for it. Now that they’re finally here, you won’t let Winnow die, will you?” There were tears in her eyes.

  Pavonine spoke now, looking at the toes of her boots. “Mayhap was my sister for seven years — seven years and she was never anything but good to me. She has — I think she has — a good heart.”

  Cygnet and Bellwether considered their daughters’ words. They looked at Pavonine, then at other-Mayhap, and then at Winnow. This was probably, in the end, what made them agree to it: the fact that they had no other hope.

  Only Mayhap could help.

  Only the Mysteriessa could make Winnow better.

  And so Cygnet and Bellwether stepped apart, allowing Mayhap and Quiverity to come closer.

  Mayhap kneeled at Winnow’s side. She squeezed her silver hand. It was a relief for Winnow not to flinch at her touch. She knew that once Winnow woke, she probably wouldn’t ever want to see her again. It hurt. But it hurt her more to see her sister suffering. She looked at the Mysteriessa. “I think you know what to do,” she said.

  Quiverity Edevane gave a curt nod.

  She sank to her knees and placed a hand over Winnow’s ear. She held it there.

  Cygnet hid her face, crying out. Bellwether stared at the Mysteriessa’s hand with horror on his face. Other-Mayhap was wearing her awkward smile, and Pavonine’s eyes were shiny.

  And then Quiverity drew Evenflee — a scraggly mess of black fur, wriggling like a new puppy �
� from Winnow’s mind. The dog squirmed and cried, pushing his body against the Mysteriessa’s chest and panting.

  Cygnet and Bellwether seemed to be holding their breath, staring at Winnow. Pavonine ran to sit by Mayhap’s side and took her hand and held it. Other-Mayhap breathed in: an exclamation of wonder. The Mysteriessa breathed out, as though relieved it was finally, finally, over.

  And Winnow opened her eyes.

  The silver began to recede from Winnow’s skin.

  Cygnet and Bellwether gathered closer to watch, their droomhunds sniffing Winnow’s fingertips. Pavonine’s mouth was open. Other-Mayhap came close, too, patting Evenflee, who was still in the Mysteriessa’s arms.

  The silver drew itself away from Winnow like mist lifting away from a lake. Her skin, inch by inch, was restored to its creamy tone. The silver was drawn out of her eyes, too, until they returned to their usual richness — so dark you could hardly see her pupils. She blinked, trying to focus on the faces that peered down at her.

  She wriggled her fingers, her toes. She sat up, ever so slowly, as though she were afraid the silver would come for her again.

  Pavonine let go of Mayhap’s hand and launched herself at Winnow, tumbling on top of her. “Winn,” she said. “You’re here. You’re better.”

  Winnow ran a hand over Pavonine’s head. “I’m better,” she said.

  “I missed you,” said Pavonine, resting her head on Winnow’s shoulder.

  Peffiandra jumped up to lick Winnow’s cheeks.

  Cygnet and Bellwether quietly reached down to take Winnow’s hands in theirs.

  Other-Mayhap stood behind her parents.

  Then Winnow’s eyes found Mayhap’s face — and Quiverity’s. Her body jerked.

  The Mysteriessa put Evenflee down gently. The droomhund ran to Winnow as Quiverity stood and drifted toward the silver grass.

  There seemed so much to say, but Mayhap couldn’t find a way to say it.

  She wanted to say I love you.

  She wanted to say I’m sorry.

  She wanted to say I didn’t know. I didn’t know all the wrong I had done.

  But she couldn’t. The air was too gentle for it. The world felt like a bruise. She didn’t want to hurt it further.