Disappointed but undeterred, Ymeene went wandering again and found another village in which to settle. This time she was careful not to let anyone see her change into a bird, but the villagers seemed to distrust her regardless. To most people Ymeene had a strange way about her—she had been raised by hawks, after all—and it wasn’t long before she was chased from this new village, too. She grew sad, and wondered if there was any place in the world she truly belonged.

One morning, on the verge of despair, she lay watching the sun rise in a forest glade. It was a spectacle of such transcendent beauty that it made her forget her troubles for a moment, and when it was over, she wished desperately to see it once more. In an instant the sky went dark and the dawn broke all over again, and she suddenly realized she had a talent other than her ability to change form: she could make small moments repeat themselves. She amused herself with this trick for days, repeating the leap of a graceful deer or a fleeting slant of afternoon sun just so she could better appreciate their beauty, and it cheered her up immensely. She was repeating the first fall of virgin snow when a voice startled her.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but are you making that happen?”

She spun around to see a young man wearing a short green tunic and shoes made from fish skin. It was an odd outfit, but stranger still was that he carried his head under the crook of his arm, disconnected entirely from his neck.

“Excuse me,” she replied, “but what’s happened to your head?”

“Frightfully sorry!” he said, reacting as if he’d just realized his pants were unbuttoned, and, with great embarrassment, he popped his head back onto his neck. “How rude of me.”

He said his name was Englebert, and as she had nowhere else to go, he invited her back to his camp. It was a ragged settlement of tents and open cook fires, and the few dozen people who lived there were every bit as strange as Englebert. They were so strange, in fact, that most of them had been chased out of other villages—just like Ymeene. They welcomed her even after she showed them how she could turn herself into a hawk, and in turn they showed her some of the unusual talents they possessed. It seemed she was not alone in the world. Perhaps, she thought, there was a place for her after all.

These were, of course, the early peculiars of Britain, and what Ymeene didn’t realize was that she had joined them during one of the darkest periods in their history. There had been a time when peculiars were accepted—even revered—by normal people, with whom they mixed easily. But an age of ignorance had dawned of late, and normals had grown suspicious of them. Whenever something tragic happened that couldn’t be explained by the rudimentary science of the day, peculiars were made the scapegoats. When the village of Little Disappointment woke one morning to find all their sheep burned to a crisp, did the villagers realize that a lightning storm had killed them? No, they blamed the local peculiar and drove him into the wilderness. When the seamstresses of Stitch didn’t stop laughing for an entire week, did the villagers blame the wool they had just imported, which was infested with mites that carried Laughing Flu? Of course not: they pinned it on a pair of peculiar sisters and hanged them.