Guardians of Ga'Hoole 02 - The Journey

Soren’s ear. “Gylfie, what are you doing up at this hour? It’s broad daylight. Are you yoicks?”
    “Not at all.” Soren could see that Gylfie was practically hopping up and down with excitement. “Soren, there’s a very important meeting going on in the parliament hollow.”
    “So?”
    “Soren, I think they are talking about the Barred Owl and”—Gylfie gulped and shut her eyes tight—“and…and…” Gylfie was seldom at a loss for words. “The ‘you only wish.’”
    Soren was suddenly fully awake. “You’re kidding.”
    “I wouldn’t kid about something like this, Soren, and you know it.”
    “How do you know this? I mean, how did you find out? Were you in the meeting?”
    Gylfie blinked and looked down at her tiny talons inembarrassment. “Look, I know it’s not nice to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t sleep and you know how Cook always says come down to the kitchen if we can’t sleep and she’ll make us a nice cup of milkberry tea. So I went down, and on my way back I just thought I’d take a different route, so I followed one of those deep inner passageways that is very winding and pretty narrow, and it actually started to go down instead of up toward the sleeping hollows. There’s a spot where something happens to the timber of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree. It is very thin, and I could hear voices, and then I found this perfect slot that is just Elf Owl size.”
    “Do they have one just Barn Owl size?” Soren interrupted.
    “Maybe. There’s an even better one my size higher up, but I would need a perch.”
    “At your service, Gylf!” Twilight was suddenly awake. “What a team we’ll make. On the shoulders of giants, the little Elf will bring back the word!”
    “Twilight, puhleeze!” Soren said.
    “Why not? Makes perfect sense.”
    “Well, I might not be a giant like you, but I can hear better than any of you. I’m going, too. So count me in,” said Soren.
    “Me, too.” Digger was stretching his legs and seemed at least half awake.
    “Do you even know what we’re talking about?” Gylfie turned to the Burrowing Owl.
    “No, but we’re a band, remember? Nobody gets left out. Fill me in on the way to whatever we’re doing.”
    And so the band of four, as quietly as possible, moved out of their hollow with Gylfie in the lead. They left by the sky opening and flew a quarter way down the tree, where they entered a very small opening that Gylfie had discovered, which twisted and turned, pitched and curled through the huge trunk of the tree, until they had wound around to the back side of the Parliament hollow and found themselves actually slightly beneath that hollow, in the root structure of the tree. It was not that the walls were thin, Soren soon realized. It was rather that the roots of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree were transmitting the sounds.
    Gylfie hopped on Twilight’s shoulders and Soren pressed one ear to a root, as did Digger.
    “And so you say, Bubo, that no trace of the dear Barred Owl was found? Our noble servant perished in the region of The Beaks?”
    The four eavesdropping owls blinked and suppressed gasps of astonishment. It had to be the same owl. It just had to. Soren pressed his ear closer.
    “Not rightly sure if he exactly perished, Boron. I mean he mightn’t be dead. He might just be captured.”
    “By St. Aggie’s patrols or…” Now all four owls strained to hear, but they could not make out what Boron had said. Indeed, it seemed as if there was a little hole in the conversation, as if a word had dropped out, perhaps a word too awful to say. Soren wasn’t sure. But he felt a chill run through him.
    “Either way it’s a bad piece of work.” It was Ezylryb’s voice. Soren could tell.
    “We done lost one of our best slipgizzles and a darned fine smith as well, one of the best of the rogues.” Bubo was speaking again.
    What is a slipgizzle? Digger mouthed the words. Soren shrugged. He had never heard the word before. He might have heard the word “rogue” but he wasn’t sure what that meant, either.
    “Without a reliable slipgizzle,” now Barran was speaking, “it’s going to make it very difficult to get any information about their activities in The Beaks.”
    “It was a very strategic spot where he set up his forge.”
    So that was it! thought Soren. That cave that, as Digger had said, not only held the spirit of the Barred Owl within its walls, sooty and scorched by countless fires, but alsowas his forge. He was a blacksmith, like