WHEN I WAKE, I am in my own bed.

My sheets are soaked with sweat. I don’t know who found me in the barn and brought me back. My dreams were coffee-scented, and Thomas is the only one who drinks coffee, though Benny takes a sip every now and then and pretends he likes it. But I can’t picture a one-armed man carrying me, even though I saw him pick up that lamb and throw it over the fence into its pasture. I wrap a blanket around my dress and shuffle down the stairs and hover outside of Anna’s room. The door is open a crack. Sister Mary Grace is there, tidying up spilled broth.

I can see the bedsheets rising and falling as Anna breathes. She is asleep. Alive. Voices come from downstairs. Sister Constance must be back with the medicine.

I’ve slept through supper, but the Sisters have left me some ham beneath a napkin. As I sit alone at the kitchen table and eat, something moves in the reflection of the copper teakettle. The angles of the kitchen are warped in its curving sides, so that the ceiling looks tiny, and the fireplace inflates into a roaring inferno behind me. My nose is the size of a swollen plum, my eyes unnaturally small. A gray winged horse is nosing around the table behind me, probably hungry for toast with jam. It snuffles against my mirror-chair, then against my mirror-shoulders. I shiver, even though my real shoulders have felt nothing. A stick cracks in the fire, and the horse turns toward it. Afraid of the flames or curious, I am not sure. It stretches its wings so suddenly that I duck.

“Be careful,” I whisper. “The fire could burn you.”

Does my voice carry to the world beyond the mirror? The gray horse swivels its head to the left, then to the right, then folds its wings and walks into the ground-floor hall.

I push away the kettle. I do not want to see my reflection. The hair that has grown back unevenly. My hand drifts up to untangle the tufts, and I taste ashes that don’t have anything to do with the kitchen fire. Even without the kettle’s distortions, Benny is right. I do look odd.

Can I tell you a secret?

This is not the first hospital I have been in. I have not always had the stillwaters. That came later, after the fire, after the bandages. After the horses kicking at their stall doors, and no one to let them out.

The kitchen door slams, and the three little mice come in with red cheeks. They’ve recruited a fourth into their ranks now: Arthur, the blond boy who never speaks and sucks his thumb. They’ve dressed him as a pirate prince and given him a shiny kitchen ladle as a sword, but he’s only gazing at his own reflection in it. Kitty, the leader of the mice, holds up two long black feathers. They look like crow feathers, except they have a sheen like wax and are the length of her arm.

“Look what we found on the terrace!”

She holds one feather in each hand, flapping her arms like a giant bird and cawing at the ceiling, and the girls giggle and run down the hall.