The Keepers of the Keys
Page 19
“Rosie!” they all exclaimed.
This was followed by her staccato chatter. “Here, here!” She swooped out of the night. Her tiny wings beat a less-than-silent tattoo on the wind.
“I have instructions to rush you directly to the ministry of war hollow. Follow me. It will be a bit of a climb for you.”
Within minutes, however, the yosses were winding their way through interior passages that were barely wide enough for them. When they arrived, Otulissa blinked and breathed a huge sigh of relief. She immediately beckoned Stellan and Froya with her talon to the map. There was no welcome back, good to see you. She plunged right in. “I know you are anxious about your father, but we must act quickly, especially if what you suspect about the MacDuncans and the MacHeaths is true. Show us where the territories are now since the earthquake.”
“That’s the MacDuncan territory,” Stellan said. “It’s a little bit farther west than before, and they are trying to claim more land. You can see it is now closer to the MacHeath clan.”
“This is shocking,” Otulissa said. “The oldest and most revered clan of the Beyond consorting with these most dastardly of clans.”
At that moment, Blythe broke into the hollow. “A message! A message from Svern! He’s alive. He’s with Soren. They are in a frost tunnel of some sort—deep in it. But the ice is yinqua! It can conduct. There’s another Yinqui, a bear to the south. So I was able to get a cross bearing with that station and triangulate the distance. Now I know the exact location.”
“We have to send a message,” Jytte said in a trembling voice. “We have to give them hope.”
The bears with Otulissa rushed to the code hollow. Just as they crouched down near the roots, which appeared to vibrate just slightly, there was a sound at the back of the hollow.
“No one else allowed, please. This is a restricted area!” Otulissa snapped.
The air in the hollow suddenly was threaded with a scent from the distant past. Did no one else notice it? Stellan wrinkled his nose, and he sensed the agitation in his sister’s mind. It can’t be, she was thinking. But it is! The two bears looked at each other in disbelief. They were almost afraid to turn around.
“You would restrict a mother from her own cubs?” a familiar voice spoke out.
“Mum!” Jytte gasped.
“She’s here?” Stellan’s voice broke. “Here!”
“First! Second! Jytte, Stellan.” Svenna swept her cubs into her arms. They were no longer simply cubs. Stellan stood taller than his mother.
“Oh my goodness,” Otulissa said softly. “We forgot to tell you. Yes, your mother is here.”
“Look at you! Look at both of you!” Svenna gasped. “You are all grown up.” And then an immense sob shook her. “And I missed it!”
“But we’re here now, Mum. We are here … uh …” Jytte hesitated.
Don’t say it, Jytte, Stellan thought. Don’t say ‘we’ll tell you all about how we grew up without you.’ That will just be too painful.
Otulissa broke in at just the perfect moment. “You three need to be together after all this time. Please move into Ezylryb’s hollow. It will accommodate all of you and maybe you can begin with stories. Stories are great menders of times lost. Perhaps the old stories that you loved to hear from your mum when you were barely yearlings.”
Svenna turned to Otulissa. “We don’t need stories. We just need to be together anyplace. I just need to hug my cubs.” She gulped and then made a strange sound halfway between a sob and a laugh. “But they are so big I can hardly get my arms around them!”
Meanwhile, deep within the roots of the tree, Blythe began tapping the code on the roots.
Svern and Soren had to wait until the two Roguer bears had gone out to hunt seal for Svern to translate the message. He finally turned to Soren.
“The code reads ‘Svenna safe, cubs safe. Invasion, it’s coming.’ ” Just then the ice began to emit the familiar ticks of another message coming through. Svern raised his paw for quiet. “This is Blythe transcribing a message from Otulissa.”
It was a long message, but Svern’s brain worked at lightning speed. “Here is what Otulissa says: ‘Fear not, dear friends. We shall fight this odious clock and these bears who worship it. We shall fight them in the air, on the ice, on the beaches with fang and talon, with grit to glory, never backing off, never surrendering to this tyranny.’ ”
That evening, Svenna and the four bears climbed high in the Great Ga’Hoole Tree to the hanging garden, which was so carefully tended by Otulissa. There were pockets of the tree where major limbs joined the trunk and collected a variety of organic matter. By careful management, Otulissa had managed to coax into bloom species of plants and flowers, lichens and mosses never before seen on the island of Hoole. It was a somewhat enchanted place where blossoms swayed in the breeze during every season of the year. They were suspended like colorful constellations from the canopy of the tree.
Now, through a cascade of winter orchids, Svenna and the four yosses looked up as the Great Bear constellation climbed into the night. She spied the skipping stars and put an arm around each of her own as if to hold them tight and not have them skip away. How, wondered Svenna, can I feel such peace on this night when the world is on the brink of war?
Stellan riddled every single word in his mum’s head. He leaned in close to her ear.
“Don’t worry, Mum. We are here. We have this night. We are all together.”
“Ah, my riddler!” She sighed and then turned to Jytte. “And my ice gazer. Yes, tonight—we have each other.”
In that same moment, a wedge formation of owls flew overhead. “The Strix Struma unit,” a voice behind them whispered. It was Otulissa. “And the Frost Beaks will follow.” She paused. “Glauxspeed!” she cried out.
“Glauxspeed,” the bears echoed, and waved their paws.
And Jytte could not help thinking of that first night they had spent in the Great Tree, when they had looked at the same constellation of the Great Glaux and that of the Great Bear, and thought how truly they were one and the same. And how she had said to her brother, Maybe it’s all the same, Stellan. We see paws and shoulders. The owls see wings.
“All the same,” she murmured to herself. “All the same even on this night of a coming war.”
Kathryn Lasky is the author of over fifty books for children and young adults, including the Guardians of Ga’Hoole series, which has more than seven million copies in print and was turned into a major motion picture, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. Her books have received numerous awards, including a Newbery Honor, a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and a Washington Post–Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Copyright © 2019 by Kathryn Lasky
Interior illustrations by Angelo Rinaldi
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
First edition, May 2019
Jacket art © 2019 by Angelo Rinaldi
Jacket design by Baily Crawford
e-ISBN 978-0-545-83814-6
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