Guardians of Ga'Hoole 06 - The Burning

flight rather than practicing the kinds of skills that were constantly being honed at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree. The brothers tradedknowledge and their skills with herbs for live coals from rogue colliers. They rotated hunting chores and had no real need for navigation since they rarely left the region of their retreat. Gylfie was eternally grateful that the brothers’ retreat was not underground like the Glauxian Sisters’ but in the hollows of the ring of birch trees. The evening meal, tweener, was always followed by several hours of meditative flight. When the brothers returned to the retreat, they broke up into the study hollows to pursue their scholarly interests in herbs, literature, and science.
    The silence in the dining hollow on this particular evening was as thick as ever. As Otulissa and Gylfie entered they noticed once again a very peculiar-looking old Whiskered Screech huddled in a corner eating with the help of nurselike attendants, a Short-eared Owl and an elderly Kielian snake who was constantly flicking up some sort of dark red juice from a goblet with his forked tongue. Gylfie was not sure why the snake stuck so close to the old Whiskered Screech. But both Gylfie and Otulissa had noticed that on the meditative flights the Short-eared Owl accompanied the old owl. Gylfie felt there was something vaguely familiar about the decrepit old one, but she could not figure out what. Apparently, the code of silence was not always practiced with this owl, forGylfie often saw the attendant whispering something in his ear. She supposed that perhaps, for the frail and elderly, exceptions were permitted. However, she had never seen the owl speak a word in response. Indeed, the old thing seemed to be lost in a daze, his yellow eyes permanently set on some invisible horizon. The more she saw of this old owl, the more he reminded her of someone. She decided that tonight she would try to fly near him and his attendants during the meditation flight.
    In the meantime, Otulissa’s attention had been drawn elsewhere—to a handsome young Spotted Owl. He was quite attractive and flew with great style, and she had thought she might try to fly near him. Fat lot of good it will do me if I can’t even talk , she thought. Might as well forget it. It would only be a distraction. She hadn’t come here to socialize, but to learn. And he probably didn’t know that much, anyway. She was certain he had arrived only a few days before she and Gylfie did.
    After tweener, thirty owls or more rose in the crisp night air of the forest where Hoole had been hatched and began their nighttime meditation. The flight formation was a loose circle of owls that resembled the circle of the birch trees of the retreat. There was ample space between each one so that every owl could meditate without distraction. All owls were known for their silent flight, but these owls of the retreat flew in a silence more complete than either Gylfie or Otulissa had ever experienced.
    During this particular flight, Otulissa had chosen as her subject of meditation the legends of Hoole. She was trying to imagine what this forest had been like when the great owl had hatched in that glimmering time in the icy forest, when the seconds had slowed between the last minute of the old year and the first of the new. She was startled when she heard the air nearby ruffle with a stir of wings and then next to her a Spotted Owl slipped in. Not a Spotted Owl, but the Spotted Owl.
    “The silence is sort of getting to me,” he whispered.
    Otulissa’s head nearly spun around entirely. She blinked in astonishment.
    “Oh, go on, tell me you don’t like to talk,” he said. “I can spot a talker a league away.” He sent a riffle through his pinfeathers, a special trick Spotted Owls did that showed off their spots magnificently.
    Otulissa tried to repress a churr. Oh, how glorious! she thought. Words, language! “Aren’t we breaking the rules?” she whispered.
    “They don’t really have hard-and-fast rules here, exactly. You’re supposed to learn them—gradually. They don’t have any real rhot gorts, either.”
;
    “You mean flint mops?” Otulissa asked, for she was not sure of the Krakish words for the Ga’Hoole term for “punishment,” which was flint mop.
    “Yes, that’s it in Hoolian. But you speak pretty good Krakish.”
    “Oh, a little trouble with the passive subjunctive in irregular verbs, but thank you,” Otulissa said modestly and blinked in her most