Guardians of Ga'Hoole 09 - The First Collier

fend for that hatchling alone, without a mate.”
    Thanks to you, she thought.
    “You know how constantly hungry they are. You shall have to leave him to go hunting all the time.”
    “That is really my concern. I’ll find a way, rest assured.”
    “I thought for your own sake, and for the safety of the chick, that you might consider some kind of a union with me, milady.”
    Siv was stunned. “You conveniently got rid of King H’rath, did you not? Now you propose a union with the murderer of my mate? Really, Lord Arrin!”
    “It’s not murder when it happens in the midst of war.”
    “It was murder, Lord Arrin, and you know it.”
    “You’ll need someone, milady. You can’t do it all by yourself.”
    Siv would not dignify his words with an answer. She simply turned away and walked back through the ice channel of the berg that led to her cave.
    Siv would not come out of her cave for some time and when she did, she could not find Svenka. Instead she found a large pile of herring. She looked down at the gleamingfish. Svenka’s time must have come, she thought. Svenka had prepared Siv for her own confinement, telling her that she would have to be gone for a few days. She had told Siv that she would need to be completely by herself, but she would leave enough fish for Siv so she wouldn’t go hungry. She had explained to Siv how to dry them during that sliver of daylight between the long nights. So Siv kept herself busy laying out the small fish just as Svenka had instructed, and by practicing flying short flights. Her wing was getting stronger, there were signs of new feathers budding. And although her wing was a completely different shape, she was learning new ways to compensate for these differences through minute adjustments as she flew.
    But for Siv, these nights pierced briefly by the shortest of days were the saddest time in her whole life. It was wrong, she knew, to be jealous of dear Svenka, but how could she not envy the polar bear who was about to become a mother when she herself was so far away from her own young’un? Has he hatched yet? she wondered. How would she ever know? And all around her, she sensed that there were other creatures giving birth, new young’uns were squirming into the world one way or another. She knew that some, like fish, hardly spent any time at all with their mothers, but others spent a great deal of time. Oneday, she caught a glimpse of an iceberg streaked with blood and spiraled down to see what had happened, thinking that something had been killed that would offer meat. Instead she saw a mother seal who had just given birth and was licking the filmy birth membrane off her new pups. Siv flew off immediately. She knew that they must be left alone. But her heart and gizzard were wrenching. She felt none of the joy that she knew she should have felt at seeing a new creature coming into the world. This was life, not death, and yet Siv felt only despair.
    When she returned to her cave in the iceberg, she began to wonder about the blood. Why, she thought, are some animals born in a flow of blood while others are not? For Siv, it seemed very unnatural that blood should accompany the birth of anything, and she was glad it was not this way when birds hatched. But on the other hand, she thought, how lovely to have your young always within you before they are even born. To feel them growing inside of you. There was something almost miraculous about that.
    Siv had much time to think during the nights and days when Svenka had gone to her birthing den. She thought about many things—the blood of birth, the transit of the stars across the sky and why they moved when they did, and why the one called Never Moves never did move. She thought a great deal about me, she said. She had knownme practically her entire life. And she knew that although I possessed a certain aptitude for magic, a magic that was so different from that of the hagsfiends, at the same time I was a deep believer in reason and in what I thought of as science. She knew of my intense exploration and study of fire and flames.
    So, Dear Owl, although it might seem odd, it was Siv’s reflections on science and rational thought that led her to even deeper reflections on magic—not my kind of magic but the nachtmagen of the hagsfiends. What Siv began to understand about nachtmagen was far greater than any scientific discovery that I would make about fire, or Theo would make about metal.
    Siv began thinking back on her own