Guardians of Ga'Hoole 09 - The First Collier

the small fracture in the ice cliffs. I threaded my way through the twisting passages. There was a full moon and, as the storm clouds scudded across the sky, an occasional shaft of moonlight fell through the issen clarren, or clear ice, illuminating the interior of this strange, tangled web of ice and frost. There was nothing more beautiful than the Ice Palace in falling shafts of moonlight. Every ice crystal, every flake of snow radiated intricate faceted designs that sparkled fiercely. It was as if the stars had fallen from the sky and hung suspended within these cliffs.
    Deep in a maze of ice tunnels and channels I came upon her. There she sat, the widow queen, trembling onthe nest of her egg. Her breast was nearly bare from the feathers she had plucked to weave into the packed snow from which she had fashioned her schneddenfyrr, that special kind of nest that we birds of the near-treeless north build for our eggs. These nests are surprisingly snug and warm, and Siv herself was not shivering from cold but from fear. I could see the grief deep in her amber eyes. The stranger at the grog tree had told me about that last battle in which H’rath had been cut down. The queen had witnessed it from an ice notch in the Hrath’ghar palace and had seen the king, her mate, fall in flight, his blood splattering the glacier below. The stranger had said that if she had been in flight instead of sitting on her egg, she would have gone yeep. “As it was, she could hardly move, sir. It seemed as if her gizzard had frozen.” When he told me this, I had shut my eyes and imagined her looking into that night that was woven with her mate’s blood and seeing the sky torn with hagsfiends. Glaux, how had these creatures ever come to be? What ghastly trick of fate had sent them flying into the owl world with their terrible magic, poisonous enchantments, and vile charms?
    But now Siv was there in front of me. My queen, my dear friend, my secret love.
    “Grank! Thank Glaux you are here!” She rose from the nest and came to give me a welcome preening, runningher beak through my flight feathers. It felt good after the long flight.
    “Yes, I am here, Siv.” I nodded deeply to her, then turned and greeted her faithful servant, Myrrthe.
    “Do you know, I think there was a hagsfiend in the ice canyon tonight?” Siv said. “Both Myrrthe and I caught a strong whiff.”
    I had not planned to tell her about Penryck, the hagsfiend whom I had just seen. “Don’t worry. It’s gone now,” I said.
    “You saw it? Was it male or female?” She blinked rapidly.
    “Male. It was Penryck.”
    “Penryck,” she repeated. She seemed relieved and shut her eyes for several seconds. “I was so fearful it might be the one called Ygryk. She is a terrible hagsfiend.”
    “Yes, I have heard, but not, I think, as bad as Penryck.”
    “Worse,” she said firmly.
    “Why is that?”
    “She craves this egg of mine, Grank. She is the mate of Pleek now. They cannot have a chick. She’s a hagsfiend and he’s a Great Horned, so it is impossible. But she wants my egg for her own, for their own. She wants to practice her evil magic on it and transform it into a monster. She wants to be its mother!” Poor Siv nearly gagged on theword “mother.” “I am frightened, Grank. There is nothing more terrifying than a hagsfiend who craves a chick.”
    “There you are wrong, my dear,” I replied.
    “What do you mean?” Siv asked, genuinely perplexed.
    “I mean that there is something more fierce, more violent.”
    “What is that?”
    “A mother whose chick is threatened.” I saw a startled look pass through the amber luster of Siv’s eyes. “Now step aside, my dear, and let me see the egg.”
    I came up to the schneddenfyrr. There, nestled in the delicately woven pieces of ice and packed snow, was an egg, an egg the likes of which I had never seen. It was indeed a special egg, so luminous that one might have thought that within its white shell a tiny silvery moon lay cradled. I knew immediately that it was a male. And it came to me that this small male chick who would hatch soon should be called Hoole. Hoole, like the fabled mage of times past, who was thought to be merely an invention to soothe the ruffled spirits and tremulous gizzards of desperate owls in a world overrun by hagsfiends. A Hoole, whose spirit had led the dire wolves to the Beyond!
    I looked up now at Siv and our eyes met. A sliver of moonlight came through the issen clarren and