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.
