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 often spent entire days there — reading stories herself and asking Tutto to tell them to her — Mayhap had visited it just a handful of times.
She went there only when Pavonine begged her to go — usually on Tutto’s birthday or when Pavonine wanted to show her something in a book from the reference section: an encyclopaedic entry on some outlandish animal, or the pressed and preserved leaf of a rare and irreplaceable plant.
The truth was, Mayhap hated the library. She hated it because the books, lined up like an army, made her feel as though there was so much she didn’t know about the world and about herself.
And she hated it because it always — always — smelled of coffee.
Her parents had asked for a coffee trolley to be added to the room, and there it remained. According to Tutto, they’d said that the smell of coffee was a bewitching thing, able to make anyone think faster and think better. Mayhap liked the idea of coffee — and the image of her mother and father bent over their books, cups of the steaming elixir by their sides — but the smell was nearly unbearable. It made her feel as though someone were burying her. She could taste earth on her tongue, could feel the weight of soil on her chest. It made her want to cough and cough until she spat up blood.
Which is to say: going to the library was no small feat.
But she would do it for Winnow.
The library had a floor of green marble. Sofas were dotted around it, as well as reading desks with low-bent lamps. Shelves lined the walls and reached all the way up to the domed ceiling, curving with it, the books somehow staying on their shelves even as they met the oculus in the cupola’s center.
In the middle of this large circular room was the coffee trolley, positioned between two velvet armchairs. Tutto stood beside it.
Tutto was a large hippopotamus — about the same size as a real hippopotamus, Mayhap guessed — fashioned out of silver and holding all the library’s thousands and thousands of catalog cards. He had about a hundred palm-sized drawers in his left side, and he moved about on creaky wheels. Each of the drawers contained countless cards, and each card was inscribed with the name of a library book.
Winnow seemed to remember a time when Tutto had not been alive — when he was unable to speak. She had told Mayhap and Pavonine about climbing onto his back, feeling the hammered metal beneath her hands. But she couldn’t remember how he’d started talking. She used to say that maybe he got tired of sitting in a room filled with words while not having anything to say himself. Mayhap couldn’t remember a time before he’d spoken, and neither could Pavonine.