Guardians of Ga'Hoole 06 - The Burning

greenish-blue that was quite different from the bright blue of the seawater. Suddenly, Gylfie realized that they must be flying over the Hrath’ghar Glacier. The rising sun began to take on a peculiar color of green—sharp and minty—and then jagged peaks loomed up. They were an impossible color of indigo blue. This, Gylfie thought somewhat sourly, must be their inspiration for color. Perhaps when one was this far north in a snow-covered, ice-clad, completely white world, the very air and light itself became a prism and the whiteness of everything—ice and rock, peaks and land—shattered into all of the colors of the spectrum.
    She wondered where the pirates roosted. Most likely in some icy crevices, for there was not a tree in sight. I’m going to be tree sick again, she thought morosely. But she knew that this was the least of her problems. She did wonder, however, why they wanted her. Was she a hostage? What value could she possibly have for these pirate owls, these kraals?
    The pirates’ lair was not in the icy cliffs of the high peaks but rather was a series of ground nests in dens between and underneath boulders. Gylfie was kept in a rock cell and guarded at all hours of the day. She was surprised to see that the land was not all glacier but a vast spongy surface covered with mosses and lichens and low shrublike plants. She had read about land formations like this; she thought it was called tundra. Beneath the tundra, the land was frozen solid and never melted but on top there was a short growing season when berries could be harvested. At night, the wolves howled, which she found very unnerving being confined to the ground and never allowed to fly. She could, however, peer out into the main dens of the pirates’ lair and what she saw intrigued her. These pirates might be clever with their windless vacuums for transporting prisoners but they were also incredibly vain. Plates of what they called in Krakish “issen vintygg,”or “deep ice,” had been polished to a mirrorlike finish, and the pirates spent endless hours painting their feathers and admiring their reflections in these ice mirrors. The dyes they used were made from the berries and the few sedges and grasses that grew in the summertime on the tundra.
    Gylfie began to think hard about vanity and mirrors. She and the rest of the band had had some experience with mirrors, and she knew that vanity deceived, and was not a strength but a weakness. Long ago, when Gylfie, Soren, Twilight, and Digger had been on their long and arduous journey to find the Great Ga’Hoole Tree, it had been the Mirror Lakes in the region known as The Beaks that had nearly been their undoing. Transfixed by their own images reflected in the lakes’ surfaces, the band had almost forgotten how to be owls. They had forgotten their purpose, their goals, and all that they had risked and nearly died for simply because they had fallen under the spell of vanity. If Mrs. Plithiver, Soren’s old nest-maid snake from Tyto, had not been there and given them a blistering scolding, well, there was no telling what might have happened. Then a phrase came back to Gylfie from a book by Violet Strangetalon she had once read: The folly of vanity is the curse of the peacock, a nearly flightless bird, happy to remain so and to strut about for the admiration of earthbound creatures. Their appalling ostentation is equaled only by their appalling stupidity. There was also something else from that book that was quite haunting but Gylfie could not remember it.
    She peered out of her cell. The two guards were gabbing about their new tail-feather treatments and posing for each other in front of one of the ice mirrors. They were big, four times bigger than Gylfie, and they carried ice daggers, and Gylfie knew they could use them. But surely there had to be a way out of here. Let their vanity lead me, Gylfie thought. But how much time did she have and why, why were they keeping her? Why did they need a little Elf Owl who would be perfectly useless in these katabatic winds? She was a high-maintenance owl from their point of view. Had to be fed and guarded. What was the reason for all of this?
    Gylfie didn’t realize that she was about to find out in a matter of seconds. She heard a familiar sound as something came slithering down the passageway just outside her cell. Then what little light that slanted into the cave was blocked as the large head of a Kielian snake poked its snout in. Two immense