Guardians of Ga'Hoole 15 - The War of the Ember

she have shared the ember with her long-dead mate, Kludd, with whom she had brought that unruly son into the world? Once her gizzard had sung for dear Kludd. But let’s be practical. An ember cannot be divided, she thought. And who would want to be queen to someone else’s king when indeed she could be both king and queen?
    She quietly observed the blue owl, who was fussing like an old nest-maid snake over this schnedden-whatever, arranging the eggs just so. He, too, seemed absorbed in private thoughts, but he now began to speak and what he said stirred something deep in Nyra. “Of course, you, of all owls, know of the curse of one who is hatched on the night of a lunar eclipse.”
    “I suppose,” Nyra answered cagily, “that it depends on your viewpoint, whether it be a curse or not.”
    “True. Nevertheless, they say an enchantment is cast upon those hatchlings, a charm that leads to great power. Hoole was hatched on the night of a lunar eclipse. And he retrieved the ember for the first time.”
    “And so was my son,” Nyra replied.
    “And he became king, as well,” the Striga said softly.
    Nyra remembered the night. It was just after the end of the War of Fire and Ice, which was sometimes called the War of the Great Burning. She was soon lost in the reveries of that night Nyroc had hatched.
    “Nyra, you are the one who explained to me that Kreeth was not only interested in creating strange monsters that were odd crossbreeds, but she had dabbled in creating a new strain of hagsfiends. You said they hatch from eggs such as these on the night of a lunar eclipse. Thanks to your diplomatic efforts with my brethren, the converts from the Panqua Palace, the eggs have been secured. Their contribution was great but yours is immeasurable. It was a setback when we were surprised in that cave in the Ice Narrows. But these eggs will be safe. The rest will be taken directly to the kraals’ territory. The ice nests are readied. All we need to do is fetch those eggs and the broodies from the kraal region and lead them to the Ice Cliffs for the final days of brooding before the eclipse when the quickening begins. In all, we will have nearly one hundred eggs! A company! A company of hagsfiends!”
    “I still don’t see why we must quicken the eggs here. Why not leave them there in the kraals’ territory?”
    “Too exposed. The land is bare and windswept. These eggs need to be brooded out of the wind in proper schneddenfyrrs to quicken. No puffins here and no polar bears because the fishing is poor. But the old Ice Cliff Palace is the perfect place to brood these eggs. The broodies will sit on them, keep them warm, and so will we. We’ll help them. But we must do this in shifts. For some of us must be ready to defend the eggs, in case there are intruders, like before. Soon it will be too late to move them.”
    “So you say.” Nyra did not quite understand this, but she had agreed to it.
    “Some say…” The Striga’s voice seemed to creak as if he were carefully measuring the weight of each word. “Some say that we owls of the Dragon Court were once hagsfiends.”
    A charge shot through Nyra’s gizzard like a bolt of lightning. The Striga continued. “That Theo created the court to disempower hagsfiends by smothering them in luxury and counterfeit power—to make us weak.
    “Did it ever occur to you, Nyra, that you and I might share a heritage?”
    Nyra blinked.
    “Look at your feathers, my dear. Look how they havedarkened. See their ragged edges. You look no more like a Barn Owl than I do a Spotted Owl. We have lost our definition as an owl species.”
    Where is he going with this talk? Nyra wondered.
    “Therefore,” the Striga continued, “I think we might assume that we are on the brink of a new possibility.” He glanced down fondly at the eggs, which seemed to have darkened in the few minutes since they had arrived. “Together we could realize this possibility.”
    “Together? Is this a proposal?”
    “Let’s just call it an experiment.”
    How romantic! Nyra thought derisively, but she held her tongue. He wanted to be her mate, yet she knew that ultimately this blue owl was her enemy.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Trace of Doubt
    C oryn had not been idle since the Band had left and the mission to remove the ember from the Palace of Mists had commenced. Soren had devised an ingenious plan for dispatching the ember to the Middle Kingdom, if the H’ryth agreed. But Coryn needed to do more—he needed to