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.

They were regarded as safe havens of sanity and order, and word of them spread quickly. Peculiars who had survived the purges traveled from all across Britain to seek refuge in them, though in order to be admitted they had to agree to live under the rules of the birdwomen. The women became known as ymeenes, to honor the first of their kind (though with the passage of time and the gradual shifting of tongues in Britain the word became ymbryne).

The ymbrynes held council twice a year to trade wisdom and collaborate. For many years Ymeene herself oversaw the proceedings, watching with pride as their network of ymbrynes and loops increased, and the number of peculiars they were able to protect grew to many hundreds. She lived to the ripe and happy age of one hundred and fifty-seven. For all those years she and Englebert shared a house (but never a room), for they loved each other in a steady, companionable way. It was the Black Plague, on one of its pitiless sweeps through Europe, that finally took her. When she was gone, all the peculiars she had saved who were still living, and all their children and grandchildren, risked their lives to cross hostile territory and carry her in a grand procession to the forest and, to the best of Englebert’s reckoning, to the very tree in which she had been born, and they buried her there among its roots.9