The Shattering (Guardians of Ga'hoole) (2 page)

“Oh, for Glaux’s sake, let her sleep,” said Ginger, the newest hollowmate. Ginger was a Barn Owl who had actually been part of the attacking forces during the terrible siege of the previous winter. She had been wounded, but during her recovery she had decided that she’d had enough of the Pure Ones, and much preferred life in the Great Ga’Hoole Tree. She had not yet, of course, been approved for training as a Guardian. That would require some time. Nonetheless, Eglantine had taken her under her wing, so to speak, and become a kind of big sister to Ginger during her recovery. They had grown quite close in the process. But Primrose was still Eglantine’s best friend in the tree.

“Let her sleep?” Primrose swiveled her head toward the reddish Barn Owl. “Let her continue to have this awful dream?”

Ginger merely sighed and said, “She’s tired. She needs her sleep, bad dream or not.”

Suddenly, Eglantine’s eyes flicked open. “Why in the name of Glaux are you shaking me? I was having the loveliest dream.”

“Loveliest dream?”
Has she lost her mind?
thought Primrose. “You were screaming your head off about being dead or not dead, Eglantine.”

Eglantine blinked. “No, I wasn’t,” she replied defiantly. “I was having a wonderful dream about the old hollow in the fir tree back in Tyto where Soren and I lived with our mum and da. And I was just about to go into the hollow. Something wonderful was about to happen, and then you came along and shook me.” She looked accusingly at Primrose. Ginger pretended she wasn’t paying any attention and commenced humming a little owl ditty that Eglantine had taught her.

Now it was Primrose who blinked at Eglantine. Something about her friend seemed different.
She’s seemed different for a while,
Primrose thought.
Is it just my imagination? It must be my imagination. What if she doesn’t want to be my friend anymore?
Primrose didn’t think she could stand that. She had to stop thinking this way. She and Eglantine were best friends. They had been from the very start, from the day
Eglantine had been rescued. Why, she herself had been on the rescue mission that had found Eglantine.

Like most of the young owls in the Great Ga’Hoole Tree, Primrose had also been rescued by the Guardians. She had lost everything in a devastating fire that had swept through the forest of Silverveil. In a matter of minutes her hollow, her homeland, her parents, and even the eggs of her future brothers and sisters had been destroyed. But since her rescue, life at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree had been wonderful, and the best part was having a best friend. It didn’t matter that she was a Pygmy Owl, quite small, and that Eglantine, a Barn Owl, was huge by comparison. They had so much in common. They were so much alike. No, she’d never find another friend like Eglantine.

“Look,” she said to Eglantine, “I’m sorry I woke you from your nice dream. It looked like a nightmare to me. I just couldn’t stand hearing you cry like that.”

“It’s all right, Primrose, don’t worry. I know you meant well.” Eglantine said it softly, and then repeated, “Don’t worry. I’m going right back to sleep and finish my nice dream.”

But Primrose
was
worried.

Within a few minutes it would be tween time, those slivers of seconds between the last minute of the day and the first of the evening. It was a lovely time, especially in summer as it was now. The sky turned a soft lavender just as the sun began to slip away. Sometimes there were streaks of pink and a fragile light limned every leaf and blade of grass, making everything stand out with special beauty. Primrose sat on the branch just outside her hollow and watched the subtle transformation of the lovely Island of Hoole as the light played across it. How close they had come last winter to losing it all to the terrible owls known as the Pure Ones, who were led by Kludd, the brother of Eglantine and Soren.

How fragile life is,
thought Primrose,
how fragile everything is, including friendship.
And once more she felt a tremor deep within her gizzard, where all owls feel their most intense feelings.

She could not dwell upon this, she realized. She was now up for the evening, and the rest of the tree would soon be up as well. Perhaps she would go to the library. It was summertime and there were fewer chaw practices and classes, so she could pick out a book and read just for fun—a nice joke or riddle book. Nothing too serious like colliering techniques, weather interpretation, which the owls of the great tree were expected to be familiar with, or
track recognition, land and celestial navigation, which Primrose as a member of the search-and-rescue chaw was expected to know. No, not tonight.

Tonight, she would find herself a really good joke book and she would laugh as loud as she wanted because there would be no one else in the library at this early hour of the evening.

B
ut Primrose was not to be alone.

“I just don’t understand it, Digger,” Otulissa said in a low, rasping whisper as Primrose entered the library. “If it hadn’t been for Dewlap, Strix Struma would never have been killed. She’s a traitor, I tell you.”

“Look, I agree that she’s a traitor but we would have had that battle with the Pure Ones any way you look at it,” Digger said. “Primrose, you’re up early,” he added, seeing her come into the library.

“Yeah, couldn’t sleep,” Primrose lied. “You’re talking about what’s going to happen to Dewlap?”

“Yes, and as far as we can see, nothing’s going to happen to her,” Otulissa huffed. “It just isn’t fair.”

“They say,” Primrose offered, “that she’s had a nervous breakdown. That she’s really sick and didn’t know what she was doing.”

“Breakdown, my flight feathers!” Otulissa harrumphed. “And I’ll tell you what she was doing.” Otulissa didn’t wait
for them to ask. “She was not only leaking information to the enemy and destroying books, but she was hoarding.”

“Hoarding!” both Primrose and Digger said at once.

“Hoarding what?” Digger asked. “What possibly could there have been to hoard last winter?”

“I’ll tell you what: While we all were starving during that long siege, she had her own private supply of milk-berries and Ga’Hoole nuts. You didn’t see her getting any thinner last winter while the rest of us were so pathetically skinny we could have slipped through a knothole.”

“I can already do that,” Primrose said, trying to make a small joke. After all, she had come here to read a joke book. She had not expected such serious conversation.

“Oh, sorry,” Otulissa replied. “I wasn’t talking about Pygmy Owls, but you got plenty skinny yourself, Primrose. Probably could have slipped into a hummingbird hole.”

“What are you reading, Otulissa?” Primrose asked, hoping to lighten the mood.

“Dowsing and divining techniques for metals and water. There’s a short chapter in here by Strix Emerilla. You know, my ancestor—”

“The renowned weathertrix,” Primrose finished the sentence. They all knew about Otulissa’s ancestor Strix Emerilla. There was hardly a word written by her that
Otulissa hadn’t read, and she rarely missed an opportunity to remind them of her connection to the great owl. But Primrose didn’t mind. She was happy that Otulissa was showing signs of being herself again.

“That’s terrible, about the hoarding,” Digger said. “I never knew that. I wonder what the parliament will decide about Dewlap.” Then he looked slyly at Otulissa. “Have you been to the roots lately?”

Very few of the owls knew about the roots, but Primrose had once overheard the band—as Soren, Gylfie, Twilight, and Digger were often called—talk about them. Of course, they had immediately sworn her to secrecy. The place they called “the roots” was a cramped space deep under the Great Ga’Hoole Tree directly beneath the parliament chamber. Something about the tangled roots and ceiling timbers caused sounds to resonate, most particularly the sounds coming from the owls’ innermost parliament chamber. The roots transmitted the voices of the owls in the parliament above. Listening in on closed parliament sessions was the only really bad thing that the band, plus Otulissa, ever did. It was out-and-out eavesdropping. They all knew it. They all felt guilty about it. But they simply couldn’t stop. They had a million and one ways of rationalizing their snooping activities, but their
excuses never made them feel much better. Still, they continued to secretly listen.

“I just don’t buy it—the stuff about Dewlap having a nervous breakdown: She’s not shattered.”

“Shattered?” Digger and Primrose both said at once.

“Shattering. It’s terrible when it happens, worse than any moon blinking that Soren and Gylfie went through at St. Aggie’s, believe me.”

“How could anything be worse than moon blinking?” Digger wondered aloud.

“Well, shattering is. I was reading about it in that book,
Fleckasia and Other Disorders of the Gizzard
, which we have Dewlap to thank for confiscating and then losing.”

“Well, what is it? Did you read enough to learn anything about it?” Digger asked.

“A little bit.” Otulissa’s plumage suddenly drooped and flattened. She was “wilfing.” This happened to owls when they experienced extreme fear or agitation.

Primrose blinked.
Shattering must be awful,
she thought,
if just reading about it does this to Otulissa.

“You see,” Otulissa continued, regaining some of her composure. “Moon blinking is caused by the moon—especially the full moon—shining down upon the head of a sleeping owl, resulting in massive disorientation and
confusion of one’s sense of self. But shattering is much worse. It is not caused by the moon but by the exposure to flecks under certain conditions.”

“You mean like when we infiltrated St. Aggie’s and discovered that the Pure Ones’ agents were putting flecks into the nests in the eggorium?” Digger asked.

“Yes, precisely. When owls are still in the egg it can happen. Young owls in general are very susceptible. But it is thought that shattering can happen to almost any owl.”

“But look at all the flecks at St. Aggie’s,” Digger said. “When we were there, we weren’t hurt by them. It was the moon blinking that was bad.”

“I know it’s very odd. Sometimes I guess one can rub right up against flecks, and it doesn’t cause shattering. Like with Hortense from Ambala. They say that the streams of Ambala have lots of flecks. But she wasn’t shattered. Instead she simply has deformed wings and is small for her age. It’s a very complicated thing. If only that stupid old Burrowing Owl Dewlap—no offense, Digger…,” she apologized because Digger himself was a Burrowing Owl, “…but if only she hadn’t taken that book.”

“But aren’t there other books in the library that might tell about it—about shattering?” Primrose asked. “I mean now that nothing is spronk any longer.”

“Not so far, and believe me, I have scoured this library.”

Books being declared spronk had been the beginning of Otulissa’s problems with Dewlap, indeed the beginning of all of their problems with the strange old Burrowing Owl who was the Ga’Hoolology ryb. Spronk meant forbidden, and nothing, especially books, had ever been forbidden at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree. Then, for some reason, Dewlap had forbidden the young owls access to certain books. No one had really agreed with her, and Ezylryb had personally delivered the fleckasia book to Otulissa. But then Dewlap had confiscated and lost it.

At that moment, a matron, a rather chubby Short-eared Owl stuck her head in the library. “Almost time for tweener,” she hooted cheerfully. Tweener was their evening meal, just as breaklight was their morning meal and the last food they consumed before going to sleep for the day.

So the three owls made their way to the dining hollow.

P
rimrose stopped in her own hollow to check if Eglantine had gotten up. She’d become a late sleeper lately, which was strange because it was summertime when the nights were so short that every owl wanted to be flying about having “larks in the dark.” With no heavy study or chaw schedule, flying on the smooth air of warm nights under the great summer constellations was so much fun that no owl wanted to miss a minute of the blackness. Primrose was pleased to see that the hollow was empty and that Eglantine and Ginger would not be late to the dining hollow as they so often were. She smelled good things as she approached. Could it be barbecued bat wings? Bats were common summer food. Fruit bats in particular were thick around the Great Ga’Hoole Tree in the early part of the summer evenings. It could hardly be called hunting as an owl only had to stick its head out of a hollow opening to catch one on the wing.

Primrose made her way to her usual spot at Mrs.
Plithiver’s table. The nest-maid snakes of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree also served as dining tables for the owls. They stretched their supple, rosy-scaled bodies to accommodate at least a half-dozen owls for dining. But now as Primrose approached, she saw that Mrs. P.’s table was overcrowded and the place where she usually sat next to Eglantine was taken by Ginger. Soren waved a wing for her to come over, anyway.

“There’s always room, dearie,” Mrs. P. said. She stretched herself a bit more, and all the owls squashed in a little closer. All of the owls, that is, except Eglantine and Ginger, who continued jabbering away to each other in low whispers.

Soren blinked. He was shocked at his sister’s rude behavior. “Eglantine! Could you stop talking for one bloody second and move your butt feathers to make room for Primrose?”

“Oh, dear. Sorry, Prim.” Eglantine looked up and began to move over.

But Soren was still angry. He blinked and looked at Eglantine and then Ginger. “You know, Eglantine, whispering at the table isn’t very polite. If you have something that is so private that the rest of us can’t hear it, maybe you should eat by yourselves.”

What,
Primrose wondered,
could Eglantine and Ginger
have to say that was so private?
Primrose suddenly realized that Ginger was often trying to get Eglantine alone, not just away from her but from the group. Was Ginger jealous of all of Eglantine’s friends? True, they were all in training to be Guardians, and she knew how much Ginger hoped to be approved for training, too. Did Ginger think that Eglantine would have some special influence over that approval?