Tales of the Peculiar (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #0.5) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,16
her a flock of kestrels—and among them, a young woman. It all happened in a flash. The kestrels saw her and took off, scattering into the woods. In the tumult, the young woman seemed to have disappeared. But where could she have gone so quickly?
Could she have turned into a kestrel and flown away with the others?
Ymeene dove after them and gave chase, and for an hour tried to track the kestrels down—but kestrels are the natural prey of goshawks, and they were terrified of Ymeene. She would have to try another approach.
It was dark. She returned to her loop, reset it, wolfed down five ears of roasted corn and two bowls of leek soup—flying all day was hungry work—and returned to the kestrels’ woods the next morning. This time she approached their clearing not from the air as a goshawk, but on foot as a human. When the kestrels saw her they flew up into the trees and sat watching her, cautious but unafraid. Ymeene stood in the middle of the clearing and addressed them not in human language, or in go-talk (the speech of goshawks), but in the few halting words of kestrel she knew, as well as her human throat could reproduce them.
“One among you is not like the others,” she said, “and it is to that young woman that I address myself.
You are both bird and human. I am afflicted and blessed with the same ability, and I would very much like to speak with you.”
The spectacle of a human speaking kestrel incited a flurry of chittering in the trees, and then Ymeene heard a flap of wings. After a few moments, a young woman showed herself from behind a tree trunk. She had dark, smooth skin and close-cropped hair, a tall, finely boned frame that was distinctly birdlike, and she wore furs and leathers to protect against the cold.
“Can you understand me?” Ymeene asked her in English.
The young woman gave a tentative nod. A little, she seemed to say.
“Can you speak human?” said Ymeene.
“Sí, un poco, ” replied the young woman.
Ymeene recognized the language as human but couldn’t understand the words. Perhaps the young woman was from a migratory clan, and had picked them up elsewhere.
“My name is Ymeene,” she said, indicating herself. “What’s yours?”
The young woman cleared her throat and made a loud cry in kestrel-ese.
“Perhaps we’ll just call you Miss Kestrel for now,” said Ymeene. “Miss Kestrel, I’ve an important question for you. Have you ever made something happen . . . more than once?”
She drew a large circle in the air with her finger, hoping the young woman would understand.
Miss Kestrel came forward a few paces, her eyes widening. Just then a clump of snow fell from a tree branch, and with a flourish of her arms, Miss Kestrel made it disappear from the ground and fall from the tree a second time.
“Yes!” Ymeene cried. “You can do it, too!” And then she waved her arm and repeated the snowfall, too, and Miss Kestrel’s jaw fell open with astonishment.
They ran to each other, laughing, and clasped hands and shouted and then hugged, each chattering excitedly in a language the other could hardly understand. The kestrels in the trees were jubilant, too, and sensing that Ymeene was a friend, they flew down from their branches and fluttered around the two women, twittering with excitement.
The relief Ymeene felt was indescribable. Though she was peculiar even among peculiars, now she knew she was not alone. There were more like her, which meant that—perhaps—peculiar society could be made a safer, saner place, no longer ruled by the shortsighted whims of prideful men. She had only an inkling of what form that society might take, but she knew that finding Miss Kestrel had been an important breakthrough. They spoke, in their halting way, for nearly an hour, and by the end of it Miss Kestrel had agreed to follow Ymeene back to the loop.
The rest, as they say, is history. Miss Kestrel came to live with the peculiars. Ymeene taught her everything she knew about loops, and soon Miss Kestrel was skilled enough to keep their loop going by herself. This allowed Ymeene to embark on long-distance expeditions to find more time-looping birdwomen like themselves—which she did, bringing their number to five—and when the new arrivals had been trained, and the hard, hungry winter had thawed into spring, they divided the peculiars among them and set out across the land to establish five new, permanent loops.