Guardians of Ga'Hoole 14 - Exile

feathers, but his own shown through. Pelli flew up to him and peered directly in his face.
    “I beg your pardon, madam!” the owl replied coolly at her sudden intrusion. He was speaking with a Burrowing Owl.
    “Oh, sorry,” Pelli apologized. “I thought you were someone else.” She had never seen either one of these owls at the tree before. But it was not unheard of for strangers to come from the mainland for the variouscelebrations. Although there did seem to be an awful lot of them tonight. But where was Bubo? The harp guild snakes had started to pluck a jig, and there were owls fly-dancing outside the tree. She would have a look.
    A quarter of an hour later, she had still not found him. Back inside she went. A flash of ruddy feathers peeking out from under a cape of snowy-white ones caught her eye, and then there were his horns barely concealed under the white mask. It was Bubo, she was sure, and he was weaving about in slow glaucana, a kind of waltz, with Otulissa. Great! Pelli thought. They both needed to know about her terrible gizzard-wrenching feelings. Otulissa was wearing the mask of a Great Gray but she was unmistakable. She was a lovely fly-dancer, much better really than Bubo. She danced with great style, a crisp yet fluid motion.
    “I need to see both of you right now!” Pelli hissed. Mrs. Plithiver, who was just wending her way as a sliptween through an octave, swung her head in the direction of Pelli. She sensed a thin filament of tension in the air. It was pronounced, because all of the other owls for the first time in a long while seemed to be relaxed and enjoying the celebration.
    Bubo and Otulissa immediately sensed the rising panic in Pelli’s voice. “Where should we meet?”
    “The forge,” Pelli replied. “But leave separately and by different ports. I’ll take an interior corridor. They will just think I’m tired and going to my hollow.”
    They . The word sounded ominous to Otulissa. She glanced over at the Striga and Coryn.
    Pelli actually got to Bubo’s forge first. When the two other owls entered, they saw her peering into the coal pits where he kept his bonk embers. Immediately, they knew what she wanted. “The ember is in danger, isn’t it?” Otulissa blurted out.
    “I knew this celebration stuff was too good to last.” Bubo sighed, pulling off his Snowy Owl mask and cloak.
    “It just came to me. I don’t know how. I was looking at Coryn and the Striga when I had a feeling deep in my gizzard and suddenly realized that Coryn has weakened in some terrible way, that he’s going to come for the ember. I know it.”
    “So, what do we do?” Bubo asked.
    Pelli’s dark eyes shone with such a luster that had she been outside and not in the cave, they would have reflected the moon and the stars. “We get it out of here. We substitute another.”
    “A substitute?” Bubo said with a note of incredulity in his voice. “Won’t he know?”
    Otulissa swiveled her head and peered with her amber eyes into Pelli’s dark ones. “You think Coryn has been weakened to the point where he won’t notice the difference, right?”
    “Possibly.” Pelli nodded.
    “You think or you hope?” Otulissa asked pointedly.
    Pelli sighed. “A little bit of both, I suppose. But what do we have to lose?”
    Otulissa knew that Pelli was right. What did they have to lose? At the very least, the ember would be safely tucked away someplace. Otulissa now turned to Bubo. “Do you have a bonk coal that is a reasonable facsimile?”
    “Reasonable facsimile of the Ember of Hoole?” Bubo raised a talon to his head and scratched between his horn tufts. “Not likely, but I suppose I could try to fire-juice one.” Fire-juicing was a way of heating coals so that their interior structure changed slightly to radiate a more intense heat for a short period of time.
    Bubo was now poking around in one of the coal pits. With his tongs, he plucked out an ember. “Here she be.” The tongs pinched a glowing coal. Deep in the ember’s gizzard, there was a lick of blue and around it a pulsating ring of green. The air seemed to tingle as Bubo held it up. Each one of them could feel it. Dislodged from the other embers in the pit, its power was more direct. It wasamazing that Bubo himself had been able to live with it and suffer no ill effects. But he was a blacksmith. He had built up his resistance to it, and it had been buried with other coals, which had acted as a shield. “You see, it’s that green that