“I wouldn’t tell you even if I knew, because it’s none of your concern,” Miss Wren said. “It isn’t the duty of peculiar children to worry for the welfare of ymbrynes—it’s ours to worry for yours.”
“But, Miss Wren, that’s hardly fair,” Millard began, but she cut him short with a curt “I won’t hear anything else about it!” and that was that.
I was shocked by this sudden dismissal, especially considering that if we hadn’t worried about Miss Peregrine’s welfare—and risked our lives to bring her here!—she would’ve been condemned to spend the rest of her days trapped in the body of a bird. So it did seem like our duty to worry, since the ymbrynes had clearly not done a good enough job worrying to keep their loops from being raided. I didn’t like being talked down to that way, and judging from Emma’s knitted brow, she didn’t, either—but to have said so would’ve been unthinkably rude, so we finished our climb in awkward silence.
We came to the top of the stairs. Only a few of the doorways on this level were iced over. Miss Wren took Miss Peregrine from Horace and said, “Come on, Alma, let’s see what can be done for you.”
Althea appeared in an open door, her face flushed, chest heaving. “Your room’s all ready, mistress. Everything you asked for.”
“Good, good,” said Miss Wren.
“If we can do anything to help you,” Bronwyn said, “anything at all …”
“All I need is time and quiet,” Miss Wren replied. “I’ll save your ymbryne, young ones. On my life I will.” And she turned and took Miss Peregrine into the room with Althea.
Not knowing what else to do with ourselves, we drifted after her and congregated around the door, which had been left open a crack. We took turns peeking inside. In a cozy room dimly lit by oil lamps, Miss Wren sat in a rocking chair holding Miss Peregrine in her lap. Althea stood mixing vials of liquid at a lab table. Every so often she’d lift a vial and swirl it, then walk to Miss Peregrine and pass it under her beak—much the way smelling salts are waved under the nose of someone who’s fainted. All the while, Miss Wren rocked in the chair and stroked Miss Peregrine’s feathers, singing her a soft, lilting lullaby:
“Eft kaa vangan soorken, eft ka vangan soorken, malaaya …”
“That’s the tongue of the old peculiars,” Millard whispered.
“Come home, come home … remember your true self … something like that.”
Miss Wren heard him and looked up, then waved us away. Althea crossed the room and shut the door.
“Well, then,” said Enoch. “I can see we’re not wanted here.”
After three days of the headmistress depending on us for everything, we had suddenly become extraneous. Though we were grateful to Miss Wren, she’d made us all feel a bit like children who’d been ordered to bed.
“Miss Wren knows her business,” came a Russian-accented voice from behind us. “Best leave her to it.”
We turned to see the stick-thin folding man from the carnival, standing with his bony arms crossed.
“You!” said Emma.
“We meet again,” the folding man said, his voice deep as an ocean trench. “My name is Sergei Andropov, and I am captain of peculiar resistance army. Come, I will show you around.”
*
“I knew he was peculiar!” Olive said.
“No, you didn’t,” said Enoch. “You only thought he was.”
“I knew you were peculiar the second I saw you,” said the folding man. “How you weren’t captured long time ago?”
“Because we’re wily,” said Hugh.
“He means lucky,” I said.
“But mostly just hungry,” said Enoch. “Got any food around here? I could eat an emu-raffe.”
At the mere mention of food, my stomach growled like a wild animal. None of us had eaten since our train ride to London, which seemed eons ago.
“Of course,” said the folding man. “This way.”
We followed him down the hall.
“So tell me about this peculiar army of yours,” Emma said.
“We will crush the wights and take back what’s ours. Punish them for kidnapping our ymbrynes.” He opened a door off the hallway and led us through a wrecked office where people lay sleeping on the floor and under desks. As we stepped around them, I recognized a few of their faces from the carnival: the plain-looking boy, the frizzy-haired snake-charmer girl.
“They’re all peculiar?” I asked.
The folding man nodded. “Rescued from other loops,” he said, holding a door open for us.
“And you?” said Millard. “Where did you come from?”
The folding man led us into a vestibule where we could talk without disturbing the sleepers, a room dominated by two large wooden doors emblazoned with dozens of bird insignias. “I come from land of frozen desert beyond Icy Waste,” he said. “Hundred years ago, when hollows first born, they strike my home first. Everything destroy. All in village killed. Old woman. Baby. All.” He made a chopping motion in the air with his hand. “I hide in butter churn, breathe through reed of straw, while own brother killed in same house. After, I come to London to escape the hollows. But they come, too.”