Guardians of Ga'Hoole 09 - The First Collier

experience with the hagsfiends and how they had almost completely destroyed her. That strange paralysis that had set in; that feeling that her will was slipping away, that her gizzard had become frozen and the amazement of it all. Yes, that was the overriding emotion she had felt. Not fear, not horror, not even weakness—but amazement. And hadn’t Svenka herself described that same feeling of amazement when she had looked up at the sky and seen the ragged shadows of the hagsfiends printed against the moon? How strange, Siv thought. She replayed in her head each minute of her own experience and compared it with much ofwhat Svenka had described of that night when Myrrthe had been murdered.
    In her own experience with the hagsfiends, she tried to recall exactly how she had first become aware of that yellow glare. Had it really flashed or had it seeped into the Ice Cliff Palace? She recalled now seeing a first dim glow looming within one of the tunnels just outside of where she and Grank had been perched by the schneddenfyrr. What she had first thought of she now realized had been distraction. Distraction, she began to think, might be the opening gambit, the first ploy of the hagsfiends. It might be the fulcrum upon which all their magic rested.
    Yes! She had been distracted. That is what allowed them to ambush her and Grank so nearly fatally. But they had both escaped this first ambush. How had she done it? “Distraction!” she whispered to herself. “I distracted them ,” She had grabbed H’rath’s scimitar. They had not expected this—not from an egg-sitting mother owl. But how, she wondered—it was as if she were pushing her brain to its limits—how had they disabled her when she was pinned up against the ice wall, awash in that harsh yellow glare? And even more interesting, how had she broken through the strange powerlessness that had engulfed her?
    She closed her eyes as she tried to remember those terrible endless seconds. She had felt herself going yeep.She had felt the snow egg begin to slip and worse, she felt a kind of haggishness plucking at her gizzard. How could she, the queen of the N’yrthghar, holding the scimitar of her king and beloved mate, allow hagsfiends to tug at her gizzard, attempting to transform her into one of them? Her mind had been flooded with those thoughts. She had concentrated on those images of H’rath, she now realized. She had focused intensely on H’rath raising this scimitar in battle until those visions of him were engraved not just in her mind’s eye but in her very own gizzard. It was this concentration that had made her invulnerable to their distractions. The hagsfiends had ceased to amaze her. And as they ceased to amaze her, they became ordinary and she felt her gizzard unlock. Once she could not be distracted or amazed, she was no longer theirs. Yes, it took imagination and concentration to distract them. And the odd thing was that these powers were not magical at all. They were powers that any intelligent owl might possess and might use if it dared to.
    Although I agreed with Siv that her powers were not magical, I did think they were not quite as ordinary as she made them out to be. I did not believe that “any intelligent owl” could do what she had done. I felt she had Ga’ deep within her gizzard. I believed that Siv was indeed a great spirit. And that great spirit was soon to be put to thetest once again. Siv knew that Lord Arrin would be back, just as soon as the firthkin had frozen over. The longest night of the year was fast approaching. The day that had been merely a notch in the long night was but a sliver now. A sliver for the sunlight to pour through, hardly enough to keep the firthkin free of ice, and the warm current at this time of year swept away from Siv’s iceberg in a more westerly direction, as if it were chasing the last rays of the setting sun. With the firthkin frozen solid and nary a strip of free seawater to be spied, Siv knew that Lord Arrin would return—this time with a pack of hagsfiends flying through the darkness like winged sky hounds, their fangs bared, the horrible yellow light known as the fyngrot streaming from their eyes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Odd Stirrings
    S iv had no choice but to remain where she was. She knew that she was not yet strong enough to fly any great distance. But would she be strong enough to fend off the hagsfiends when they came? It took a different kind of strength to escape the yellow snare of the