The Mysteriessa leaned toward Mayhap and whispered, “I’ve been here a long, long time.” She looked down the hallway and back at Mayhap. “I’m the one who made this place what it is. Before, it was only an ordinary house.”
Mayhap sat up straighter. “You made the grass?” she said.
The Mysteriessa shook her head. “No, no. Not the grass. The grass was here before everything.”
Mayhap looked down at her folded arms. “How many years have you been the Mysteriessa?”
“One hundred and twelve.”
“So you’ve looked after many families before us.”
“I’ve taken care of all of them.” The Mysteriessa smiled. “I told you. I understand how things work around here. That is why you must trust me, Mayhap.”
Mayhap didn’t want to rely on the Mysteriessa. But she needed help. She had so many questions. “The other families who lived here before us,” she said. “Their portraits are in the gallery. Did the grass ever make them sick?”
“Sometimes. But most of them didn’t stay long enough. Most of them couldn’t last.”
“Why not?” asked Mayhap. “Please,” she implored. “Tell me.”
The Mysteriessa blew out a sigh. “Fine,” she said. “But only if you promise not to tell Pavonine. We don’t have to make this any more complicated than it already is.”
Mayhap’s stomach tingled, but she said, “I promise,” and she shifted so that she was facing the Mysteriessa. Seekatrix curled up on her lap.
“The grass takes things,” said the Mysteriessa. “From families. So that they can live here.”
“Takes things?”
“It’s so that the house can look after them,” continued the Mysteriessa. “So that the magic of the house can touch them. It’s the cost of it.”
The Mysteriessa paused as though she were remembering.
“Once,” she said, “a man came to the gate. The house had been standing empty for years, so the grass offered it to him. The man accepted the house gladly, even after the grass told him that he would have to give something up. When he stepped inside, he couldn’t believe its grandeur. He had a nice hot bath, and after a sumptuous dinner of roast lamb and figs, he fell asleep in one of the house’s large, clean beds.
“The next morning, the house served him a delicious breakfast of rich coffee and tea cakes — but he could not eat a single bite or swallow a single sip. The tea cakes tasted like mud; the coffee, like water from a dirty puddle. I told him to leave, but he wanted the house. He was stubborn. He had never seen a place so beautiful.
“The house kept serving the man food — rich, lavish meals — but he could not stomach any of it. The grass had taken good tastes from him. Taken them, as though they were coins in a purse.
“Eventually, after weeks of being able to eat only the most meager of mouthfuls, he crawled out into the silver grass. But he was so weak that he died before he could get to the gate. If he’d only listened to me, he might have survived.
“That’s what I do, Mayhap. I help the families who live here. I help them to enjoy the luxury of the house but also to manage the grass’s magic. Because if they don’t, tragedy befalls them.”
The story sifted through Mayhap like flour through a sieve. She hugged Seekatrix tightly. “What other sorts of things does the house take?” she asked.
“Oh, sometimes it’s memory, sometimes music. Sometimes it’s love, or language, or solitude. The cost of light is darkness.”
“Our parents used to say that,” said Mayhap.
“That does not surprise me. It is the motto of Straygarden Place.”
“Is this — is Winnow’s sickness — is it one of the things the grass takes? Her health? Or — is that why our parents left? Did it take them?”
The Mysteriessa shook her head quickly. “No,” she said. “It’s like I said: Winnow’s sickness is a consequence of touching the grass, of being out there for so long. And I — I don’t know why your parents left. I’m sorry, Mayhap. I did try to get them to stay. But they insisted.”
“You knew them?” asked Mayhap, identifying the tight, vicious feeling in her chest as jealousy.
The Mysteriessa nodded. “For a little while, yes.”
Then it dawned on Mayhap. “The grass took sleep from us,” she said. “That’s why we have droomhunds. That’s why we can’t close our eyes for more than a minute —”
“Yes,” said the Mysteriessa. “You’re right. And I was the one who interceded on your behalf. I brought the droomhunds to your beds. So you could get your rest.”
“So you only appear when something goes wrong?”
“When there’s a conflict between the grass and the family, yes.”
“None of this makes any sense,” snarled Mayhap. “None of it.” The ideas were a jumble of knotted ribbons in her mind, and she couldn’t separate them out.
The Mysteriessa looked at the carpet. “I’m sorry, Mayhap.”
Mayhap buried her face in Seekatrix’s fur. Her helplessness made her furious, the kind of anger that came after you touched a hot stove. “Don’t be sorry,” she said to the Mysteriessa. “Be helpful.”
“But I am sorry, Mayhap,” said the Mysteriessa. “Just keep the grass from touching Winnow and let her rest, and it’ll all be well. I’m sure of that.” She touched Mayhap’s shoulder, but Mayhap shrugged her hand away. Seekatrix whined softly.
“Just leave me alone,” Mayhap said.
She felt the Mysteriessa drifting from her like a dissipating mist.
“What are we going to do, Seeka?” she moaned. “What are we going to do?” She looked down the hallway, toward the room she shared with Pavonine and Winnow.
She heard Pavonine’s faint voice again. “Would you like me to tell you a story, Winn?”
“A story,” Mayhap said to Seekatrix, and his ears darted forward.
She stood and began to walk, and her droomhund followed her dutifully.
Mayhap had never liked the library.
Though Pavonine
