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

flotsam as they go.”
    “Such as blue feathers,” Cleve replied. Then like the blare of an alarm, “Otulissa!” Cleve hovered just inches over the swirling feathers.
    “What is it, Cleve?”
    “There aren’t just blue feathers here. Some are painted bright pink. And look—blood! There’s been a fight near here.” Cleve tried to quell the rising panic he felt. If there were wounded owls, he needed to help them. This was his duty. Cleve was a healer. He turned to Otulissa. “We need to think this through. It’s a shortdistance to the shore. We can get out of the wind under the rocks there.”
    A few minutes later, the two owls huddled on a small scrap of beach under a rocky overhang. They had plucked the mass of feathers from the water so they could examine them more closely. There were several kraal feathers stained with blood. “Broken shafts!” Cleve said. “This was a real battle.”
    “And then there are the emerald and cobalt-blue ones,” Otulissa said.
    “Yes, but those aren’t broken. I’d wager the blue owls won.” Then he inhaled sharply. “That’s not a kraal feather or one from a blue owl.” He picked up a creamy white feather, a primary from a Snowy Owl, by the look of it, the bottom portion of which was soaked in blood. A few red berries still clung to it. “That’s a gadfeather’s,” he said.
    “A gadfeather’s!” Otulissa said, shocked. “Gadfeathers just sing. They are peace-loving. Kraals fighting is one thing, but gadfeathers? Are you sure it’s a gadfeather’s? I mean, there are lots of Snowy Owls up here and not all are gadfeathers.”
    “There are bright berries, here, in the blood. And I know of only one gadfeather in the NorthernKingdom whose plumage is this creamy color. Isa!” Cleve whispered.
    Otulissa wilfed. She had heard Cleve speak of Isa. Her singing voice was renowned. At one point, Otulissa had wondered if Cleve had not once been the tiniest bit in love with Isa.
    “We are not far from kraal territory here,” Otulissa said. “Straight inland there is a place called the Gray Rocks. Poor ice there, but the kraals like it. There are no firths, no fingers of water penetrating the territory. It is deep inland. Bushes grow there from which they harvest special berries for their dyes.” She paused. “It was also,” she spoke slowly, “a favorite place for hagsfiends. At least in the time of the legends. But why would it be favored now?” she asked in a professorial manner. Otulissa had begun pacing up and down under the overhang, her wings tucked neatly behind her so that the edges of the primaries interlocked in a seam down the middle of her back. “Yes, we must ask ourselves why they would go there. True, it is far from salt water, which hagsfiends feared. But why are the blue owls so fearful? It is very hard to make a traditional schneddenfyrr in that region, for there is little ice. They must seek this place for its remoteness and…and…” Otulissa’s single eye began tosparkle. “Of course, how easy it would be for an owl of such plumage”—she held up the cobalt blue feather—“to blend in with those gaudy kraals! That’s it, Cleve! Gray Rocks could have been the battleground.”
    “We have to go. There might be wounded and dying owls there that need help.”
    “There might be fighting owls there, as well,” Otulissa said, and looked at Cleve, wishing for the umpteenth time that he had worn battle claws. “We have to approach carefully. Remember, there is not much cover.”
    But there was no need to approach carefully. A quarter of a league inland they began to sense an eerie stillness that was not the absence of the sounds of the Everwinter Sea and its crashing waves and grinding ice floes. This was the silence of death. They spotted the first body, that of a kraal, gilded, and glittering in the rising sun of the dawn, then a few yards away that of a pink-dyed kraal. As if to underscore the evidence they had found in the swirling eddy, there were a few unpainted feathers that spun through the air on that inexorable course to the coast. Something flinched in Otulissa’s gizzard. If these were gadfeather owls, why? Kraals stole. Yes, they could get into trouble. But why gadfeathers? Gadfeathers were harmless. They lived only to sing.
    “There’s someone alive down there!” Cleve suddenly said. He swept down. “Great Glaux! It’s Isa!”
    They found a bloody mound of creamy feathers but Otulissa could tell immediately from