Guardians of Ga'Hoole 06 - The Burning

complaining bitterly just hours before that they were always left with the dirty work, guarding a prisoner and never allowed to go out on raids?
    Twilla was describing to them in some detail where these golden sedge berries grew. “Follow the dry creek bed until it turns east, and the shield rock breaks from the tundra…”
    “But who will guard the prisoner?” asked Phlinx.
    “I shall, of course,” Twilla answered.
    Both owls sputtered their gratitude. But Twilla interrupted them. “Now fly along. You need to be back before your subjects return!”
    “Subjects? What are subjects?”
    “Oh, never mind,” Twilla muttered in a most un-godlike exasperation.
    As the two guards lifted into the air, Twilla turned to Gylfie. “I thought we’d never get rid of them.”
    “You’re going to get me out of here?”
    “Of course.”
    “But aren’t you…aren’t you…you know, with Ifghar?”
    “No! Look, we don’t have time to talk. I’ve got to get you loose. Do you know where they keep the ice daggers buried around here?”
    “No.”
    “I’ll have a look. In the meantime, start wiggling your talon in that tether to loosen it up.”
    Twilla was back in a very short time with an ice dagger. But the ice dagger proved too large to work on the tether binding the skinny little leg of an Elf Owl. One false move, and she would have cut Gylfie’s leg off entirely. So she left and came back with an ice splinter with which she could work far more delicately. And as she worked, she explained in Hoolian sprinkled with some Krakish wordsthe plan for flying out. “You are not to worry about the katabats.”
    “But they’re so fierce, and I’m so small.”
    “Be quiet and listen. We are going to fly into a layer of air above them.”
    “How?”
    “We follow the steam vents.”
    “Steam vents?” Gylfie had never heard of such things…or maybe she had.
    “Yes, smee holes we call them. They are scattered throughout the Northern Kingdoms. If we take the land route and don’t strike out over the sea, there are many more. It’s longer, but we’ll avoid the katabats, and it will take you as far as the Ice Narrows. You see, the steam vents cause strong updrafts that can boost you over the crests of the katabats.”
    It was all coming back to Gylfie now. She had remembered Otulissa blabbing on and on about the smee holes she had read about in a book by Strix Emerilla. Oh, Glaux! If she had only listened more carefully.
    “There, it’s off,” Twilla said. Gylfie blinked and shook her leg loose of the shreds of the tether that had bound her. But her newfound joy in freedom was short-lived. Suddenly, in one of the ice mirrors propped against therocks, she saw streaks of color. She looked up and saw the sky smeared with lurid colors as if a rainbow had run amok.
    “They’re coming back!” she shouted.
    “Who—the guards?”
    “No! The whole frinking lot of them—the pirates! And there’s way more more than before.”
    Gylfie blinked at the mirror reflecting them. How typical of these vain birds. They had set a mirror out so they could admire themselves as they flew in from the west. But now the sun was just beginning to creep down toward the horizon. Suppose… Gylfie thought, and the thought was as dazzling as the setting sun itself.
    “Quick, Twilla, tilt that mirror up and catch the sun in it. The one next to it as well.”
    Twilla blinked as it dawned on her what Gylfie was thinking. This was some smart little owl!
    “Dagmar! Watch where you’re flying, idiot bird!”
    “What’s happening?” screeched another pirate owl. “I can’t see! I can’t see!”
    Havoc reigned in the sky, as dazzling shards of light sliced the clear air above the tundra. Blinded by the reflected light of the sun, owls were crashing into one another. The constantly bouncing blades of light came inintense bursts, destroying the owls’ orientation. Their invisible eyelids were no help against the fragments of light that exploded before them. Were they flying east or west? Up or down? The air, the very sky, suddenly seemed brittle. The tundra world of the pirate owls was being smashed to smithereens by light, light in its own peculiar way as sharp and deadly as any ice sword. The pirates were now falling out of the sky, and as they fell two others rose in flight, heading east by southeast to catch the warm drafts from the first smee hole.
    And suddenly, Gylfie remembered the other quotation from the book by Violet