The War of the Ember (2 page)

Dearest tree, we give our thanks

For your blessings through the years.

Vines heavy with sweet berries

Nourish us and quench our fears.

And in times of summer drought,

Searing heat or winter’s cold,

From your bounty freely given

We grow strong and we grow bold.

Let us always tend with care

Your bark, your roots, your vines so fair.

S
oren and Pelli stood on the balcony with Bell and Bash, trembling with joy as they watched Blythe singing to the accompaniment of the grass harp.

“Mum, she is really good!” Bell said, her voice drenched in wonder at her sister’s accomplishments.
“And you should hear her when she sings one of those old gadfeather songs,” Bash exclaimed.

“Hymns don’t really do her voice justice,” Gylfie said. And no sooner was the hymn completed than there was a loud twang as Mrs. Plithiver jumped the strings over an octave. “Oh, here it comes!” Gylfie exclaimed. “She’s going to sing that old gadfeather gizzard-acher!”

When an owl loves an owl

And your gizzard’s about to break,

Let me tell you, you can’t do nothin’

‘Cept to follow in that wake.

Don’t turn tail, just go on…

Halfway through the song, Soren and Pelli turned to each other. Their black eyes were bright with a mixture of joy and alarm. “Great Glaux!” Soren exclaimed. “Do you think she’s courting already?”

“Oh, Da!” Bell and Bash both said at the same time.

“It’s just an old gadfeather love song,” Bell said.

“With a little R and H beat laid in to make it more modern,” Bash added.

Pelli blinked. “What in Glaux’s name is R and H?”

“Rhythm and hoots,” Bell said. “And not everybody can sing it. It’s complicated, and Blythe is great, and Mrs. P. said that because of Blythe the harp guild snakes have developed a whole new style of plucking.”

Soren and Pelli exchanged glances. Their eyes glistened with unshed tears as they gazed at Bell, her sister Blythe’s staunchest fan. But a year before, under the powerful, malignant influence of the Striga, Bell had tried to discourage her sister from singing. Bell had believed, as the Striga had told her, that singing, along with many other artistic and playful pursuits that owls of the great tree had enjoyed, was a “vanity,” a word now rarely heard around the Great Ga’Hoole Tree without causing a shiver deep in one’s gizzard.

The Striga, this peculiar blue owl from the sixth kingdom, had saved Bell’s life, and Coryn’s and the Band’s, as well, for he had learned of a plan to assassinate them. By saving them, the Striga had earned the deepest gratitude of the owls of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree. Little did anyone suspect that this tattered, blue-feathered owl would become a terrible danger. On Balefire Night, one of the most joyous holidays of the owl year, the Striga had finally been driven from the tree. Now singing, and all else the Striga had forbidden
as vanity, was once again welcome at the tree. Blythe was singing her gizzard out and no one was happier than Bell.

“Look at Otulissa and Cleve!” Pelli exclaimed. Cleve had put his wing gently around Otulissa and was crooning softly in her ear slit. From watching his beak, Soren could see that Cleve was repeating the last words of the gadfeather song. Soren had to stifle a churr as it seemed so improbable that anyone could get away with crooning anything to Otulissa. But Cleve was another story. There had never been two owls more different from each other than Cleve and Otulissa. Cleve of Firthmore was a prince from an ancient dynastic line of owls in the Northern Kingdoms who had given up his title and inheritance to pursue a meditative life studying the healing arts at the Glauxian Brothers retreat. He was also a dedicated gizzard-resister. He would not fight nor would he fly with battle claws. Otulissa, although she shared his scholarly nature, was a seasoned warrior. She commanded the Strix Struma Strikers. Could a dedicated soldier and a gizzard-resister find true happiness together? Apparently they could.

Gylfie noticed Soren observing Cleve. “I would say that Blythe is singing their song.”

“If it hadn’t been for Cleve,” Pelli said, “I don’t think
Otulissa would have ever taken wing again. She would have just retreated into her books.”

“Out of the way! Out of the way!” Fritha, a young Pygmy Owl barreled through the birds that had crowded the balcony. “I’ve got to go to press. I have to include a review of this concert in the next edition. Your sister was great!” she shouted to Bell as she flew by.

“I’ll help!” Bell called out, and flew after her. “I’ll make sure you get all the details right.”

Soren, the rest of the Band, and Coryn enjoyed the night air in silence a moment on a branch just outside of the Great Hollow. The dancing had begun.

“Quite a difference from last year,” Coryn said. The Band seemed relieved that Coryn had said what was in everyone’s mind—that last year Coryn had been so completely duped by the Striga that the tree had nearly been lost to that fanatical blue owl and his converts. Left unsaid, it would have hung like the last vaporous shreds of a dark storm cloud. The evening, however, was lovely, the air smooth for dancing.

“The dancing will go on late,” Gylfie said.

“Good!” Coryn exclaimed with unbridled joy. “Good!”

By the time dawn broke, the first edition of
The Evening Hoot
was completed. The owls, tipsy from the milkberry wine or from dancing the glauc-glauc,
had long since staggered to their hollows. They would be able to read
The Hoot
that evening at tweener. The headline screamed
HARVEST FESTIVAL BACK IN FULL FORCE: STUNNING SINGING DEBUT! B FLAT? NO WAY!

Blythe, one of the three daughters of Soren and Pelli, opened the Harvest Festival celebration with the traditional “Dearest Tree” carol. Singing with clarity and lovely expression, she gave a polished rendition of that beloved song. However, it was when young Blythe broke into her next number, an old gadfeather favorite, that we saw what a daring artist this little owl is. Belting out “When an Owl Loves an Owl,” she was all gizzard!

There was obvious musical chemistry between Blythe and the members of the harp guild, in particular with the brilliant Mrs. Plithiver, who gyrated through those strings, twanging and plucking in her capacity as a sliptween with unmatched precision. After last year’s disastrous festival, this reporter cannot imagine a better way to commence the harvest celebration than with this bold, self-assured young singer and the brilliant sliptween.

T
he moonlight in the ice cave had grown faint. It had felt like forever before the two owls left. Their conversation had sent chills through Dumpy, and for a bird hatched and reared in the Ice Narrows to feel chilly was freakish. And what was that word the owl had said?
Hagsfiend!
It sounded frightening. And then Dumpy realized that the crevice he was lodged in had suddenly become roomier; that a thing he thought could never happen had happened.
I’ve wilfed. Actually wilfed. I’ve grown skinny with fear. Owls wilf, not puffins! Oh, dear…oh, dear. I must REALLY be scared. What are these hagsfiends the owls spoke of? And what does their talk of “eggs” mean?
Dumpy’s head almost ached as he felt his brain stretching as it never had before. Little slivers of thought, sharp as ice needles when the katabats blew, were storming through his mind.

What is the meaning of all I have seen and heard here?
Dumpy tried to recall his second-to-last thought before the mind storm in his wee brain had begun.

I must
do
something! And that scares me almost as much as what I have seen and heard. I must
do
something! But what?

Then Dumpy the Fifteenth’s thoughts came swiftly.
I must tell someone what I have heard and seen. Not Pop and Mummy. They’re too stupid. Grandpop and Grummy—even stupider!
He thought of his older brother, the Chubster.
No, never! Oh, Great Ice, what am I to do?
Then it came to him.
I must tell somebody smart. Should I go to the Great Ga’Hoole Tree? The owls! The Guardians!
He’d seen them once or twice. And there were the four called the Band.
Oh, and that very nice Spotted Owl from the north. What was his name?…Cluck, Clem—Cleve! Yes, Cleve.
Cleve had passed through when Dumpy was just a chick. But he remembered. Indeed, he did! Dumpy’s foot had had a sea tick lodged in it, and Cleve had removed it.
I must find Cleve and I must find the Band. But they’re so smart, and I’m so dumb! It would be so embarrassing, and it’s so far to travel. Maybe…maybe I can tell the polar bears. They are big and tough. And they’re much closer.

Dumpy waddled to the back entrance of the cliff cave and perched on a ledge that overhung the Ice Narrows. He looked down into the churning waters. He
could see his brother, the Chubster, as he was known, diving for fish for his own young family. The Chubster caught sight of him, opened his beak to shout a greeting, and the twenty-four fish that he had neatly lined up in his beak dropped back into the sea.

“Ah, for the love of ice!” A squawk erupted from one of the ice nests that notched the cliffs. “Chub, you idiot. You lost our dinner!” It was the Chubster’s mate, Pulkie.

“Just wanted to say hi to Dumpy. Hey, Dumpster, baby! How’s it icing?”

“I got young’uns to feed,” Pulkie shouted, and blasted out of the nest. Folding her wings back against her plump sides, she hurled herself into the thrashing water below. Some baby pufflings peered over the edge of the ice nest.

The Chubster, oblivious to his hungry pufflings, flew up to where Dumpy perched. “What ’cha doing?”

“Uh…nothing.” Dumpy wasn’t sure if he should say anything to his brother about what he had just witnessed. He tried changing the subject. “Pulkie—she can really dive. Look at her.”

“Yep, she’s a can-do sort of puffin. You got to get yourself a mate, Dumpy.”

“I don’t think I’m ready.”

“Ready? Mum always said you were the smartest. Too smart for your own good maybe.”

Dumpy blinked.
She might be right,
he thought. “Uh…listen, I got to go.”

“Go where?” asked the Chubster.

“I’m not sure,” Dumpy said.

“Imnotsure! A fabulous place!” the Chubster exclaimed. “Heard all about it. Great fishing.”

“Uh, well, I better be off.” Dumpy spread his wings and lifted off the edge of the cliff. He heard the Chubster yelling at his pufflings. “Wave bye-bye to Uncle Dumpy. He’s going to Imnotsure.”

Pulkie was back in the ice nest, sorting fish. She and the pufflings turned and looked wistfully at Dumpy as he dissolved into the fog bank over the Ice Narrows.

Oh my, fog. Which way do I go?
Dumpy thought. Finally, he carved a turn and headed north toward the end of summer gathering place for the bears. He knew where that was. Not far from the Ice Narrows. But what should he tell them? He tried to order the facts in his disorderly mind. First there was the strange blue owl. And the owl with the frightening face. But worse than what they looked like was what they said.
Hagsfiends.
What were hagsfiends? Another kind of bird? Definitely not a
polar bear. The faint dark memory stirred again, like a shadow invading his being.

Dumpy must have been flying faster than he thought, for soon he was looking down at the remnants of summer ice in the Everwinter Sea. He followed the floes up the Firth of Fangs. He hoped the polar bears were still there and had not begun their long swim north to the more remote firths and small channels where they hibernated for the winter. He spiraled down, and to his great delight saw several bears swimming about and some reclining on floes with their cubs. Many of the floes were bloody with freshly killed seals. The polar bears were fattening up for their long winter sleep.

The firth was quite narrow at this point, and Dumpy saw one bear slip off an ice floe and swim toward the base of the cliffs where there appeared to be a cave. Dumpy hovered outside. It was hard to understand these bears, with their thick Krakish accent. Thankfully, many of them spoke a mixture of Hoolian and Krakish, and Dumpy was catching a few words here and there.

“Gunda grunuch and see you in two years…Eeh, Sveep?” Then the most enormous head Dumpy had ever seen poked out of the cave and roared in a clear voice. “Svarr, you are about as romantic as a mess of seal guts. Love ’em and leave, huh?”

“Well, mating season doesn’t last forever, and I’m getting sleepy. The katabats are blowing early,” replied a male bear who was treading water outside the cave.

“You just want to skedaddle.”

“Here, I’ll get you something to eat before I go.” The bear swooped an immense paw through the water and snatched up a large fish. “Bluescale—token of my affection.” He slapped it down on the rock ledge by the cave.

“Great Ice!” Dumpy sputtered. The two bears looked up.

“What do you want?” the bears roared.

“That fish—that fish. Never saw one that color. Sky. I mean blue,” Dumpy said, alighting on the ice floe the male bear had just vacated. “I saw an owl that color. Blue…” Dumpy repeated the word softly, almost as if he were tasting it.

“I’m out of here,” Svarr said. “Same time, same place, two years from now.” He yawned and began to swim off. “Hope you get some cubs. I’m sure they’ll be cute, just like their mum.”

The female sighed. “As if he’ll ever bother to visit them.”

“You mean he’ll never see his cubs?” said Dumpy.

“Never.”

“That’s very sad,” Dumpy said. “I mean, he doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

The bear blinked. “What is your name, puffin?”

“Dumpy.”

“Well, Dumpy, mine is Sveep, and I think that is very astute of you.”

“What’s ‘astute’?”

“Smart, keen.”

Now it was Dumpy’s turn to blink. “No…no one has ever called me—or any a puffin—smart, keen, or…or astute.”

“Well, I’m calling you that. Now tell me, what is this about a blue owl?”

Dumpy hoped he could give a halfway intelligible recitation of what he had seen. He began slowly. “There is this cave in the Ice Narrows. Two owls came to it. One had these feathers that you call blue, and the other…the other…”

When Dumpy had finished the story, Sveep was silent for several seconds, then finally she spoke. “This does not sound good. Not good at all. But it’s owl business.”

“What should I do?”

“You must seek out the owls,” she said. “The Guardians of Ga’Hoole.”

Dumpy’s head drooped. For a bird that possessed one of the most comical faces, with its bright orange beak and odd facial markings, Dumpy at this moment looked positively tragic. “I can’t,” he whispered into his breast feathers.

“What do you mean ‘you can’t’?” Sveep said. She was beginning to feel that seasonal sleepiness that afflicted polar bears at this time of year, when they sensed the first signs of winter, when seconds, then minutes clipped off each day’s light. Nonetheless, she fought the lethargy that beckoned her insistently. This was important. “I repeat, why can’t you seek the owls?” Her words were becoming thick.

“The Guardians are all so smart. I am so stupid.”

This was like of jolt of summer sun through her body. “Nonsense! You’re the smartest puffin I’ve ever met!” she said emphatically.

“Do you mean that?” Dumpy asked.

“I mean it. You have to go.”

“I’ll…I’ll think about it!”

“Don’t think about it—do it!”