Guardians of Ga'Hoole 08 - The Outcast

spirit trail, that wolf could return as anything it wanted to be on Earth? Would it be worth it? “No,” she muttered to herself. Life is to live on Earth in the whelping den with your young, in the Gadderheal with wolves of honor, on the trails where the code of lochinvyrr is respected. That is how a wolf’s life is to be lived. Damn the clan of hers, which kills and forgets the ways of lochinvyrr. Damn the MacHeaths for their jealousies, their mutilation of young pups, and their alliances with devil owls. She looked up and caught sight of Coryn. Slowly, so slowly, he was circling each of the five volcanoes. Other owls were beginning to notice him now. Many had stopped flying as if to make airspace for him.
    Perched on a rock outcropping were two owls that had been watching him from the start. It was one of the few times in her life that Otulissa was completely silent. Gwyndor stood motionless, as if holding his breath. Bothof their gizzards were in a frenzied state. They sensed what was coming.
    Except for the screech of the wind and the occasional howl of a gnaw wolf, a hush had fallen over the Sacred Ring. This was Coryn’s fifth circle of the ring. He could see Otulissa and Gwyndor watching him. He spotted Hamish on the ground. He must be off duty , Coryn thought, for he had stopped loping the trail between Dunmore and Stormfast. Coryn felt bad that he had paid such scant attention to his friend these past several days. He hoped there would be time later. He hoped there would be a later!
    But despite this grim thought, Coryn was calm, as calm as he had ever been in his life. His gizzard was trimmed and fit for the challenge. Part of this challenge was patience. He knew someplace deep within his gizzard that it was not a matter of guessing which volcano the ember lay buried in. It would come to him in some inexplicable way and he would know that one is the volcano.
    On the very fringes of the dark red shadows cast by the volcanoes, another owl lurked. If anyone had noticed her, they would have thought she flew most awkwardly for a Rogue smith. She set down her tools with a clank but no one heard it above the wind. Every creature’s eyes were focused on just one thing: the young Barn Owl flyingnow for the sixth time over the top of the cones of the volcanoes—every creature, that is, except for the gnaw wolves on the cairns. Their hackles had risen the moment this other owl had arrived. A silent scent message went out. Beware! A graymalkin is here. Would she try to fly up where the young Barn Owl was circling? It could prove a difficult intercept if the two of them were fighting over the ember. Never in the history of the Sacred Ring had two owls attempted at the same time to recover the Ember of Hoole.
    But the wolves were wrong. This owl would not attempt to retrieve the ember before Coryn. No, Nyra had it all worked out. She was not diving into some boiling volcano. Let Coryn do it and if he died, he died. He was no more the heir of Hoole than she was. But if by some freakish incident he did get the ember, well, then, she would wrest it from him. She would kill him and take the ember back to the MacHeaths. And if no one got it? Her plan would still work. She had promised to restore the MacHeaths to their glory as the true members of the Sacred Watch and then, with them by her side, she would begin to dominate the world of owls. If only Kludd were here to see this. Kludd!
    Coryn looked down into the boiling crater of Dunmore. It was in Dunmore’s cauldron that the bonkcoals he caught on the fly had been born. And even though those coals had revealed to him the image of the Ember of Hoole, he knew in his gizzard that the great ember was not buried in that boiling cauldron. He flew over Morgan and peered in, and then Stormfast and Kiel. So far, he had been flying high, but it was as he approached Hrath’ghar that he noticed a strange phenomenon on the slopes just beneath the cone’s opening. He began to hover. He blinked in dismay and now felt a quickening in his gizzard. The sides of this volcano seemed suddenly luminous. Now they were turning a pearly opalescent, and then the gleaming swirls started to glow and become translucent. Were the others seeing this, too? The night was strung with that wild savage music of howling wolves. Owls were flying in the lower levels around Hrath’ghar, but suddenly Coryn knew that they were not seeing what he was seeing at all. They had come to this volcano merely