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 muffled with the dogs’ black fur. But if the droomhunds weren’t brushed, the fur would prickle the insides of the girls’ heads, turning their dreams sharp as hat pins and making their thoughts scatter like dropped marbles. The softer the droomhunds’ fur was, the more restful the girls’ sleep would be.
“But it’s such a pain,” moaned Pavonine. “The house does everything for us. Why can’t it take care of the droomhunds, too?” She ran one hand over Peffiandra’s back, the brush poised in the other.
“Because the cost of light is darkness,” said Winnow. She sat opposite Pavonine, Evenflee lying beside her.
“You’re always saying that,” said Pavonine, her shoulders drooping. “And I don’t even know what it means.” She stabbed at the chaise with the handle of her brush, and Peffiandra looked up, alarmed.
“It’s something Mamma used to say,” said Winnow, sounding unbearably sad. “For every good thing in the world, there is a little bad to go with it. The cost of having a droomhund is brushing her each night.”
Mayhap tried to meet Winnow’s eyes to say a silent thank you, but Winnow looked away.
“Why doesn’t the house do it for us, though?” said Pavonine. “It does everything else.”
“It doesn’t sleep for us,” said Winnow. “The dogs do that.”
“I suppose,” said Pavonine.
Mayhap said, “It’s the way it is, Pav. Some things simply — are. And you can’t change them.” Like the way Winnow has been acting, she thought. She blinked back tears as Seekatrix turned a few anxious circles on her lap. Once he was lying down, she began to run the bristles of her brush through his fur.
Winnow began to brush Evenflee, too, and Pavonine — who had somehow managed to stop complaining — followed suit.
Usually, the Ballastian sisters would talk while they groomed their dogs, but tonight there were too many secrets in the air, and too many lies. The only sounds were the hush of the brushes through thick fur and the rattle of the grass against the windows.
Hush. Rattle. Hush. Rattle.
Pavonine made a quick job of brushing Peffiandra, who endured the treatment like a rag doll. When Pavonine was done, the little dog leaped to the floor, shook as though she was wet, and scratched at the plush carpet.
“Did you do her legs?” said Winnow.
“Yes,” moaned Pavonine. She rolled her eyes.
Winnow rolled hers back.
Then Pavonine began chasing Peffiandra around, squealing as the droomhund growled playfully, her fur fluffed and standing on end.
“Pav,” said Mayhap. “Don’t get her all excited before bed.”
“Why not?” asked Pavonine, stalking behind Peffiandra, about to give her a fright. “She’ll sleep when she needs to sleep.”
“But you had those nightmares the last time, remember? If she can’t settle down, then you won’t, either. It’s not just the texture of their fur that matters.”
Pavonine didn’t listen.
“Pavonine Ballastian,” said Mayhap, “take your droomhund into the hallway right this minute. Ask the house to keep the lights off, and walk up and down slowly. She needs to be in the right state for sleeping.”