Exile (4 page)

T
rader Mags had quietly flown into the library and taken up a perch as Fritha was proofreading
The Evening Hoot
. “Oh, Mags, I didn’t hear you come in,” Otulissa said. “I’m afraid you won’t be doing much business here tonight.” Although Otulissa had always been one of the magpie’s most severe critics, she had gained a new respect for her in recent times. Mags had been most helpful just after Coryn had retrieved the ember and become king. It was a time sometimes referred to as the Great Flourishing. Mags had been invaluable in procuring many articles that were needed at the tree for new devices and tools they were building, which ranged from scientific instruments to parts for a printing press. The owls of the tree were now able to reproduce books and other literary matter. There would have been no
Evening Hoot
had the press not been assembled.

“So I gather. But Octavia thought I should come speak to you.”

“About what?” Otulissa asked.

“This blue owl fella. Octavia thought you’d like to know he’s been around longer than you think.”

“What do you mean by that?” Otulissa was suddenly alert.

“Well, he might have just got to the great tree when the moon was newing. But he’d been on the mainland for a whole moon cycle before that.”

“He was?” Otulissa blinked. “Where?”

“Here, there, everywhere.” The magpie tossed her head about as she said the words. “You know, I get around. I get as much information as any slipgizzle in my line of work.”

“So, what do you hear?” Otulissa asked thoughtfully.

“Younger ones are quite caught up with him. You know, the blue feathers and all.”

Otulissa felt something clench in her gizzard. “A Blue Feather Club?” she asked in a somewhat tremulous voice.

“Yes, they call it something like that. Or maybe it’s called the Blue Brigade.”

“He’s started something here, too,” Fritha said.

“Do you know what they do?” Otulissa asked Mags. “This Blue Whatever?”

“Not much. They always have a small ground fire, though, at their meetings.”

“A small ground fire?” Fritha and Otulissa both said at once. Ground fires made on purpose in the wild by owls were very odd. In the great tree, fires were for cooking, illumination, and, of course, Bubo had his powerful forge fires. “What would be the reason for these ground fires?” Otulissa asked.

“I’m not sure. Got to admit, I ain’t got close enough to really see.”

“Maybe they’re just roasting squirrels or voles, outdoor cooking,” Fritha offered.

“Nobody cooks in the wild. We’re the only ones who cook our meat,” Otulissa said.

“No, it ain’t roasted meat. That’s not the smell. Sometimes it’s a strange smell. I can’t place it.”

“Well, they certainly haven’t been having ground fires around here,” Otulissa huffed. “We would have noticed.” But this did not set her mind at ease. She knew that since the blue owl had been at the great tree he had made flights to the mainland. Coryn explained that these were periods when the Striga felt a compelling need to be alone in the wilderness because he was overwhelmed by the worldliness of the tree. She supposed it might fit that the Striga felt too “full up” with the ways of the tree. But still, it was all very disturbing.

“And where do they get the fuel for these little ground
fires?” Otulissa suddenly asked. “Certainly these young owls belonging to the Blue Feather Clubs aren’t seasoned colliers or blacksmiths.”

“Oh, Otulissa, you show me a Rogue smith or a collier who doesn’t want to make a bit on the side. And there is a buyer for everything. Take it from old Mags.” Then the trader blinked suddenly with alarm.

“What is it?”

“I just remembered something.” She shook her head in wonder. “I was flying over one of them dying ground fires, and something caught my eye. Thought it reminded me of something. Something sparkly but now all burnt up. I didn’t pay it much heed at the time ‘cause I was in a hurry.”

“But what was it about the sparkly thing?” Otulissa asked.

“Well, ain’t it simple enough? Most sparkly things, them glittery things that you don’t like and Madame Plonk loves. Where else would they come from but me? And why would someone be trying to burn them up in a fire? Imagine them burning up perfectly wonderful treasures that I search all over creation for. Owls love my goods—why would they allow them to be burned?”

“I’m not sure,” Otulissa said slowly, but once more she felt a twinge in her gizzard. “But I don’t think those gems
and jewels that sparkle would necessarily smell if they were burned.”

“‘Course not. But it weren’t no burnt-cloth smell, either. Or any metal smell like you get when you’re around a forge.”

“What did it smell like? Can you think, Mags?”

“Maybe paper,” the magpie replied.

At that moment, Fritha came up, looking a bit agitated. “Otulissa, I can’t find that book of Lyze’s poetry. No one’s checked it out. I just wanted to quote something from it for the newspaper.”

“And you know what else is missing?” Winifred, the ailing librarian, had just come in, flying rather lopsided due to her arthritic wing. “Couldn’t find it for the life of me the other day.”

“What’s that?” Otulissa asked. She could feel her gizzard throbbing.

“Madame Plonk’s book,
My Fabulous Life and Times: An Anecdotal History of a Life Devoted to Love and Song
. Cheers me up. You know I’ve been feeling so poorly. And I noticed a few of the other songbooks in that section were missing, too.”

“Really?” Otulissa felt the throbbing stop and instead a terrible dread began to grow in her gizzard. “Excuse me,” she said suddenly. “I have to go see Octavia immediately.”

C
oryn had settled down in his hollow. It did feel odd not to be out celebrating on this night of full shine, the start of the Harvest Festival, but in another way there was a lovely peacefulness. He was perched studying the map of the Hoolian Kingdoms and the air currents above the Sea of Vastness. The Striga was perched solemnly across from him, studying the young king with his pale yellow eyes as Coryn studied the map and charts.

“Tell me, Coryn,” the blue owl asked, “do you believe that glaumora is real?”

“Of course I do.”

“And hagsmire?”

That was a hard question. Coryn was not really sure. Certainly, if there was one, he knew Kludd, his father, was there and would be condemned to it forever and ever. And if his mother, Nyra, was dead she would be there as well. But he preferred not to think of either of his parents in any kind of afterlife, glaumora or hagsmire. He just
wanted them gone, their souls to evaporate into a complete and irrevocable nothingness. “I don’t know,” Coryn finally replied.

“But glaumora?” the Striga pressed.

“Oh, yes, yes. There must be a place for the good souls to go, the scrooms of decent owls.”

“Decent owls?” the Striga said. “And what makes a decent owl?”

“Well, Hoole, the first king of this tree, was a great and decent owl. But one does not have to be great to be decent. One does not even have to be an owl.”

Striga blinked in surprise at this. “What do you mean?”

“Well, for example, Mrs. Plithiver.”

“The nest-maid snake?” the Striga replied, an edge of disgust in his voice.

“Yes.”

“But she’s a servant. She makes our life easier, more luxurious.”

“Oh, but she’s much more than that. She is a gifted musician and holds the highest rank in the harp guild as a sliptween.”

“Yes,” the Striga said coldly, and decided not to say more.

“And aside from that, she is a very good creature. She is sensitive and loving and wise. All those things.”

A vain slithering thing
, the Striga thought,
her music as useless as the baubles the awful tree singer, Madame Plonk, collects
. But he said none of this. Instead, he affected a very mournful gaze and looked down at his talons.

“You seem distressed, Striga,” Coryn said anxiously.

“Does that matter to you?” the blue owl answered.

“Of course it matters. We owe you so much.”

“You owe me nothing, but I owe it to you to share what I have learned; to share my vision of a world that might end—will end—on the night of the Great Scouring. I have seen it, Coryn.”

Coryn suddenly wilfed, growing as slender as the branch he perched on.

“Let me tell you this, Coryn—you are your own worst enemy.”

“How do you mean?” Coryn felt a sickening swirl in his gizzard. He thought he might yarp a very squishy half-digested pellet.

“Don’t you see?” the Striga said.

“See what?”

“Hagsmire is real. You and I have both lived it. We both endured, survived, two very different kinds of hagsmire. I, in the Dragon Court, and you in the canyonlands as the hatchling of Nyra. You remember those times.”

“How can I ever forget them?” Coryn had tried as a
young innocent owl to be everything that his mother had ever wanted. But he had not realized her lies, the true depth of her sadism, or how far she would go. She had tried to force him to murder his best friend, Phillip, and then killed the young Sooty Owl herself.

The Striga flew to the branch in the hollow where Coryn perched, so that his face was just inches away. He looked deep into Coryn’s shining black eyes and saw his own reflection. “Don’t you see? You and I share something. We have a bond, a bond like no other two owls.” His voice had become rough with a new intensity. “In my hagsmire, I had a vision, a vision of a hagsmire to come. But there can be a glaumora for us if we are ready. I was chosen to survive in order to show the world this vision. And so were you. Who else has lived through hagsmire? Look at me, Coryn, my feathers once would have nearly filled this hollow and trailed out the port. And now I stand before you nearly scoured. And yet I fly, fly without ornamentation, without the vain trappings and fripperies in which I once luxuriated. And feathers were just the beginning of my vanities.”

A small light like the flame of a candle flickered in Coryn’s shining dark eyes. “We
have
shared something, haven’t we?” Coryn spoke with a deep intensity and the Striga nodded. The young king thought about his
hagsmire—a harsh country, cut with rock canyons. There was not a tree, not a meadow, but that harshness was nothing compared to the cruelty of his mother and her insane ambitions to raise him to be as ruthless and cruel as she was. And then there was the Striga’s hagsmire—the resplendent palace where owls were so laden with feathers that they could hardly fly. Those foolish owls had become numb, without ambition for anything but their own pleasures. They had even mistaken that palace for glaumora, some said. All, that is, except for one owl, the Striga. Now that Coryn thought about it, the Striga’s achievements were staggering. Coryn had fled harshness and cruelty in a barren landscape, but the Striga had abandoned luxury beyond measure, beyond imagination. How had he done it? This was an owl to be listened to. His talk of vanities was not idle.

“Tell me, Coryn.” The Striga’s voice had lost the intensity, the tautness, and agitation with which he had spoken moments before. His voice grew soft and had a lazy, almost casual tone. “Tell me about the ember.”

T
here’s one, down there!” Twilight called out. “Finally!” Gylfie said. “Should I go for it, Digger?”

“Let’s just see where it came from first.”

For almost ten nights the Band had been in the southeastern part of the Shadow Forest pursuing their experiments for Otulissa. They had set out feather buoys to track the sources of the elusive feeder currents that Otulissa hypothesized were related to the River of Wind. So far, they had found none. Gylfie and Twilight flew into a low ground hover and focused on the tufts of feathery down that were slowly circulating inches above the ground. There was a green tag attached to one.

“Well,” said Gylfie. “This is the one we set out three nights ago at a latitude of forty-three degrees north and one hundred twenty degrees west.” Gylfie, the ryb of the navigation chaw and probably the best navigator in the history of the tree, had, over the past few years, advanced the science of navigation. By relating distance
to time she had figured out how to derive a much more precise geographical location. While studying some fragmentary documents in the Palace of Mists, she stumbled upon the description of a little mechanism—a chronometer—for measuring time and immediately set about trying to build one. It was another instance in that time of the Great Flourishing when Trader Mags had been very helpful. In Mags’ treasure trove, the chapel ruins in Silverveil where she lived, she had several of the key parts for the chronometer, and dedicated herself to searching the more distant ruins of the Others for the rest. Bubo helped by forging some of the tiny parts. Finally, such a clock, a very small one, had been reassembled.

There had been so many wonderful advances since Coryn had brought the Ember of Hoole to the Great Ga’Hoole Tree. That was part of the mystery of the ember. Its peculiar power bestowed both blessings and curses. The ember was neither purely good nor purely evil.

Twilight and Gylfie landed just beneath the still-circulating buoy. Gylfie flipped open the tiny chronometer that she always carried and did a few quick calculations.

“All right, yes! I think we have some interesting data here,” Gylfie proclaimed triumphantly. “Let’s get Digger and Soren.”

“Yes!” Twilight hooted and thrust a talon into the air. “We win the prize!”

They had agreed that whoever made the first important finding got to eat the stomach of the next ground squirrel they caught. The stomach was the tastiest part of this delicious rodent, the prize.

Meanwhile, Soren and Digger were flying in another region of the Shadow Forest known as the “notch.”

“I don’t see them,” Twilight said.

“I don’t, either,” Gylfie replied. Then suddenly from a very tall cedar, Soren appeared.

“Quick, follow me!” he said, swooping in. “I’ve been listening for you.” His expression was grim.

“Did you find a feather buoy, or what?” Twilight asked. “Because if you did, it’s a tie and we’ll have to split the stomach.”

“Forget about feather buoys. Follow me.” Soren began to carve a steep, banking turn. It was a cloudy night and the moon was still in the newing phase, as it rose in the blackness like a thin curve of silver light scratching at the night. Soren swiveled his head around and addressed Twilight and Gylfie. “We’re going to fly really high, and then begin to plunge. A stealth plunge.”

A stealth plunge?
Gylfie and Twilight both thought. This was a maneuver usually reserved for battle, not scientific
expeditions. Whatever it was that Soren was leading them to must be serious. Soren launched himself into a climbing spiral, then a few minutes later began the plunge.

The target, however, was not an owl or prey, but rather one of the giant trees that could be found in the notch. They landed in the bushiest part of the tree, where Digger was waiting. He raised his port wing and signaled that they should be quiet. Then, with Digger now leading, they crept out on one of the branches. He indicated with his head to look down. There was indeed a peculiar scent. Something was burning below, but the smoke hung low over the ground. Gylfie and Twilight could not see what it was that Soren and Digger appeared to be focusing on, but a light breeze stirred the air, and the smoke cleared, leaving a blue-tinged gloom.

Within that gloom, they could see a circle of owls standing around a small fire. The owls’ faces were bathed in the glow of the fire and their shadows danced across the pools of light behind them. Most of them were quite young. Some, however, were older.
Old enough to know better
, Soren thought. Digger and he had been astounded when they came across this queer ceremony. At first they were simply curious, but soon they felt a sickening twist in their gizzards as they watched a Burrowing Owl step up to the fire with a book in his beak and drop it into the
flames. “Watch this!” Soren whispered to Gylfie. Another owl stepped forward and dropped in another book.

So this was the source of the smell
, Gylfie thought. It was the smell she had been the first to detect as they approached the border between Silverveil and the Shadow Forest. Then another owl flew low over the fire. It was a Pygmy. She was young and in her beak was a strand of bright beads. She looked as if she were weeping and she hesitated as she held the beads. Another owl came up beside her and gave her a reassuring pat. Soren cocked his head to hear the words. “This is for the best. Those beads are a vanity. Give them up to the flames, dear, and when you do, they will burn and vanish with the smoke. Instead, in that space, a perfect simplicity will come and you shall be ready for glaumora on the night of the Great Scouring.”

She’s just a kid
, Twilight thought.
This is obscene, skart!

They saw the Pygmy finally drop the beads. Another owl presented her with a blue feather, and one to each of the four other owls, including the one who had dropped the book into the flames. The Band looked at one another in horror and felt a chill run through their gizzards. A cold wind seemed to blow through their hollow bones.