Guardians of Ga'Hoole 09 - The First Collier

ignited tiny amber fires in her eyes. I could read these flamesperfectly. A bird in flight, an egg cradled in its talons as it flew across the Bitter Sea. She almost guessed what I was seeing. Her voice trembled as she spoke.
    “The egg is special, isn’t it?” She paused for a long time. I knew that she was thinking of the inevitable choice she must make. I could not tell her. It was not my place. How could I, a male owl, know what it was like to lay an egg—any egg—whether it was luminous like this one or an ordinary white egg?
    Finally, Siv spoke: “In order to save him, I must part with him.” It was not a question but a statement.
    I nodded. “It will simply be too dangerous for you and the egg, Siv. You have every hagsfiend on your tail. They are looking for a queen with an egg. And they will find you. Lord Arrin would love to take your egg. It would give him incredible power if this chick were hatched in his realm, under his stewardship.”
    “Imagine”—she lowered her voice to barely a whisper as she looked down on the egg, her own face now basking in the luminous light it gave off—“imagine using this precious egg as a thing for evil.”
    “It is unimaginable.”
    Siv gave a little shake of her shoulder feathers and straightened herself. She blinked and looked directly atme. “You will take the egg and care for it and raise the chick, then?”
    “With all the care and love that I can give. I promise you this, Siv. And if there is a night when you can come to see him…” She startled when I said “him,” and I nodded and went on, “Siv, if there is a time when the wars are finished and there are no more hagsfiends, I promise I shall send for you.”
    “Yes, of course, I know you will.” Her eyes had begun to stream with tears. She looked down at the egg, and it almost seemed that it was composed entirely of light. It was incandescent and appeared to have no substance save for the unearthly glow that emanated from it. And if the egg was nothing but light, Siv herself had become pure grief.
    “Where will you take it, Grank?” she asked.
    I breathed a sigh of relief. She had not sensed where I would take this egg.
    “I can’t tell you, Siv. If I told you, it would endanger not just the egg, but you as well.”
    “I don’t matter,” she said quietly.
    “Siv, don’t say that. You do matter.”
    “I feel as if I am nothing without my egg, without my mate.”
    “Now, now, milady.” Myrrthe tried to console her mistress, putting a snow-white wing lightly on her shoulder.
    “Siv,” I said. “You are still a mother, no matter where your chick is. You brought this egg into the world. You shall always be a mother, just as you shall always be a queen.”
    She looked up around her and murmured, “A queen imprisoned in her own Ice Palace.”
    At just that moment, there was a loathsome stench. We all froze and then, suddenly, the ice was washed in an eerie yellow glow.
    “Hagsfiends!” Siv whispered. “Hagsfiends!”
    “Noooo!” A shuddering cry came from Myrrthe, but I turned and saw her swell to twice her size. It was as if a large cumulus cloud had descended into the Ice Cliff Palace.

CHAPTER TWELVE
To the Bitter Sea
    A t the moment the word “hagsfiend” was uttered, Siv’s eyes went through an incredible transformation. The amber beam hardened, as hard as the metals that Fengo and I had extracted from rocks, as hard as the strong ice from which we made our swords. She grabbed an ice scimitar that had been H’rath’s and rushed out into the tunnel, ordering Myrrthe to go in an opposite direction. “You know where we’ll meet, Myrrthe.” It was not a question.
    “Yes, milady,” Myrrthe replied, and picked up a small ice dagger for herself.
    I knew immediately what Siv planned. She was going to decoy them, distract them. I reached for the egg and, clutching it with my talons, made for a back passageway out of the Ice Cliff Palace. I had no idea if I would ever see Siv again. But only moments before I had said that a mother whose chick was threatened was fiercer and more violent than any hagsfiend. The time to prove this had come.
    Once I had left the Ice Cliff Palace, I headed across the Bay of Fangs on a straight course for the Bitter Sea. There was an island there with a dense forest and trees with good hollows where I thought the egg and I would be safe. In general, owls of the N’yrthghar nest in ground burrows or the ice caves of a glacier or the many cliffs