Guardians of Ga'Hoole 08 - The Outcast

days?!
    “Now, Coryn, you try it. Remember all I said.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Wind check, then loose circle, steep bank…”
    Otulissa kept talking as Coryn took off. But then just as he was about to pull out of his banked turn and begin the downward spiral to the ground, the volcano belched vigorously and a column of fiery embers shot high into the air. All the owls immediately began spiraling to earth to catch these hottest of bonk coals. All the owls, that is, except one.
    “What in hagsmire is the young’un doing?” Gwyndor gasped.
    “Coryn!” Otulissa screeched as she watched her pupil spiral upward at a dizzying speed.
    Instinctively, he flew through the rain of coals, tipping his wings this way and that, catching first one coal on the fly in his beak, then another in his port talon, and then a third in his starboard talon.
    “My Glaux,” Otulissa gasped. “He’s coming in fully loaded! Well, I never.”
    Coryn dropped all three coals in the bucket. The three owls peered into the glow.
    “Magnificent,” Otulissa said.
    Three blue coals, with a flash of yellow in their centers. “Now, that is quality, Coryn. Those are bonk coals.”
    “I’ll say so, ma’am. I should pay you for coals like this.” Gwyndor was jubilant.
    “Nonsense,” Otulissa snapped. “Besides, I don’t approve of accepting payment for coals from a sacred site. It’s vulgar.”
    “Yes, ma’am, anything you say. Thank you very much.”
    “I need no thanks,” Otulissa replied, and then turned to Coryn with tears in her eyes. “Seeing this young’un fly so exquisitely through that rain of embers is reward enough.”
    But what next, thought Otulissa, what next? Oh, Strix Struma, you have brought us here. But what am I to do? The young’un still does not know himself. He does not recognize his destiny.
    Coryn was alone with his own troubling thoughts as he peered into the bucket.
    Now what is that young’un seeing in those coals? Gwyndor wondered.
    For Coryn, the coals in the bottom of Gwyndor’s bucket seemed to breathe like living creatures. Coryn’s fire sight was so powerful now that he did not need flames. The coals offered shapes and images as clear as the ones he read in fire. And what he saw first in these coals was the face of his mother, Nyra. And, as before, when he had seen her in the fire in the Gadderheal, her face was no longer white, but sooty and stained with smoke. There was a wolf figure near her. He wore a headdress of bones. So she had been there, Coryn thought, or perhaps is there right now with the MacHeaths.
    Coryn felt the old fearful twinges in his gizzard exactly like the ones he had felt so often in the hollow he had shared with his mother in the canyonlands. But suddenly, his gizzard grew still. What was that deep in the coals? It flickered like the reflection of another coal. He blinked. There were only three coals in the bucket, but now each one was reflecting an image. The same image. It was orange, but at its center was a lick of blue and then around the edge, there was the green—the green of wolves’ eyes.This was not an image of a bonk coal. This was the reflection of the Ember of Hoole!
    But where? How? What am I supposed to do?
    You will know, Coryn. You will know, a voice whispered in his head.
    Was it a scroom? Was it Mist?
    When he lifted his eyes from the bucket, he saw Gwyndor and Otulissa staring at him hard. It was Otulissa, however, who shivered. “By Glaux, I felt as if a scroom floated by me.” And then she churred a bit, as if to say, Nonsense. I don’t believe in such things.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A Blood Oath
    S o I might stay as long as I care to, Lord MacHeath?” Nyra had just revealed her true identity. She had just told them that she was no Rogue smith but Leader and Supreme Commander of the Tytonic Union of Pure Ones.
    “You bring us eyes that are green like ours. You hunt for the hare and share your meat and now you bring us what you have said is a great secret that could turn our clan into the most powerful wolf clan on Earth.”
    “Yes, but in exchange I need some information that you have,” Nyra said.
    “Sir Ross, take the talking bone to our honored guest, Nyra, Supreme Leader of the Tytonic Union of Pure Ones.” This was a sign that Nyra was to give her information first. A black wolf took the bone and placed it at Nyra’s talons. She clamped it firmly down with one talon.
    “As the Supreme Leader of the Pure Ones, I would liketo propose