Guardians of Ga'Hoole 09 - The First Collier

see so much but not help Theo was wrenching my gizzard most painfully. And I could not tear myself away from mylittle fire to check on the egg. The sky was growing darker. This would be the longest night of the year. I again leaned closer to the flames to get a better look at what I thought I had seen. It could be anything, anyone, but something was approaching Theo and Lord Elgobad.
    The good news was that it was not a hagsfiend. The bad news was that it was one of Lord Arrin’s knights. He was not armed as heavily as Elgobad, but he did fly with a very deadly looking ice scimitar. Nonetheless, the balance was hardly equal: two against one. I could only hope that this fellow had more sensitivity to the rules of war than Elgobad did.
    “Who is this?” asked the newly arrived owl, a Great Horned like Theo.
    “Won’t tell me his name or where he is going,” Elgobad answered.
    “I’m a gizzard resister,” Theo said. “I don’t fight.”
    “Unless attacked!” hooted the new owl and, with that, both the Snowy and the Great Horned blasted through the purpling sky toward Theo, their ice swords, sabers, and scimitars raised.
    Theo dodged them, but they quickly wheeled around and came in for a second attempt. Theo went into a giddy spiraling plunge. Then skimming close to the water, heflew as fast as any owl I had ever seen. There were few icebergs of any size in that region of the Bitter Sea but there were several ice floes, which are smaller and lower. If Theo’s pursuers were hagsfiends in some sort of disguise this flight course would finish them because the wind had begun to pick up and waves were cresting and breaking, spraying salt water into the air around the floes. But they showed no fear of the sea and followed Theo as he wound in and out of the maze of ice floes. I knew that he wouldn’t want to fly too far out of the Bitter Sea because then he would enter a war zone. There might be more owls, and how would he know if they were friend or foe?
    The Snowy and the Great Horned were gaining on Theo as I watched. I felt my gizzard being wrenched in all directions. Suddenly, I saw a glittering missile whiz through the night, which had now turned black. It was an ice sliver and it just missed Theo’s head. A sliver like that could have driven straight into his brain. Theo knew this. Suddenly, I saw him do one of the most spectacular maneuvers I have ever witnessed. It was a complete somersault in the air but executed dangerously close to the water. He came out of it and raced straight toward the two owls. His battle claws gleamed in the light of a rising moon. I heard a whup-whup sound. There was a terrible screech. It was all so clear that it seemed as though the fire itself was spurtingblood. The breast of the Great Horned was torn open to the bone and he plummeted into the sea. The other, Lord Elgobad, went yeep, recovering just in time to fly off, looking back at Theo and his terrible claws.
    The images faded. What have I done? I wondered. Have I saved an owl or destroyed a gizzard resister?

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Theo Returns
    “ I t was awful.”
    Those were Theo’s first words when he returned. I said nothing. He looked at me. “Don’t you want to know what was awful?”
    “I know,” I replied.
    He looked surprised. “You have gone back to your fires to read the flames?”
    I nodded. Early in his apprenticeship I had told Theo about my firesight and that I suspected I had lost some of my ability. It was not really the truth. The truth was that I had been frightened that I would see Siv dead in the flames. But I could not tell him that.
    “I don’t know why those owls were so far out in the Bitter Sea,” he said.
    “The Great Horned was most likely a press scout,” I said.
    “Press scout?”
    “Owls sent out to find other owls whom they can press into soldiering.”
    “In other words, by killing that one owl I might have saved other owls from being forced to kill? Perhaps even saved myself from being forced to kill them?”
    “Yes, exactly,” I said quietly.
    “And you think I should feel pleased about this?”
    “I would not dare to tell you, Theo, what you should feel, but I know that it is never a good feeling to kill a living thing that is not prey to eat.”
    He was perched on a branch outside the hollow and he raised one talon and regarded the battle claw for several moments. The Great Horned’s blood was still on it. “They will know about these now,” he said. “If that