The Rescue (Guardians of Ga'hoole) (9 page)

“Where’s your forge?” Gylfie asked looking around.

“Not here.”

This is one tough owl,
thought Soren.
Almost like she’s not used to talking.
But then Digger had said she could swear like nobody’s business. Used words that he had never even heard Bubo use. That was something—an owl who could out-curse Bubo. Although the owl hadn’t said that much, there was something oddly familiar in her tone. Soren couldn’t place it, however.

“Well, may I be so bold as to ask where your forge is?” Gylfie persisted.
Good for you, Gylf.
This was one of the advantages of being small, Soren thought. No one ever expected you to be bold or aggressive.

“Yonder!” The smith turned her head and indicated somewhere behind her shoulder.

“Might we see it?” Gylfie took a tiny step forward. The black Snowy towered over her, looked down and blinked.

“Why?”

“Because we’re interested. We’ve never seen a rogue smith’s forge before.”

The Snowy paused as if to consider if this was an adequate reason. “It ain’t fancy like Bubo’s.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Twilight said. “Do we look
fancy?” Twilight puffed himself up. The inverted curves of white feathers that swept from his brow framed his eyes and beak and made his fierce glare even fiercer. He looked anything but fancy.

The black Snowy turned to Gylfie. “You’re small to be out here with this bunch of hooligans.”

“We’re not hooligans, ma’am,” Gylfie replied.

“Why’d you call me that?” The smith glared at Gylfie but the Elf Owl stood her ground firmly and met the blazing yellow gaze.

Uh-oh,
thought Soren.
This bird does not like being called ma’am.
Soren remembered what Bubo had said about the rogue smiths being loners. How had Bubo put it?
They likes living wild.
Being called ma’am—or sir, for that matter, if it were a male—would prick their gizzards.

“We aren’t hooligans. We are a band. Soren here is like a brother to me. We escaped from St. Aggie’s together. Shortly after we escaped, we met up with Twilight and Digger. Soon we shall have our Guardian ceremony and become true Guardians of Ga’Hoole.” Gylfie turned and swept her wing toward the three other owls who seemed almost spellbound by her words. “And I called you ‘ma’am’ because underneath all that coal dust, I know there is a beautiful Snowy. As beautiful as the most beautiful Snowy of the great tree, Madame Plonk.”

At that, the smith seemed to choke and then tears began to leak from her eyes.
That’s it!
That’s who the smith reminded Soren of. The tone of her voice, it was the same melodic sound, the same
pling
that he heard in Madame Plonk’s voice each night when she sang the “Night Is Done” song.

“How did you guess I was Brunwella’s sister?”

“You mean Madame Plonk? Is that her name?” Soren asked.

“Yes. Come, follow me to the forge, young’uns. I’ll tell you the story. I have some fresh voles. Mind you, I don’t roast them here like you do in the Great Tree.”

“Don’t worry,” Soren said. “I fly weather and colliering with Ezylryb—or did—and we always have to take our meat raw.”

“Oh, yes. I heard about Ezylryb. No sign of him yet?”

“No,” said Soren sadly as they flew the short distance to the forge.

“Dear old fellow. We go back, way back.”

Soren wondered what the Snowy meant by that? Well, perhaps they would soon find out.

“What is this?” Digger asked as the band lighted down in the stone ruins. There were two-and-a-half walls of ancient stone that had been neatly stacked upon one another.
Old vines crawled over them and in the center was the pit where the smith had her fire. On one of the walls, a new set of battle claws and a helm hung. Soren could see that the work was very fine, every bit as good as Bubo’s.

“It used to be a walled garden. At least, that’s what I think. Maybe part of a castle.”

“The Others?” Soren asked.

“Oh, you know about the Others do you?” the smith asked.

“Just a little, from the books in the library when I was reading about castles and churches and barns. Being a Barn Owl, it interested me. I just know that they were creatures from long, long ago, and they weren’t owls or birds or like any other animals we’ve ever seen.”

“That they warn’t. Did you know that not only did they not have wings or feathers, but that they had two long sticks for legs that were just for walking.”

“That’s all?” Digger said. This, of course, interested him, being a Burrowing Owl who walked as well as he flew. But he certainly preferred having the option to do either one. “How did they get along?”

“Not that well, apparently. They’re gone now. In addition to no feathers, they didn’t have fur.”

“Well, no wonder they didn’t last,” Twilight snorted.

“Rocks, they had rocks,” the Snowy said.

“Rocks? What can you do with a rock?” Twilight muttered.

“Plenty,” the Snowy replied. “They built with them—castles, walled gardens.”

“Why would anyone want to wall in a garden?” Digger asked, thinking of the lovely gardens that were planted around the Great Ga’Hoole Tree that seemed to meet up in a seamless way with the ferns and wildflowers of the forest.

“Don’t ask me,” the Snowy said.

The Snowy had begun to lay out some freshly killed voles and a couple of ground squirrels.

She chuckled to herself as if she had discovered something terribly amusing and a light drift of coal dust sprinkled down on her face.

“So it’s hard for you all to believe that I am the famous Madame Plonk’s sister, eh?”

“To put it mildly,” Gylfie replied.

“She’s a good soul but she’s very different from me. We were born, my sister and I, deep in the Northern Kingdoms, far beyond the Ice Narrows, on the eastern coast of the Everwinter Sea. Some say that is where Snowy Owls originated. But there were others up there. Your teacher Ezylryb came from an island near where I was born. And he’s a Screech Owl. Anyhow, there was always a lot of fighting
up in those parts. Warring clans. The fiercest warriors came out of the region of the Everwinter Sea. My father and my mother being two of them. But despite their warlike ways, my parents were artists, and for generations the line of Plonk singers were renowned. For thousands of years in every community, in every kingdom, there has been a Plonk singer. But the singer for the Great Ga’Hoole Tree is an inherited position and it is given to only one Snowy in each generation—the one considered the finest. Well, that was my sister, Brunwella. I could have lived with that, but what I couldn’t live with was my stepmother.

“After my mum was killed in the Battle of the Ice Talons—the last battle in the War of the Ice Claws—my da found a new mate, a horrible old Snowy. She treated me like seagull splat. And, of course, fussed over my sister because my sister was going to be the singer for the great tree. I had to leave. Even Brunwella saw that it was impossible for me to continue in the hollow. My father, however, was besotted with this female. She could do no wrong. I wasn’t sure where to go. For some reason, I felt it was important for me not only to get as far away as possible from my family but to take up a whole new line of work. My voice wasn’t bad. But not nearly as good as that of most Plonks which, of course, meant it was a lot better than
anyone else’s. But I wanted no part of it. And I wasn’t as lovely-looking as my sister. I was given to gray scale, which made for unsightly splotches where the feathers fell off. As a matter of fact, my stepmother used to call me ‘Splotch.’”

“How mean!” Gylfie said. “What is your real name?”

Will she say what it is?
Soren thought. He looked at her closely.

“My true name?”

“Yes,” Gylfie said in a barely audible voice. It was as if she sensed she had ventured into forbidden territory.

“That is for me to know, and only me.”

But what about your sister?
Soren thought.
Doesn’t she know your true name? And what is the difference between a true name and a real name? Is there a difference?

“So, as I was saying, I was looking for something new and different. I really wanted to separate myself from the Plonks. My sister had been good to me, but my father seemed not to care. I really had no one else to turn to. So I just left. I flew about in the Northern Kingdoms for a year or more, and then I came upon Octavia. You know Oc-tavia, don’t you?”

“Of course,” they all cried.

“She’s Ezylryb’s and your sister’s nest-maid snake,” said Soren.

“Oh, she’s working for my sister now, is she? Well, she’s a good old soul. I, of course, met her before she was blind.”

The owls all gasped in disbelief.

“You mean,” said Gylfie, “she wasn’t born blind?”

“I had heard a rumor that she had not been born blind, but I really didn’t believe it. I thought all nest-maid snakes were born blind,” Soren said.

“They are—except for Octavia. Haven’t you noticed that she’s not rosy-scaled like the others?”

Soren had noticed and wondered about Octavia’s pale greenish-blue scales.

“But that’s a whole other story. It was Octavia who told me about a rogue smith on the island of Dark Fowl, a desolate place that is lashed constantly by ice storms and gales, rocky, not a tree, not a blade of grass. But this smith was supposed to be one of the most superb blacksmiths on earth. So I went there. I wanted to learn how to make battle claws. I wanted to avenge my mother’s death. I had a dream of making battle claws that would slice to shreds the clan that had killed my mum. I had the fire in my gizzard as they say. Smithing came naturally to me, more natural than singing, I’ll tell you.” She sighed and seemed to reflect happily for a moment. “And I did kill my stepmum with some magnificent claws I made.”

“You killed your stepmother?” Twilight had swollen up
with excitement. Never having even known his own parents he had no romantic notions in general about them, and an evil stepmother set his gizzard to boiling. Then the Great Gray looked down at his talons in what Soren thought was a pathetic display of shyness—for shy was the last thing that Twilight was. “I don’t want you to think I’m a violent sort of bird.”

“Ha!” the other three owls laughed.

“Well, I’m not!” Twilight said stubbornly and blinked at his mates.

However, any one of them could see the Great Gray could hardly contain himself.

“But how’d you do it? Quick slice to the gullet? How? Talon to talon? Stab with the beak to the nether down?”

“I don’t care about how,” Soren interrupted. “But why? I mean, I know she was bad, but that bad?”

“She betrayed my father. Turned out she was a slipgizzle for the other clan. Had planned to marry him from the start—as soon as they got rid of Mum.”

“How did you learn this?” Digger asked.

“I had my ways. Working for a master rogue smith you find out a lot of things. All sorts come to you by the by.”

Digger looked at the coal-dusted Snowy carefully. “Did Octavia have something do with this? Or maybe—” But the blacksmith cut him off.

Cut Digger off too quickly,
Soren observed. Then the rogue smith of Silverveil seemed to clam up. Oh, she was very hospitable, giving them the best parts of the voles and making sure that they had comfortable perches for the day.

Soren did have one more question for her but something kept him from asking it. He wondered, however, if the rogue smith of Silverveil thought that Metal Beak was in any way connected with Ezylryb’s disappearance. Soren wrestled with his question all through their daytime sleep and finally, just before First Black when he noticed that the Snowy was stirring, he decided he just had to ask.

He flew down to where the blacksmith was taking some coals from a niche in the wall to build up her forging fire.

“I knew you’d come and ask,” the Snowy Owl said. Soren blinked. “You want to know if Metal Beak had something to do with Ezylryb.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Never mind that,” she snapped. “The fact is I’m not sure, but Ezylryb, well, how to explain? Ezylryb has a past. He is a legend. He does have enemies.”

“Enemies?” This was unbelievable to Soren. Ezylryb never went into battle. This was a well-known fact at the great tree. He might be gruff, but he was the most nonviolent
owl imaginable. How could such an owl have enemies? He didn’t even own battle claws. In fact, he once said he despised them. Thought the owl kingdoms were becoming much too dependent on them. “Give them books, give them tasty milkberry tarts, teach them to cook, teach them the ways of Ga’Hoole,” he had said to the owl parliament, “and every cantankerous owl will be on our side.”
Ezylryb violent! It’s absurd.

“One last question,” Soren said.

“Yes?”

“Why do they call that owl Metal Beak?”

“He got half his face torn off in a battle. A rogue smith had to make him a mask and a new beak.”

Soren felt as if he might be sick.

I
t’s the part about Octavia not being born blind that absolutely blows my gizzard,” Gylfie was saying.

“It’s the enemies thing for me,” Digger said. “It’s unbelievable that the rogue smith told Soren that Ezylryb has enemies, and that’s why Metal Beak might be connected to his disappearance.”

“I know,” Soren said, “that’s what gets me, too.”

They had returned to the great tree. No one seemed to have missed them and now, in their hollow, Gylfie, Twilight, Soren, and Digger were reviewing and telling Eglantine all they had learned from the rogue smith of Silverveil. They really weren’t sure if they had learned that much. They were, in truth, still quite mystified. Were they any closer to Metal Beak? Was there any chance of them actually being able to do something about the scrooms’ warning?

“Tell me about the rogue smith’s forge again?” This was about the fourth time Eglantine had asked. For some reason,
she was fascinated by their description of this place. So Soren began once more to describe how the stones were stacked in walls, walls that the Snowy thought might have enclosed a garden.