A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(79)

“But why aren’t there ymbrynes around?” asked Bronwyn. “No one’s been able to explain what happened to them, and it’s really starting to wind me up.”

“It’s just how it’s always been, for as long as any of us can remember,” Reggie said.

“Some of us remember,” said a voice from behind us.

I turned to see the old lady with the eyepatch hobbling toward the table. “You all started without me, I see.”

“Sorry, Miss Annie,” said Fern.

“No respect for your elders,” Miss Annie muttered, but it was clear, as the diviners all stood up from the table to greet her, that she commanded a great deal of respect. We followed their example and stood up, too. Fern darted out and helped Miss Annie to the table, where a seat right at the head had been reserved, and when she reached it she gripped the edge and lowered herself slowly into the chair. Only then did the rest of us sit down again.

“You want to know how things got the way they are.” Her voice had such grit and gravitas, it sounded like it was bubbling up from the depths of a muddy river. “What happened to our ymbrynes.” Miss Annie folded her hands on the table. A hush fell over the group. “They used to be the heart of our society, just like they are yours. The seeds of their downfall were planted a long time back. Back when the British and French and Spanish and native peoples were still fighting over who owned this country. Before it had occurred to anybody to fight over whether or not people should own one another.”

“Miss Annie’s old as the hills,” Fern whispered. “She was probably there.”

“I’m one hundred and sixty-three, give or take,” Miss Annie said, “and still got ears that work, Fern Mayo.”

Fern stared into her potatoes. “Yes, Miss Annie.”

“Some of you aren’t from here”—Miss Annie was looking at my friends—“so maybe you don’t know. But this nation was built with the stolen labor of black people and on the stolen land of native people. A century and a half ago, the southern part of this country was, by itself, one of the richest places in the whole world, and the vast bulk of that wealth was held not in cotton nor gold nor oil, but in the form of enslaved human beings.”

She paused to let her words sink in. Emma looked ill. Bronwyn and Enoch were silent, eyes downcast. I tried to wrap my mind around it. This vast, institutionalized evil, unfathomable in scale, swallowing up one generation after the next. Grandparents and parents and children and children and children. It was unimaginable, overwhelming.

After a moment, Miss Annie went on. “All that money and all that wealth depended on one thing: the ability of one kind of people to subdue and control another kind. So think about what happens when you introduce peculiarness into a system like that.”

“It raises hell,” said Elmer.

“And scares the life out of the people in control,” said Miss Annie. “Imagine. A person slaves all day chopping cotton. That is their life, and their life sentence. Then, one afternoon, from out of nowhere, this person—a young girl—manifests a peculiarness. And now, she can fly.” As she said it, Miss Annie’s eyes rose above the table and her hands spread out wide, and the image was suddenly so clear in my head that I had to wonder if she was describing her own experience. Miss Annie’s gaze fell to Bronwyn. “What do you do if you’re that girl?”

“I fly away,” said Bronwyn. “No—I wait until nighttime, then use my power to help everyone else escape, and then fly away.”

“And what if there was one who could turn day into night? Or a man into a donkey?”

“I’d make it midnight at noon,” said June. “And turn the overseer into an ass.”

“So you see why they were frightened of us,” said Miss Annie, her hands settling back onto the table, her voice lowering. “Our numbers were always small. Peculiarness has always been rare. But they were so terrified of even those few that they paid fortune-tellers and quack doctors and exorcists to try and tell us apart from the normals. They invented lies and folk stories about how peculiars were the spawn of Satan himself. Tried to get us to turn one another in. They’d kill you if you even knew a peculiar. If you even said the word peculiar! And the ones they were most frightened of?”

“Our ymbrynes,” said Paul.

“That’s right,” said Miss Annie. “Our ymbrynes. The ones who made our places of refuge. The places no normal could find, or get into. That made it possible for us to survive. They hated the ymbrynes worse than anything.”

“So these normals knew about ymbrynes?” Emma said. “They knew what they were?”

“They made it their business to know,” said Miss Annie. “Because it was their business. Peculiarness threatened their economy, their way of life, the bottom line of the whole wicked establishment, so the slaveowners plotted against us in ways that may not have occurred to normals in other parts of the world. They formed a secret organization devoted to rooting us out, destroying our loops, but especially to killing our ymbrynes. They were ruthless, tireless, obsessed. So much so that their organization continued to exist even after the Confederacy died, even after Reconstruction ended. And it took a toll on us. When I was growing up in the 1860s, we never had enough ymbrynes. They were always spread thin. Always in danger. We’d have one ymbryne to maintain four or five loops, and you’d hardly ever see her. And then one day it seemed like there were none. Instead, we had demi-ymbrynes and loop-keepers—functionaries and mercenaries, not leaders—and in the absence of ymbrynely influence, peculiars in this country gradually became divided and distrustful of one another.”