“Division Six requests sixty pairs of deep ice claws, forty-two standard battle claws.”
“Sub-squadron Four requests additional colliers.” Then from another tree there was a burst of Krakish.
Ezylryb suppressed his desire to laugh. It was a classic peg-out operation. Division Six and sub-squadron Four were entirely fictitious. They existed only in the ears and probably the gizzards of the enemy. To accomplish this, he had divided the Ga’Hoolian owls into three groups, stationing them in three different trees. The owls were then ordered to chatter about plans and weapons, troop positions, and strategies. With this small yet elegant ruse, he might be able to deflect a significant number of the enemy from the trail of Primrose and Eglantine into the fire. Then the rest of the Pure Ones would have to fight in blazing forests, which was not the best terrain for them. Not all of the Ga’Hoolian owls were trained, as the colliering chaw was, to maneuver through towering flames, but they had all been required to do some work in fire conditions, and they were all proficient at fighting with burning branches.
The flame squadron, which was sometimes called the Bonk Brigade, was there. The Chaw of Chaws had been recruited for the flame squadron in the last battle with the Pure Ones. They were all here and a messenger had been sent back to the great tree to bring in every other fighting unit. Whether they would arrive in time was uncertain. Who would ever have imagined when we set out to rescue two young owls that it would turn into this, Ezylryb thought. What if they found out we are a mere twenty-four owls without even one single battle claw between us!
Just then, Soren cocked his head and raised one toe of his left talon. This was the sign that Ezylryb had been waiting for. It meant that an enemy squadron was being split. Soren continued to listen. A second later, he raised two toes. This was what they had been waiting for. A platoon was being directed away from the fire! Only one and a half enemy squadrons were left. Now that’s a fair match, Ezylryb thought. It was time for the action code to be given.
“The sea is dry. The puffins are perfect.” Nyra blinked. Obviously, it was a code she was hearing. She had ordered complete silence. She had now realized—but too late—that the owls of Ga’Hoole could hear her if they had a Barn Owl among them. Although so far she had heard only non-Barn Owl voices, and there had been a reference to Soren being back at the Island of Hoole. Now what could this code mean? There was no way she could possibly break it in the short time required. She felt it was best to stick to her plan of splitting the squadron; one half to go to the northwest front, which was some distance from the fire, and she would lead the remaining squadron into the fire. She had to get that egg back! If only Kludd were here. But he had taken the best of their elite units south to St. Aggie’s.
With her lifted talon, she gave the signal to proceed with the plan of splitting the squadron and diverting the platoon to the northwest. Uglamore lifted off from the limb and soon Nyra did, too, heading for the fire with her squadron and a half.
Meanwhile, high on a branch of a very tall larch tree, Primrose and Eglantine perched. Eglantine had propped herself in a V-shaped wedge where a branch joined the main trunk of the tree. She could therefore still hang on to the egg with her talons. Although the tree had thus far been untouched by the fire, she could feel the branches tremble from the onslaught of the hot gusts and intense thermal drafts that the forest fire created. Soren had said forest fires had their own private weather system and one had to learn how to ride the hot updrafts and cruise around something they called the heat band. All owls, when they reached a certain age, were supposed to do some training in each of the chaws even if it was not necessarily the one they had been assigned to. But neither Eglantine nor Primrose had reached that age yet. However, they had some training in flying with burning branches for torch fighting, which had been used to great effect against the Pure Ones.
Primrose crept out to the end of the branch.
“Any sign?” Eglantine asked by beaking the words silently. If Nyra was around, she didn’t want her to hear anything that would give away their location. Primrose shook her head to indicate no. But it was not more than three seconds later that Eglantine heard her gasp and saw Primrose twist her head around and flip it back. Eglantine did the same. Overhead in combat formation were the Nyra Annihilators!
CHAPTER TWENTY
A Crown of Fire
But look!” Eglantine shouted and then clamped her beak shut. She had been so excited at the sight of Soren flying out of a smoke bank and leading the Chaw of Chaws, with Bubo and the colliering chaw following, that she had forgotten and spoken aloud. In that instant, Nyra suddenly went into a steep, banking turn and headed directly toward the tree where Eglantine and Primrose were perched.
“To the fire! Leave the egg, Eglantine,” Primrose screeched.
“No! Never!”
Egg! What egg? Then Soren remembered that Digger had found the imprint of an egg. Soren’s mind was racing. His gizzard was aquiver with gladness and terror. Gladness that his sister was alive and terror as he saw Nyra head directly toward the sound of Eglantine’s voice. Then he saw his sister and Primrose blast out of the branches of the larch tree and head directly toward the fire. Genius! Little genius! She’s leading them into the flame field, which she knows they cannot contend with as skillfully as we can. But can Eglantine and Primrose do it? They’re so inexperienced. The thought had barely passed through his mind when another slammed into it. It all made sense now. That egg. He saw Eglantine clutching it. It must be Nyra’s egg!
“Very high stakes your sister plays with.” Twilight slid in next to Soren.
“Where’s Ezylryb?” Soren asked.
“Back with the Frost Beaks,” Twilight replied. Soren had asked the question in all seriousness and had forgotten that Nyra and the other enemy Barn Owls could pick up on everything. How quick of Twilight to carry on the fiction of the Northern Kingdoms with a reference to the legendary 24th Frost Beaks Division, which Ezylryb himself had commanded.
Eglantine and Primrose had just sliced through the clear space between two blazing trees.
“Torch,” Soren said. Otulissa and Ruby approached with burning branches in their beaks.
“Snap set one.” At that, Bubo flew up and, having the strongest beak of all the owls, bit the two burning branches in half.
“Ignite,” Soren ordered.
Martin, as the smallest of the colliering owls, flew in with a small, glowing, kindling twig and set fire to the ends of the newly broken branches. Now instead of two burning branches there were four.
“Snap set two.” This time Poot, the first lieutenant in colliering, and Elvan, a Great Gray who was the colliering ryb, flew in with two more branches. Bubo repeated the action. Now there were eight. The burning branches multiplied expontentially.
Soon they were all armed and flying. So far, the colliering chaw and the Chaw of Chaws had performed flawlessly, meshing their particular skills, their actions, and their maneuvers in perfect harmony.
Soren gave the next order. “Round out.” With those words, the Chaw of Chaw split and flew into formation for a bilateral attack on Nyra’s squadron.
Nyra saw them coming in. She felt the terror in her squadrons’ gizzards. “The Sacred Orb!” she screamed. “Cowards will have their eyes pecked out!” At that moment, Ruby struck. Nyra did not turn her head, but she heard a rearguard owl plummet from the formation toward the ground. Then she felt a stillness in the air beside her as Uglamore went yeep. She dove after him and gave him a sharp jab with her beak. “Mooncalf!” Nyra shreed in the high-pitched wail of a Barn Owl. To be called a mooncalf,which meant both idiot and coward, was the worst insult a commander could throw at a soldier. But the jab and the insult did the trick. At twenty feet, Uglamore recovered before hitting the ground, and now they all pressed on with new vigor in their chase after Eglantine and Primrose.
“We’re leading them on a merry” Eglantine whispered. It was what Soren and Martin had done in the last battle of the siege
when they had lured Nyra into a tight space. But this space was not just tight, it was hot and they were getting bounced around fiercely by the tumultuous drafts of the burning forest. Behind a curtain of flames, they had both spotted a safe tree. If only they could get there and lose Nyra and her squadron! Look for a hole in the flame curtain. Soren told me there were holes. If not a hole, a tear, a nick. Anything will do, Eglantine thought.
There it was! There it was! “Charge!” Eglantine yelled, and they both zipped through the opening, which closed behind them almost immediately and singed some of Primrose’s tail feathers. But they were on the other side. And there was a tree. Not as safe as their last tree, for it was smoldering at its base, but it would do for now.
They had barely lighted down on a top branch with Eglantine propped as before, guarding the egg, when Nyra and her squadron burst through. But coming around from the other end with burning branches was the Chaw of Chaws.
Eglantine’s eyes were fastened on Twilight who, in a flame-clear space, was advancing on Nyra.
Backing him up was Soren with not one but two burning branches—one held in his beak and the other in his talons.
Martin was looping in and out of the Ga’Hoole owls and igniting their branches with a small twig. Ruby was flying at high speed directly through the enemy squadron and making them scatter. But above the crackling and hissing of the fire, Twilight’s voice could be heard. He had begun one of his battle chants.
You smokin’ now,
You moonfaced owl.
These flames gonna make you howl.
You gonna skitter
Back to where you from.
And now you think you ain’t so dumb?
Well, just let me tell you this—
You dumb as a fish,
Dumb as a snail,
Dumb as a rock,
And I shall prevail!
Nyra seemed confused and stunned. She had never before encountered Twilight, whose battle chants were in their own way as sharp and deadly as any battle claw. She had heard about this chant-talking owl and never understood how it could so disarm other owls. But I am not other owls. I want my chick, my baby, my Sacred Orb. And above her, Nyra heard the heartbeats of two owls high in a tree.
Then everything happened so quickly that Eglantine and Primrose could not see what was coming or understand the words being yelled. Nyra had somehow avoided Twilight’s swipe with the burning branch and had flown up as if she were flying directly toward Eglantine and Primrose. Primrose screamed something, but now the Pygmy Owl was no longer there. Had Nyra killed her? Why was she, Eglantine, standing on this branch all by herself still clutching the egg?
And now their voices from the flames were coming to her.
It was Soren’s voice. “Drop the egg! Drop the egg.”
“I can’t! I can’t! It gives us power, Soren. Power!”
Then she heard a sterner voice. Great Glaux. It’s Boron.
“Drop the egg. That is a command!”
But their voices were now very dim in Eglantine’s head. Her gizzard stilled, her eyes fixed on the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. Flames leaping joyfully, freely, they wound like the most gorgeous banners into the blackness of the night. For, indeed, the conflagration that raged around her was pulling the deadliest trick of all. Eglantine was flame dazed and halfway to being completely fire blinked. She saw only beauty. She felt no heat. The fire was leaping from treetop to treetop. Eglantine’s treetop was next.
“It’s crowning,” Soren yelled in a hoarse voice. “It’s crowning, Eglantine. You’ll be burned alive!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Gollymopes
Nyra looked at the shattered fragments of eggshell at her feet. She nudged them gently with her talon.
“Your Pureness, we must move on. There is a rolling bed of embers moving toward us. And the tree”—Uglamore looked up at the tree from which the egg had dropped—“It’s about to fall. There will be more eggs in the future, Your Pureness, rest assured.”
“I am assured but I shall not rest. And I vow to kill Eglantine if it is the last thing I ever do.” Her once-white face was almost black now with soot. She flapped her wings once, twice, and rose in the air. “Kill! Kill! Kill Eglantine, the betrayer, murderer of the Sacred Orb!”
When she had composed herself, Nyra turned to Uglamore. “Where have they all gone? There was an entire division. How can they just vanish?” They were flying west toward the distant lands known as Beyond the Beyond where the Pure Ones had secured a stronghold.
“Uh…” Uglamore hesitated. He had known this moment would come, and he had a response prepared. But he was nervous. “Well, Your Pureness, they know how to fly in fires, these owls of Ga’Hoole. There is nothing like them. They can hide behind flame curtains and find passageways through them that we cannot.”
“Hmmm,” Nyra replied.
He cast a nervous glance at her. Maybe she believed him. It sounded reasonable. There was no way that he would ever tell her the truth: that it had all been a ruse, that they had been tricked, that seventy-five owls had been outwitted and outmaneuvered by a mere twenty-four owls—and none with battle claws! It gave Uglamore pause. Was it possible, he thought, that the Great Ga’Hoole Tree could produce a better soldier than the Pure Ones?
Kludd and Nyra and Stryker, the second in overall command, had trained them to fight magnificently. They were better armed than any other group of owls. Their discipline was the best. They were the best! Already they had conquered more territory than any other owl army, save perhaps those of the Northern Kingdoms. There was no discipline in the Great Ga’Hoole Tree. Every owl knew that. Those owls were free to do anything—anything at all! Then it suddenly struck Uglamore—a free society of owls might, in fact, produce a very fine soldier despite the lack of discipline. Discipline counted, but it had not won this battle. Wits had. When was the last time I used my wits? When was the last time anyone ever listened to me? When was the last time I really had any kind of an idea about anything?
Nyra banked across the headwind that was making a direct course to Beyond the Beyond hard to hold. Uglamore followed, as did the rest of the platoon.
“So, Octavia,” Ezylryb settled onto his favorite parlor perch in his hollow and plucked a dried caterpillar from a small dish, his favorite snack food. “Our young Guardians, the Chaw of Chaws, have become quite proficient in torch fighting. Simply amazing what they can do with a blazing branch. I mean, we have always had a flame squadron. But it was a rather minor unit, and they only used burning branches defensively, never offensively as these young owls did. They have essentially invented a new weapon.”
“Yes, sir, that they did,” said the plump, elderly nest-maid snake, as she dusted off the piles of books. “Very inventive those young owls.”
“Yes, I suppose they are the fruits of an open free-thinking society.”
“Nothing wrong with that, sir,” Octavia replied.
“No, nothing at all.”
Octavia, however, could tell that something was wrong by the tone in Ezylryb’s voice.
“But don’t you think it’s rather ironic that years ago I hung up my battle claws, hid them away in that back chamber of the hollow? And now something even more destructive, more deadly than battle claws has been invented, not to mention the flecks. Glaux, those flecks are dangerous.”
“Yes, sir, that they are.” Octavia knew that Ezylryb was, as he was sometimes inclined to do, approaching by a very circuitous route the heart of what was troubling him. And after all these years of serving her master, she knew what part she had to play. “Tell me, sir, did you pick up a fire branch in this most recent skirmish?”
The old Whiskered Screech fixed her in his squinted gaze. Octavia could feel the penetrating stare. I swear he sees more with that old squinty eye than any owl with two good ones.
“Now, what do you think, Octavia?”
Octavia laughed. “I know you, sir. I don’t think you touched one burning br
anch. You were telling them how to peg-out, jabbering away in Krakish, and so on.”
“And so on,” Ezylryb churred good-naturedly. “But it gives one pause,” he continued.
“Pause about what, sir?” Octavia was now straightening out the papers on his desk.
“Does it not strike you as odd that fire was always used for constructive things—cooking, making light for candles to read by, and not as offensive weapons?”
“Battle claws!” Octavia interrupted. “What about them? You don’t cook with battle claws, sir. And to make them you need fire.”
“Just so, my dear. You’ve got me there. But the owls’ excitement about fighting with torches unnerves me somewhat. Boron and Barran are now instituting new training classes for the flame squadron.” Ezylryb did not sound particularly happy about this.
“Well, we have to get with the times, don’t we, sir?”
“What if we don’t like the times?” he said petulantly.
Octavia stopped dusting, coiled up, swung her head toward him, and fixed him with her sightless eyes.
How does she do it? Ezylryb thought. She sees straight through me with no eyes at all!
“Sir, don’t go into a gollymope on me, getting the dismals and all that nonsense,” Octavia spoke brusquely to her master.
“Yes, yes, of course not. I must get to the parliament chamber. We are convening tonight.”
“Tonight? It’s a celebration, sir.”
“For some.” He paused. “Not for Dewlap.”
“Oh, dear. Still out of sorts, is she?”
“Out of sorts is putting it nicely. She’s a Glaux-forsaken mess!”
Meanwhile in another part of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree, there was an owl on the brink of a major gollymope. Otulissa bent over a plan she had made, a landing diagram for an attack on the Pure Ones. And now the divisions actually exist. And there really will be a platoon of Frost Beaks from the Northern Kingdoms! She sighed. It was hopeless. If only someone would listen to her—Ezylryb, Boron, Barran—even Bubo. The sounds of the celebration welcoming back Eglantine and Primrose drifted into her hollow.
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