(GoG Book 07) The Hatchling (7 page)

Nyroc moved closer. He stood very still. He did not feel the heat. He peered deeply into the flames. The flames
danced into shapes again, telling, revealing shapes that were disturbingly strange and familiar. Gwyndor watched him intently. He saw the young owl’s eyes glaze over.
Look at it, lad, look deeply. Now is the time to be brave. Don’t deny what the fire reveals.
But Gwyndor kept his beak clamped shut. Oh, how he wanted to tell Nyroc what horror lay ahead but he knew in the deepest part of his gizzard that the Rogue smith of Silverveil was right. Nyroc must learn this lesson on his own.

The world began to spin for Nyroc. A pellet flew out of his beak. Then another. He was yarping in distress.

“Steady, lad. Steady,” Gwyndor said. He extended his wing and touched Nyroc’s back.

“Why did you really bring me here?” Nyroc demanded. “What is this about?” the young owl asked in a tremulous voice.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“It is all there in the fire for you to find.”

Nyroc forced himself to look back at the fire. Gwyndor wanted to tell him to look deeper. To not be afraid. But he himself was afraid for the lad.

Finally, Nyroc backed away from the fire. The young hatchling had suddenly aged. He looked coldly at Gwyndor. “I saw things,” he whispered. “I saw things I do not
understand. I saw things I cannot believe…about my parents, about the Pure Ones.”

Gwyndor desperately wanted to ask if he had seen the truth about the Special ceremony, but he resisted.

“Why do I see these things?” he asked Gwyndor.

“I don’t know why.”

“But are they true?”

“I cannot tell you.”

“Cannot or will not?”

“Will not,” Gwyndor replied reluctantly. “Because, Nyroc, if I tell you, you will not truly believe. Belief is found in one’s self, in one’s gizzard, in one’s heart, in one’s mind. It has no power if it is simply ordered like a command.”

These words made Nyroc blink.

“But why would the Pure Ones do what I see in these flames?”

“I can’t answer that except to say that the Pure Ones have very strange ideas.” The Rogue smith’s voice dwindled to a whisper.

“Strange ideas about what? What do you mean?”

“Ideas about what makes a courageous owl, ideas about power.” Gwyndor shook his head in frustration. “I cannot explain it. I hardly understand it myself.” The silence between them was thick as each retreated into deep,
gizzard-stirring reflections. Gwyndor suddenly had a notion. He could say something. Something that might help the poor owl without really telling him the truth outright. He wondered if Nyroc knew much about St. Aggie’s Academy. “Lad, have you heard about St. Aggie’s?”

“Oh, yes, we conquered them long before my hatching. Their place was rich in flecks.”

“Well, there was more,” Gwyndor said. “There was a place called the glaucidium where the young owlets were moon blinked.”

“Moon blinked?” Nyroc asked. “What’s that?”

So Gwyndor explained about St. Aggie’s, a cruel institution despite its claim of being a refuge for orphans. “It was in the glaucidium that the young orphan owls were forced to sleep-march under the blazing light of the moon. It broke their will and made them docile creatures totally under the power of St. Aggie’s leaders. They could not think. They could not make any decision on their own. They had no will—no free will.”

“Free will,” Nyroc murmured the two words softly.
But what does all this have to do with me? Or the Pure Ones? Or my parents? It all happened when the St. Aggie’s owls were in power. It was over when the Pure Ones conquered them.

Gwyndor drew the young owl close to him. The shadows of the early evening mingled with the dark patches of
the Masked Owl’s face. His beak was blacker than Nyroc had first thought and was a bit twisted. “It has everything to do with you, lad. You see, Nyroc, you have free will! You can think things through, consult your own gizzard, do what
you
think is right. You can be what you want to be.”

Be what I want to be
…The words rang ominously in his head. He felt his gizzard grow very still.

“But I only want to be the best, most perfect Pure One ever,” he said. “I must grow into my father’s battle claws. I must bring these claws great honor.”

His words echoed hollowly in the cave and as hard as he tried to summon the great enthralling image of the burnished battle claws, he could not. The claws seemed to grow dim, to dissolve like mere mist into a deepening fog. He looked back into the fire for a long time, then he wilfed and grew slender as a fragile branch.

“What do you see, lad, what do you see?” Gwyndor whispered.

Nyroc turned from the fire. “Nothing.”

Gwyndor knew that the young owl was not telling the truth. Nyroc had seen something in those flames, something so awful that he could not believe it. And he was denying it not only to Gwyndor, but to himself. The Masked Owl was feeling desperate.

“Nyroc, there isn’t much time.”

But Nyroc turned his back, hopped to the cave’s entrance, spread his wings, and lifted himself into the sky. From the cave mouth Gwyndor watched the young owl carve a slow circle above and head back to the stone hollow he shared with his mum, Nyra.

Nyra and Nyroc had been flying their normal rounds on their evening flight through the canyonlands. Tonight, however, Nyra noticed that her son was unusually quiet and distracted.

“Is something troubling you, my dear?”

“No, Mum, nothing. Nothing at all.”

They were flying over the jagged narrow canyons that had once been occupied by the owls of St. Aggie’s. Nyroc looked down. “Is that where the glaucidium was, Mum?”

“Why, yes, how do you know about that?”

“Just do. You know, talk and things.”

A nervous twinge tweaked Nyra’s gizzard. “What did you hear?”

“Something about how they moon blinked the orphan owls so that they couldn’t think.”

“Probably couldn’t think to begin with,” she said dismissively. “Very few Barn Owls among them.”

“Hmmm,” Nyroc said.

Nyra looked at him suspiciously.

“Mum, tell me once more about the night my da was killed.”

“Of course, dear. It was in the Battle of The Burning. We had all been brutally attacked by the owls of Ga’Hoole. They outnumbered us and had more weapons, although we were much superior in our firefighting. Nonetheless, your father fought on bravely. He and a small contingent of owls had been chasing some of the fiercest of the Ga’Hoolian warriors when they were suddenly forced into a cave by the backdraft of the fire. They didn’t know that a larger band of Ga’Hoolian owls was already in this cave and they were caught completely by surprise. In a maddened frenzy, Soren flew directly at your father and sliced his back through the spine with an ice sword. It happened so quickly, there was no time for any of the Pure Ones to…to…” She was searching for the word.

“Think?” Nyroc asked.

Nyra gave him a poisonous look. She did not like the way this conversation was going. Not at all.

“There was no time for orders to be issued and obeyed,” she said coolly.

Can a soldier only act when a command is given? Can soldiers never think or act on their own?
Nyroc thought. However,
he knew better than to ask such questions. And, in fact, he did not need to ask. What he had seen in the flames of the fire was nothing at all like what his mother had just described. Either the flames were lying or his mother was. It was time for him to find out the truth.

T
he night had thinned into the dawn. Mist pearled the charred landscape below as Nyroc flew to the hollow in the cleft of the rock wall. He alighted on the ledge outside. What he had seen in the fire was unbelievable, some of it so unbelievable that the images within the flames had made no sense at all. Well, he must find out for himself. It was the only way. He knew Gwyndor was right about this.

He stepped into the hollow. His mum had fluffed up the lichen she used instead of moss for his bedding and plucked some fresh down from her own breast. Nyra was sleeping soundly in her corner. He looked at the tufts of down, then at his mother. He remembered the first time he had ever seen her pull out tuft after tuft from beneath her breast feathers. It had amazed him.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” he had asked as he watched her.

“Not when you do it for your dear hatchling,” she had replied.

And Nyroc knew that because he had no father and
this burnt land no longer had the soft moss used in nests, his mum had to pluck twice as much of her own down. He had wondered if he could ever do such a thing. He didn’t like pain and could not imagine that it would be any less painful if you were doing it for someone you loved. He had complained bitterly when his first flight feathers had begun to bud. The shaft points of the primaries hurt as they poked through his tender skin.

He wanted to whisper out to her now,
Mum, what I saw in the fire—this isn’t true.
The first time he had looked through the flames, at the Marking ceremony in the cave where his father had died, he had seen a place he did not recognize, a strange landscape where weird creatures with four legs and strangely colored eyes loped through swirling mists and vapors. And then there had been the curious thing like a flame made of stone, orange in color with the lick of deep blue at its center, and between the inner blue and the outer orange what he thought might be the color green. This reminded Nyroc that his mum had promised to take him to see a tree after the Special ceremony if he performed it well. Nyroc’s gizzard gave a sickening twist. A darkness seemed to flood through it as it did every time he thought of the Special ceremony. He quickly pushed all thoughts of it from his mind.

He remembered instead how oddly his mother had
looked at him when he had told her
Oh, Mum, I love you sooo much,
almost as if she didn’t know the word “love” or what it meant. And then with dread in his gizzard, he remembered her other words to him: “You must learn to hate, Nyroc. I shall help you learn to hate.”

Gwyndor was right. He must find out the truth for himself. What he had seen in the fire was a strange and bloody history. It began with his father when he was even younger than Nyroc, pushing his brother, Soren, from the nest. And then he saw his mother trying to kill another owl who looked remarkably like Soren, possibly a sister. He had seen quick flashing images of murderous rampages. Finally, Nyroc saw the cave where his father had died, and it was not his uncle Soren trying to kill his father, but quite the reverse, his father trying to kill his uncle Soren. Then another owl had flown in. It looked like a Great Gray and in one powerful stroke with a glittering sword, he had broken his father’s back. The fire had roiled with blood and murder.

He needed to get away from the Pure Ones—and especially his mother—to think about all he had seen. To find out if the flames had lied. He could not go alone, however, for the places he really needed to go to seek out the truth were the other owl kingdoms. Dustytuft was older, more experienced. Dustytuft knew the lay of the
land and the way out of the canyonlands to other places. He knew how to navigate through all kinds of weather. Nyroc suddenly realized a new truth: Dustytuft’s skills had been frightfully wasted by the Pure Ones, simply because he was not considered pure enough. He had been given the lowliest tasks and yet he had come here with plenty of experience—he had, after all, escaped a forest fire, navigated through the smoke and poisoned air with his da, and yet he had been treated like some ignorant, useless owl unfit for anything. Sheer stupidity on the part of the Pure Ones. Well, he would not be so stupid. He would take Dustytuft…
No,
Nyroc thought,
I will never call him Dustytuft again. He is Phillip. Together Phillip and I will find the truth.

He had to tell Phillip, and they must leave right now even though the sun was over the horizon. They must risk crows. They must risk the tangled maze of the canyonlands. They must risk his mum’s vengeance.

Just before he stepped onto the ledge to fly off, he looked back at his mum in the morning shadows of the stone hollow. She was a beautiful owl, the most beautiful he had ever seen, despite the scar that ran like a fine line across her face.
I am leaving,
Nyroc thought,
all that I have ever known, and all that I have ever believed in. I am leaving my rock hollow and my bedding, fluffed with the down from my mother’s
own breast. I am leaving this cliff’s cool shade in the summer, this cliff’s ledges and overhangs and its shelter against the bite of winter’s wind. I am leaving the colors that stream through the rocks that made me think of sunsets. I am leaving the fat rats that my mum is so good at catching, and the foxes that I would never dare to go after but that taste so good. I am leaving my mum, the hunter. I am leaving my mum, the murderer.

And with that last thought, Nyroc spread his wings and stepped into the air.

W
ake up!” Nyroc shook the Sooty who slept on a stone perch on the far side of the cliff, in one of the less desirable hollows that faced the prevailing wind. Nyroc leaned in close to his friend’s ear slit. “Phillip!” he whispered.

“What? What?” the Sooty Owl was immediately awake. “Oh, hi, Nyroc.” He blinked again. “Nyroc, it’s full morning. What are you doing here? You should be asleep back in your hollow.”

“No. We have to get out, Phillip, right now. I’ll explain later.”

“What?”

“I told you. I can’t explain now.” There was no way that he could explain to Phillip right now what he had seen in the fire. He knew he had to be away, a long way away from his mum. He had to think about things, and he had to ask Phillip a lot of questions that the Sooty might not want to answer while surrounded by Pure Ones. “Just think of this
as a quest, Phillip.” Nyroc paused. “A quest for truth,” he said solemnly. “I need your help.”