Porcelain plates sat on the long dining table like lily pads, and candles glinted their light down its middle, but the air was rigid with silence.
The Ballastian sisters took their seats in high-backed chairs that curved over their heads like cresting waves. The droomhunds hopped onto stools beside them. Evenflee and Peffiandra curled up right away, lying perfectly still except for their blinking eyes, but Seekatrix squirmed and sniffled.
“Shhh, Seeka,” Mayhap whispered to him.
As usual, Winnow went first. There were rules to be followed in their family, hierarchies and orders, even if their parents were gone — especially because their parents were gone.
“I’ll have apple charlotte,” Winnow said, enunciating the words.
Evenflee sneezed.
Pavonine giggled.
Mayhap said, “Pudding for dinner? You don’t feel like your favorite?”
Winnow usually had a bowl of vichyssoise for dinner. That had been their mother’s preferred dish. Mayhap knew she shouldn’t be upset about what her sister ate, but this was yet another thing that made her feel uneasy, as though the house itself would peel away from her the way the skin is peeled off a Christmas orange.
Winnow shrugged. “I’m celebrating,” she said.
“Celebrating what?” asked Pavonine, bouncing up and down in her chair.
“It’s a secret.”
“I love secrets,” said Pavonine. “You can tell me.”
Winnow looked at her plate. “Maybe I will tell you tomorrow.”
Mayhap wanted this conversation to end. It made her feel weary and helpless, like an old purse with a hole in the bottom. There had been a time when she had been the keeper of Winnow’s secrets, when they had both lain awake in bed after Pavonine’s droomhund had put her to sleep, whispering their hopes and reveries to each other under the cover of embroidered linen. But now Winnow had begun to say, “I want to be alone. Please leave me alone. Leave. Me. Alone.” She said it when Mayhap suggested she play a guessing game with them, or drink tea by the fire with them, or do anything they used to do three weeks and three days ago.
Mayhap sat up straight, unfolding her napkin and placing it on her lap. “I’ll have my usual dinner, please,” she said defiantly. Her mouth watered at the thought of it: a steaming aubergine pie shaped like the letter D.
Pavonine looked at Mayhap out the side of her eye, then said, “I’ll have pudding-dinner, too. Chocolate marble cake.” She showed all her teeth when she smiled.
The droomhunds stayed curled up on their cushions, eyes open, waiting for bedtime. They never ate or drank a single thing. They lived off dreams alone.
Once all three sisters had asked the house for their dinner, the plates that sat on the table were topped with their requests: apple charlotte for Winnow, a golden pie for Mayhap, and a slice of chocolate marble cake for Pavonine.
Mayhap watched Winnow, who picked up her dessert spoon and prodded the apple charlotte with it.
“Why did you lock yourself in the upstairs sitting room?” asked Pavonine through a mouthful of cake. “This is delicious,” she added. “We should have pudding-dinner more often.”
Winnow paused, her heaped spoon raised. She looked at Mayhap, and then at Pavonine, and then at the space between them. She seemed to be balancing whether to keep with Mayhap’s lie or tell Pavonine where she’d really been. She filled her mouth. “I needed to think,” she said.
“What did you need to think about?” asked Pavonine.
“About Mamma and Pappa,” said Winnow. “And about —” She glanced at Mayhap. “About things.”
“Things? About the thing you’re celebrating?” said Pavonine.
“I said I would tell you tomorrow, Pav,” said Winnow. She took another quick bite of apple charlotte and stared straight ahead.
Pavonine adorned the silence that followed with a story about how Peffiandra had found a little wooden jewelry box and chewed the lid off. “I couldn’t stop laughing at her,” she said. “For hours.” She stroked the droomhund. “You’re a clown of a girl, aren’t you?”
Peffiandra stared up at Pavonine with big black eyes, then went back to licking her front paws.
By the time Pavonine and Mayhap had finished their dinner, Winnow’s apple charlotte was left mostly uneaten. She pushed her silver-rimmed plate away from her, sighing. “Time to sleep,” she said. “Tomorrow the day will wear new shoes.”
These were words Mayhap usually used to comfort Winnow when she was sad. Together, they would imagine the type of shoes the day would wear next: boots fashioned out of carmine suede, or Grecian sandals braided with ivy, or amaranth ballet slippers covered in little beaded periwinkles.
Perhaps Winnow meant them as a bridge between silence and lies. But Mayhap — full and exhausted and still shaky from her interaction with the grass — could only press her lips into a forced smile and nod.
Tomorrow, she feared, the day would be barefoot.
Dressed in lace nightgowns, the girls settled down on chaise longues in their bedroom.
Pavonine groaned. “I’m tired now,” she whinged. “Why must we brush the droomhunds every night?” She made every sound like the longest word in a long history of long-haired girls.
“You know why,” said Mayhap, handing Pavonine a mother-of-pearl brush with horsehair bristles.
Pavonine took the brush out of Mayhap’s hand begrudgingly. “So they don’t traipse the dirt of the weary world into our dreams,” she grumbled.
Peffiandra seemed to consider this a summons. She jumped onto Pavonine’s lap.
“Exactly,” said Mayhap.
The house was spotlessly clean, but one couldn’t ever be too careful with a creature one allowed to sleep in one’s head.
A droomhund could press itself into the tight space of a person’s mind, much like a mouse squeezing under the lip of a locked door. With the droomhunds in their minds, the blaring light that lit up behind the Ballastian sisters’ eyes whenever they tried to sleep — a sensation Winnow had described to Mayhap and Pavonine in great detail after conducting what she called “an experiment” — could be
