Guardians of Ga'Hoole 05 - The Shattering

hard as she could, soon she would be strong enough to fly there.
    And then what joy there would be! She would be Soren’s hero. She would be the one who found their parents. And Soren would never again dare leave her out of anything. They would all be happy together. Eglantine had already figured out that they would live together here in the Great Ga’Hoole Tree part of the year and then the other part of the year in their own private hollow in The Beaks, or maybe even back in Tyto. And Mrs. Plithiver would come along and keep everything as neat and perfect as she had before. Yes, it would all be so perfect, and she just knew that her parents were so smart that Boron and Barran would ask them to be rybs. Oh, it would all be so wonderful.
    Eglantine and Ginger flew back to the tree with the other owls who had been out. They headed toward Mrs. P.’s table for breaklight.
    “Good news!” Mrs. P. said as they gathered around her for one of their favorite summer meals, milkberry jelly with a small bug set right in the middle.
    “What’s that?” said Soren.
    “Matron says that Eglantine is well enough to return to her own hollow to sleep.”
    “You were out flying tonight,” Gylfie said to Eglantine. “So you must be feeling a lot better.”
    “Yes,” Eglantine said.
    “Oh, great!” Primrose said. She had missed Eglantine so much when she was gone. But she had to admit that Ginger was a lot nicer than she had been at first.
    “But,” Mrs. P. continued, “you have to keep taking the tonic, Eglantine.”
    “Oh, I will. I promise. ”
    “Oh,” Primrose exclaimed. “I got a dragonfly in my jelly. My favorite!”
    The other owls began poking at their milkberry jelly to see what bug might be embedded in the lilac-colored treat.
    Eglantine peered down into her own jelly. It wasn’t a slug or a grasshopper. It was a centipede, her very favorite bug. It had to be a sign—a sign that her dreams were real. Her mum had always brought back centipedes as a special treat for her, and Soren would sing the centipede song. She looked up at Soren now with huge, blinking eyes.
    “Eglantine, you’re not going to make me sing the centipede song here?” he whispered.
    Eglantine giggled. “No, don’t worry.” And she might have said aloud what she was thinking: I don’t need the centipede song to prove that my dream is real. Mum is waiting for me with a dozen centipedes, I just know it!
    The shortest night and longest day of the year were approaching. It was called Nimsy night, and all of the owls looked forward to it because it was after Nimsy that the nights began to grow longer by slivers, first in seconds, then in minutes, and finally, at summer’s end, by hours. Eglantine had decided that she would fly to the hollow in The Beaks after Nimsy, when the longer nights would give her more time.
    However, on these short summer nights and long summer days before Nimsy, the owls tended to stay up longer and go to sleep later. There were only so many hours an owl could sleep during the day, especially when their night flight exercise was cut short.
    “Let’s go to the library,” Otulissa said. “I want to study this chart.”
    On one of the larger tables, Otulissa unrolled the chart she had gotten from Trader Mags. It showed a diagram of the owl brain cross-referenced with a diagram of the owl gizzard. Perhaps it could help explain fleckasia, Otulissa thought. “If I only had that whole book on fleckasia,” she sighed.
    “But you have that page we found when we were out doing weather experiments for Ezylryb,” Gylfie said.
    “Yes, but it was hardly legible.” Otulissa stared down at the diagram. “Quadrant!” she suddenly said in ahushed voice. With a shaking talon, Otulissa pointed to the chart.
    “You see the word ‘quadrant’ in both that section of the brain and that section of the gizzard. The very word that was on the torn page you found! I’ll be back in a second.” Otulissa flapped her wings and flew out of the library. In less than a minute, she was back with the torn page in her beak. She bent over the page and peered. Then swung her head toward the chart. “There’s the number two, look. I can barely make it out, but it’s there.” She blinked and slowly began to speak. “I get it. See. The gizzard is divided into four quadrants and so is the brain.”
    “And so is the night sky for navigation,” Gylfie said. “Strix Struma taught us that.”
    “Right!” Otulissa said. “When