Guardians of Ga'Hoole 05 - The Shattering

drafts, even in the coolness of the night. They were lovely to ride. And even on this moonless night, the fabled Mirror Lakes sparkled. Eglantine was heading for a fir tree that grew beside one of these lakes. Primrose knew that she would have to be careful now to avoid being seen. She swooped off at an angle and found a spruce to settle in on the other side of the lake, from which she could observe Eglantine’s movements. A large Barn Owl with a great shining face had come out on the limb of the fir tree.
    “Mum!” Eglantine shouted.
    Mum! Is she yoicks? And if this is her mum, why hasn’t she told Soren? Primrose blinked. It wasn’t a scroom. It was a real feather-and-bone owl. She could tell. Eglantine handed the owl the papers she had brought.
    “Darling!” she heard the owl exclaim.
    Primrose strained to hear more. She had to get closer. She carefully lofted herself in short flight to a closer tree, and then a closer one.
    “Any centipedes, Mum?”
    “Would I forget?”
    “Oh, no, Mum. Of course not. Never,” Eglantine said. “Where’s Da?”
    “Still hunting.”
    “And Soren, too?”
    “Yes, still out hunting.”
    Primrose blinked in utter confusion. Soren? Out hunting in The Beaks? Soren was back at the great tree. What was happening? And that was Primrose’s second-to-last thought. Her eyes flinched. There was a blinding glare and then nothing. She felt herself being stuffed into some sort of sack.
    And this was how Primrose arrived at her last thought: The sack into which she had been stuffed was the same kind in which rogue smiths often carried their tools. And once there had been a rogue smith in The Beaks. A Barred Owl. Soren, Gylfie, Twilight, and Digger had found him dying. At first, they had thought a bobcat had murdered the Barred Owl. But no, the Pure Ones, led by Kludd, had murdered him.
    I shall die like the Barred Owl, I shall die.
    And that was Primrose’s very last thought.

CHAPTER TWELVE
A Gizzard Begins to Stir
    O h, that’s an interesting book, Eglantine,” Otulissa said as she came into the library. “I was just reading it the other day. It’s about the correspondences between the quadrants of the gizzard and those of the brain. I do believe that the owl who had the most perfect correspondence of brain and gizzard was our dearest Strix Struma.”
    Eglantine flinched and then seemed to wilf so noticeably that both Otulissa and Soren, who was also in the library, jumped toward her.
    “What’s wrong, Eglantine?” Soren cried.
    “Why did you say ‘dearest’?” Eglantine asked Otulissa.
    “Dearest?” Otulissa said again. “Because she was. Strix Struma was the dearest owl I have ever known.”
    Eglantine seemed to freeze. “Only Mum ever said that word to us, Soren. You know it.”
    Soren and Otulissa peered at Eglantine in complete bewilderment. “Eglantine, don’t be ridiculous. You can’town a word. If Otulissa wants to use the word ‘dearest’ she can. Holy Glaux, what’s gotten into you?”
    “Well, why don’t you call her darling instead?” Eglantine said stubbornly.
    “I don’t like the word ‘darling.’ I think it’s phony and ostentatious. It sounds like some gewgaw that would be dangling all glittery in Madame Plonk’s apartment. Darling! Yecch!” Otulissa made a disgusting sound that came from the back of her throat as if she were spitting out a bad slug.
    “Give it a blow, Eglantine,” Soren said. He rarely spoke rudely to his sister, but she didn’t even seem to notice. And this fact intrigued Digger, who had his beak buried in a tracking book he was researching for Sylvana, the tracking ryb on whom he had an enormous crush. Now why, Digger thought, did Eglantine flinch over the word “dearest” and not when her brother was pointedly rude to her?
    Just then, Otulissa suddenly exploded. “Holy Glaux! This really frinks me off…It spr—” Otulissa seemed to be fighting with her own beak not to say the vilest swear word in owl language—the s-p-r word: sprink.
    “What in the world is it, Otulissa?” Soren asked.
    “Someone has ripped two pages out of this higher magnetics book.”
    “You’re kidding!” Gylfie gasped.
    “Look.” Otulissa held up the book. The jagged edges of torn pages prickled up from the inside of the book like an ugly wound.
    “Dewlap?” Digger said.
    “She hasn’t been in the library since she collapsed after Strix Struma’s Last Ceremony.”
    “Who would do this?” Digger said. The owls