The Conference of the Birds Read online

  “Oops,” Noor said quietly.

  “You’re not to blame, of course. But there will be damage to contain and bruised egos to mollify. That is, if we can even get them back to the negotiating table.”

  “Everyone’s calling the peace talks the Conference of the Birds,” Bronwyn stage-whispered to Noor.

  Noor gave her a blank look. “Yeah?”

  Bronwyn raised her eyebrows. “Because the ymbrynes can turn into birds?”

  “They can?” said Noor, looking at Miss Peregrine with surprise.

  “I still don’t understand what the big to-do is,” said Enoch. “Would it really matter that much if the Americans waged war on one another? Why is that any concern of ours?”

  Miss Peregrine stiffened, then laid down her spoon. “I hate to repeat myself, but as I’ve said, war is a—”

  “Virus,” said Hugh.

  “It ‘respects no borders,’” Emma said, as if repeating from a textbook.

  Miss Peregrine rose heavily from her chair and went to the window. We could feel a lecture coming on.

  “Of course, the Americans are not our priority,” she said. “We ymbrynes care most about rebuilding our society—our loops, our way of life. But the chaos of a war would make that impossible. Because war is a virus. I can see you don’t understand what that means. It’s not your fault; none of you have ever witnessed a war between peculiar factions. But many ymbrynes have.”

  She turned and looked out across the Acre, the perpetual smoke that hung above it now stained an imperial violet.

  “The oldest amongst us remember the disastrous Italian war of 1325. Two peculiar factions rose up against each other, and the battle raged not only across physical borders, but temporal ones. The peculiars fought in loops, and the fighting spilled—inevitably, fierce as it was—into the present. Scores of peculiars died, and thousands of normals. An entire city was burned to the ground! Razed flat!” She turned to face us and swept a flat hand through the air, as if to paint a picture of the destruction. “So many normals saw us fighting, there was no containing it. It sparked a pogrom against our kind, a bloody purge that killed many more of us, and drove peculiars out of Northern Italy for a century. It took an enormous effort to recover. We had to memory-wipe entire towns. Rebuild. We even enlisted peculiar scholars—Perplexus Anomalous was one!—to revise normal history books, so that the carnage would be remembered as something other than the War of the Freaks, which is what it was called for generations. Finally, Perplexus and his scholars were able to rewrite it as the War of the Oaken Bucket. To this day, normals believe thousands died battling over a wooden pail.”

  “Normals are so stupid,” said Enoch.

  “Not as stupid as they used to be,” said Miss Peregrine. “That was seven hundred years ago. Today, if a peculiar war were to break out in earnest, it would be nearly impossible to cover up. It could spill into the present, where it would be filmed, disseminated worldwide, and we would be exposed, ruined, vilified. Imagine the terror of normals witnessing a battle between powerful peculiars. They would think the end-times were upon them.”

  “A new and dangerous age,” Horace mused darkly.

  “But don’t the Americans know all this?” asked Emma. “Don’t they understand what could happen?”

  “They claim to,” said Miss Peregrine. “And they swear up and down that they would adhere to the various conventions of war that dictate a peculiar battlefield must always be in the past, or in a loop. But wars are hard to control, and they don’t seem as worried about the consequences as they should be.”

  “Like the Russians and Americans during the so-called Cold War,” said Millard. “Blinded by mutual distrust. Desensitized to the dangers by constant exposure.”

  “I promise our dinner conversations aren’t always this depressing,” Olive whispered across the table to Noor.

  “What if that’s the ‘dangerous age’ the prophecy mentions?” I said. “Could it be predicting a war between peculiars?”

  “It’s certainly possible,” said Horace.

  “Then maybe war is inevitable,” said Hugh.

  “No,” Miss Peregrine said. “I refuse to accept that.”

  “Prophecies are not necessarily fate,” Horace said. “Sometimes they’re just warnings about events that could happen—or will probably happen—if you don’t take action to change the course of things.”

  “Hopefully there’s nothing to the prophecy at all,” Olive said miserably. “The whole thing sounds scary.”

  “Yes, I’d rather not need emancipating, thank you very much,” said Claire.

  “I’d rather not have to do any emancipating,” said Noor. “Though it says I’m one of seven, so I guess I don’t have to do it by myself . . . but who are the other six?”

  Horace spread his hands. “Another mystery. Pass the salt, please.”

  Olive’s head fell into her hands. “Can we please talk about something nice for a while?”

  Emma reached over to ruffle her hair. “Sorry, dear. One more thing is bugging me. This supposed secret society that’s trying to get their hands on Noor. Who are they?”

  “Wouldn’t I love to know,” Noor said.

  “Doesn’t the answer seem obvious?” said Millard.

  I turned toward him, surprised. “No. Should it?”

  He snapped his invisible fingers. “They’re wights.”

  “But H told me specifically they were normals,” I said.

  “And Miss Annie from the diviners’ loop said something about a secret society of American normals,” Bronwyn added, “left over from the slave-trade days.”

  Sometimes I underestimated how closely Bronwyn paid attention to things.

  “Yes, I was there,” said Millard. “I don’t doubt there was such a society in the past. But I seriously doubt any normals would have the wherewithal to pose such a danger to us now. We’ve been hidden in loops far too long.”

  “I very much agree,” said Miss Peregrine.

  “Last time we talked about it,” I said, “you told me it sounded like the work of another clan. Not wights.”

  “Things have changed,” she said. “There’s been a dramatic uptick in wight activity lately. Just in the last few days, there have been multiple sightings.”

  “Attacks?” said Horace, his face paling.

  “None yet, but reports of movement. All in America.”

  “But I thought only a small group of them managed to escape after the Library of Souls collapsed,” Emma said.

  Miss Peregrine was slowly circling the table, the shadows cast by a dozen candles flickering over her face. “That’s true. But a small number of wights are capable of causing a great deal of trouble. And they may have had a few sleeper agents embedded in America, waiting to be called up. We don’t know for certain.”

  “How many are we talking about?” asked Noor. “Between the people at my school and the ones from the helicopter attack, there were a lot . . .”

  “Maybe they weren’t all wights,” said Bronwyn. “They might have hired mercenary normals to help them. Or mind controlled them somehow.”

  “It would be just like wights to attempt such a brazen kidnapping,” Millard said, “then make it seem as if someone else was responsible—normals or another American clan.”

  “They’re masters of trickery and disguise, after all,” said Miss Peregrine. “It was Percival Murnau himself who founded the Department of Obfuscation.”

  She said his name as if I should’ve heard of him. “Who’s that?” I asked.

  Miss Peregrine stopped beside my chair and looked down at me. “Murnau is—well, was—Caul’s top lieutenant. He was the main architect of the raids that destroyed so many of our loops and killed so many of our people. We caught him the day the Library of Souls collapsed, luckily, and he’s cooling his heels in our jail, awaiting
trial.”

  “He’s a nasty man,” Bronwyn said, a tremor of revulsion in her voice. “One of my jobs is guarding his cell block. He’ll eat anything that crawls into his cell—rats, bugs. Even the other wights don’t go near him.”

  Horace dropped his fork. “Well, my appetite is killed.”

  “So, if it was these wights,” said Noor, “then what do they want with me?”

  “They must know about the prophecy, too,” said Horace. “And believe it, or they wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of finding you.”

  “They found her months ago,” Millard said. “They could’ve taken her anytime. They were waiting.”

  “For what?” I said.

  “Obviously, for someone else to come after her,” he replied.

  “You think they were using me as bait?” Noor said, eyes widening a bit.

  “Not just bait,” said Millard. “They wanted you. But they wanted someone else, too, and were willing to be patient in order to get them.”

  “Who?” I said. “H?”

  “Maybe. Or V.”

  “Or you, Mr. Portman,” said the headmistress. She let that sink in as I swallowed the last of my cake. “I think you and Miss Pradesh need to be very careful. I think someone may be trying to get their hands on the both of you.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  After dinner was over we all went upstairs to bed. The third floor was a warren of small rooms connected by zigzagging hallways that spread across the top level of the house, half reserved for the boys and the other half for the girls.

  Noor was red-eyed with exhaustion, and I’m sure I looked just as tired. We hardly had the energy to keep ourselves upright.

  “You’ll bunk with Horace and me,” said Hugh.

  “And you can have my bed,” Olive said to Noor.

  “I could never. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  “It’s no trouble,” Olive said. “I usually sleep on the ceiling anyway.”

  “The facilities are quite basic, inasmuch as there are none,” Hugh said. He pointed at a bucket at the end of the hallway. “That’s the bathroom.” He turned and pointed to another bucket at the other end. “And that’s clean boiled water to drink. Don’t get them confused.”

  The others left Noor and me alone just as Miss Peregrine appeared carrying a candlelit lantern. She had changed into a long-sleeved nightdress, and her hair was loose and trailed down the back of her neck. “I won’t see you in the morning,” she said regretfully. “But I’m only a Panloopticon door away. You can always send a messenger to the conference loop if you need to reach me.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to go,” I said. “We could use your help.”

  “If it were for anything less important, I would never go. But at the moment I have greater responsibilities. I’ll be leaving before first light.” She turned to Noor and smiled. “I’m so glad you’ve come, Miss Pradesh. I hope you feel welcome here. The circumstances of your arrival might not have been ideal, but I am no less glad at your presence.”

  “Thank you,” Noor said. “I’m glad to be here.”

  Miss Peregrine leaned in and kissed Noor on both cheeks, something I’d only seen her do to other ymbrynes or honored guests. “Bird be with you,” she said, and then she was gone down the hall.

  “Tomorrow we’ll dig into all this,” I said. “If there’s more to the prophecy, we’ll find it. And Millard will help us decode that map.” I held Noor’s gaze for an extra beat. “This is very important to all of us.”

  Noor nodded. “Thank you.” Let out an exhausted breath. I felt a pang of empathy for her and for how she must’ve been feeling.

  “How are you?” I said. “Still feeling like you’re losing your mind?”

  “It’s probably better that I haven’t had much downtime to think about everything. For now, I’m just going with it. You know what my brain keeps defaulting to whenever I have a moment of quiet?”

  “What?”

  “That I have a calc test in two days, and I should be studying.”

  We both laughed.

  “I think your GPA is going to take a little hit here. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Everything’s bizarre and confusing and so much of this is super scary and messed up . . . but despite everything’s that obviously wrong right now, I actually feel good.”

  “You do?”

  Her voice fell to a near whisper. “Like for the first time in a long time I’m not . . . alone.”

  Our eyes met. I reached out and took her hand.

  “You’re not alone,” I said. “You’ve got people.”

  She smiled gratefully, then hugged me. I felt something small but powerful turn in my chest.

  I bent my head, let my lips rest on top of her hair. Almost a kiss.

  And then we said good night.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  I had the old dream again. The same one I’d had so many times after my grandfather was killed. It’s the night he died, and I’m running through the spiky woods behind his house screaming his name. Like always, I find him too late. He’s lying on the ground bleeding, a hole in his chest. One of his eyes torn out. I go to him. He tries to speak to me. Usually in these dreams he does, and he says all the things he said that night: Find the bird. In the loop. But this time he’s only muttering in Polish, and I can’t understand.

  Then I hear another branch snap and I look up from where I’m kneeling and there’s the monster, covered in Abe’s blood, horrible thick tongues waving in the air.

  He’s got Horatio’s face. And he says, in a guttural hollowgast snarl I can plainly understand:

  He is coming.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  I jolted awake to the sound of an explosion.

  Bolting upright in bed, I saw that Hugh and Horace were already up, crowding each other to get a look out the window.

  “What’s going on?” I shouted, stumbling out of my sheets.

  “Something bad,” Hugh said.

  I joined them at the window. It was first light. Sirens were howling in the distance, and panicked shouts echoed from across the Acre. People in other buildings were throwing open their windows and looking out to see what was going on.

  Bronwyn burst into the room, her hair mussed from sleep. “What’s happened?” she said. “Where’s Miss P?”

  Emma shoved past her. “Everyone into the common room!” she shouted. “Head count, now!”

  A minute later we were all together, all present and accounted for but Miss Peregrine, who had left for the conference before dawn. Something had happened elsewhere in the Acre—an attack, an explosion, something—but we weren’t sure what.

  Through the window we could hear someone authoritative-sounding going down the street and shouting, “Stay indoors! Do not come out until so instructed!”

  “What about Miss P?” Olive said. “What if something’s happened to her?”

  “I can find out,” said Millard. “I’m invisible.”

  “I can be, too,” said Noor, and she raked the light from the air before her and stepped into it. “Let me help.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but I work better alone.”

  “It’s not worth the risk,” Emma said. “Miss P can take care of herself.”

  “So can I,” Millard replied. “Whatever’s happening, you can bet no one’s going to tell us the whole truth about it. If you want to know anything worth knowing around here, you’ve got to find out for yourself.”

  He shrugged off his sleeping robe and it fell to the floor in a pile.

  Emma tried to make a grab for him.

  “Millard, come back here!”

  But he had already slipped away.

  We paced around the common room, chattering nervously while we waited. Noor
was humming to herself, arms folded tight. Olive attached a rope around her waist and floated as high as she could out of a third-floor window, hoping to get a better view of anything that might be happening.

  “I see smoke rising from Smoking Street,” she said, when we reeled her back in a few minutes later.

  “Smoking Street smokes,” Enoch said. “That’s why it’s called Smoking Street.”

  “All right, I saw an unusual amount of smoke rising from Smoking Street,” she clarified, slipping her feet back into her leaden boots. “Dark, black smoke.”

  “That’s where the remnants of the wights’ compound is,” Bronwyn said anxiously. “And the prison where we’ve been keeping the ones we caught.”

  Noor huddled close to me. “This is bad, huh?”

  “Seems like it,” I said.

  “Figures. Right when I show up, everything goes wrong.” She pursed her lips and her eyes cut away to the window. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m just bad luck.”

  I was starting to tell her that was ridiculous when Millard came back, his bare feet slapping up the stairs and into the room at a run.

  We all crowded around him.

  “What’s the news?” Emma said, but Millard had to catch his breath before he could get a word out, and I think he lay down on the floor.

  Finally he managed to say, between gulps of air, “It’s . . . the wights.”

  “Oh no,” I heard Bronwyn say under her breath, as if this one bit of information had just confirmed her worst fears.

  “What about them?” Enoch said, sounding uncharacteristically scared.

  “They . . . broke out . . . of jail . . . and escaped.”

  “All of them?” I said.

  “Four.” Millard sat up and wiped his brow with the closest thing at hand, which happened to be an errant sock.

  Horace brought him a cup of water and he gulped it down, then told the story in feverish bursts. They killed the peculiar who’d been guarding them—“Thank the birds you weren’t on duty,” he said to Bronwyn. Then they made a hole in the wall of their jail big enough to crawl through without attracting attention, snuck over to the Panloopticon, and escaped.