“Have they brought any food with them? Or medicine? Or anything useful at all?” The girl spoke with excruciating slowness, her voice as wooden as her expression.
“No more questions until you’ve closed up,” Miss Wren said. “Quick now!”
“Yes, mistress,” the girl said, and with no apparent sense of urgency she ambled away down the tunnel, dragging her hands along the walls as she went.
“Apologies for that,” said Miss Wren. “Althea doesn’t mean to be obstinate; she’s just naturally mulish. But she keeps the wolves at bay, and we badly need her. We’ll wait here until she returns.”
Miss Wren sat on the bottom step, and as she lowered herself I could almost hear her old bones creaking. I didn’t know what she meant by keeps the wolves at bay, but there were too many other questions to be asked, so that one would have to wait.
“Miss Wren, how did you know who we are?” asked Emma. “We never said.”
“It’s an ymbryne’s business to know,” she replied. “I have watchers in the trees from here to the Irish Sea. And besides, you’re famous! There’s only one ymbryne whose wards were able to slip the corrupted’s grasp complete and entire, and that’s Miss Peregrine. But I’ve no idea how you made it this far without being captured — or how in peculiardom you found me!”
“A boy at the carnival directed us here,” said Enoch. He raised a hand level with his chin. “About yea big? Wearing a silly hat?”
“One of our lookouts,” said Miss Wren, nodding. “But how did you find him?”
“We caught one of your spy pigeons,” Emma said proudly, “and she led us to this loop.” (She left out the part about Miss Peregrine having killed it.)
“My pigeons!” Miss Wren exclaimed. “But how did you know about them? Much less catch one?”
Then Millard stepped forward. He had borrowed Horace’s disguising-room overcoat to keep from freezing, and though Miss Wren didn’t seem surprised to see a coat hovering in the air, she was astonished when the invisible boy wearing it said, “I deduced your birds’ location from the Tales of the Peculiar, but we first heard of them in your mountaintop menagerie, from a pretentious dog.”
“But no one knows the location of my menagerie!”
Miss Wren was now almost too astonished to speak, and since every answer we gave her only sparked more questions, we laid out our whole story for her, as quickly as we could, stretching all the way back to our escape from the island in those tiny, open boats.
“We nearly drowned!” said Olive.
“And got shot, and bombed, and eaten by hollows,” said Bronwyn.
“And run over by an underground train,” said Enoch.
“And squashed by a dresser,” said Horace, scowling at the telekinetic girl.
“We’ve traveled a long way across dangerous country,” Emma said, “all to find someone who could help Miss Peregrine. We were quite hoping that person would be you, Miss Wren.”
“Counting on it, really,” said Millard.
It took Miss Wren a few moments to find her voice, and when she did, it was gravelly with emotion. “You brave, wonderful children. You’re miracles, every one of you, and any ymbryne would be lucky to call you her wards.” She dabbed at a tear with the sleeve of her cloak. “I was so sorry to hear about what happened to your Miss Peregrine. I didn’t know her well, as I’m a retiring sort of person, but I promise you this: we’ll get her back. She and all our sisters!”
Get her back?
That’s when I realized Miss Peregrine was still hidden in the sack that Horace was carrying. Miss Wren hadn’t seen her yet!
Horace said, “Why, she’s right here!” and he put the sack down and untied it.
A moment later, Miss Peregrine came tottering out, dizzy after spending so long in the dark.
“By the Elderfolk!” Miss Wren exclaimed. “But … I heard she’d been taken by the wights!”
“She was taken,” Emma said, “and then we took her back!”
Miss Wren was so excited that she leapt up without her cane, and I had to steady her elbow to keep her from toppling over. “Alma, is that really you?” Miss Wren said breathlessly, and when she had her balance again she rushed over to scoop up Miss Peregrine. “Hullo, Alma? Is that you in there?”
“It’s her!” Emma said. “That’s Miss Peregrine!”
Miss Wren held the bird at arm’s length, turning her this way and that while Miss Peregrine squirmed. “Hum, hum, hum,” Miss Wren said under her breath, her eyes narrowing and lips drawing tight. “Something’s not right with your headmistress.”
“She got hurt,” said Olive. “Hurt on the inside.”
“She can’t turn human anymore,” said Emma.
Miss Wren nodded grimly, as if she’d already figured this out.
“How long’s it been?”
“Three days,” said Emma. “Ever since we stole her back from the wights.”
I said, “Your dog told us that if Miss Peregrine didn’t change back soon, she’d never be able to.”
“Yes,” Miss Wren said. “Addison was quite right about that.”
“He also said that the sort of help she needed was something only another ymbryne could give her,” said Emma.
“That’s right, too.”
“She’s changed,” said Bronwyn. “She isn’t herself anymore. We need the old Miss P back!”
“We can’t let this happen to her!” said Horace.
“So?” said Olive. “Can you turn her human now, please?”
We had surrounded Miss Wren and were pressing in on her, our desperation palpable.
Miss Wren put up her hands in a plea for quiet. “I wish it were that simple,” she said, “or so immediate. When an ymbryne remains a bird for too long, she becomes rigid, like a cold muscle. If you try and bend her back to shape too quickly, she’ll snap. She’s got to be massaged into her true form, delicately; worked and worked like clay. If I work with her through the night, I might have it done by morning.”
“If she has that long,” said Emma.
“Pray that she does,” said Miss Wren.
The long-haired girl returned, walking slowly toward us, dragging her hands along the tunnel walls. Everywhere they touched, layer upon layer of new ice formed. The tunnel behind her had already narrowed to just a few feet wide; soon it would be closed completely, and we’d be sealed in.
Miss Wren waved the girl over. “Althea! Run upstairs ahead of us and have the nurse prepare an examination room. I shall need all my medicinal remedies!”
“When you say remedies, do you mean your solutions, your infusions, or your suspensions?”
“All of them!” Miss Wren shouted. “And quickly — this is an emergency!”
Then I saw the girl notice Miss Peregrine, and her eyes widened a bit — the most I’d seen her react to anything — and she started up the stairs.
This time, she was running.
I held Miss Wren’s arm, steadying her as we climbed the stairs. The building had four stories, and we were heading for the top. Aside from the stairwell, that was the only part of the building still accessible; the other floors were all frozen shut, walls of ice clogging their rooms and hallways. We were, in effect, climbing through the hollowed center of a gigantic ice cube.
I glanced into some of the frozen rooms as we hurried past them. Bulging tongues of ice had broken doors off their hinges, and through their splintered jambs I could see evidence of a raid: kicked-over furniture, drawers torn open, snows of paper on the floor. A machine gun leaned against a desk, its owner frozen in flight. A peculiar slumped in a corner beneath a slash of bullet holes. Like the victims of Pompeii, arrested in ice rather than ash.