The Siege. Kathryn Lasky

books. It was always Strix Emerilla this or Strix Emerilla that. After a little while, the other owls at Mrs P’s table ignored her and went on with their own conversations.

      Gylfie turned to Soren again and whispered in his ear, “You notice that Ezylryb and none of the other parliament members are here?”

      Soren nodded.

      “Well, big doings,” Gylfie said, then blinked with one eye. Soren felt a surge of excitement. Gylfie must be on to something. Soren needed a distraction. Life had been, well, not quite the same since the appalling revelation that his own brother had trapped Ezylryb in the Devil’s Triangle. And his own brother had vowed to kill him. Soren spent entirely too much time remembering those dreadful images of Kludd flying off, his face molten as the hot metal mask melted, screaming, “Death to the Impure! Death to Soren!”

       My own brother. My very own brother is Metal Beak and he wants to kill me.

      After breaklight, the owls departed the dining hollow and made their way back to their respective hollows. Outside the great tree, the blizzard lashed. The gale-force winds had turned the sky white. It had been on a night like this in the thick of a blizzard that Soren, Gylfie, Twilight and Digger had first arrived at the great tree. Now as soon as the four friends and Soren’s sister, Eglantine, were alone Gylfie spoke in a low voice.

      “As I said to Soren at breaklight, something big is going on.”

      “How do you know?” Digger asked.

      “Not one of the parliament members was in the dining hollow. There’s an important meeting taking place.”

      “Getting ready for war, I bet!” Twilight said. “I’ll bet they’ll put us each in charge of a division.”

      “It’s not war, Twilight. Hate to disappoint you,” Gylfie said.

      Twilight was disappointed. He loved fighting, and with his amazing quickness and ferocity, Twilight had proved that he had no equal.

      “No, no war,” repeated Gylfie. “It’s higher magnetics.”

      “Oh, for Glaux’s sake,” Twilight growled. “How boring. As if we don’t get enough of HM, as she now calls it, from Otulissa all the time.”

      “It’s important, Twilight. We have to learn about this stuff,” Digger said.

      “That’s just the problem,” Gylfie said in a low hiss. “This stuff is spronk.”

      “Spronk?” the three other owls said at once.

      “What’s ‘spronk’?” Soren asked.

      “Spronk is forbidden knowledge,” said Gylfie. There was a deep silence in the hollow.

      “Forbidden knowledge? No, Gylfie,” Soren said, “You have to be wrong. Nothing is spronk in the Great Ga’Hoole Tree. That’s just not the Guardians’ way. They would never forbid knowledge. They only want us to learn.”

      “Maybe not forbidden forever, but at least some things are spronk for right now,” she replied.

      “Well, I don’t like it,” Soren said firmly. “I’m completely against things being declared spronk.”

      “Me too,” Twilight said.

      Digger blinked and then in that slow way he had of speaking when he was considering a problem, he said, “Yes, I think it’s awful when they keep knowledge from young owls. Just suppose that Otulissa had not been permitted to read that book about the Devil’s Triangle. We might never have been able to free Ezylryb.”

      “I think we should go and tell them that this is all wrong,” Eglantine spoke up for the first time.

      “Before we do anything,” Soren said now in a firm voice, “I think that we have to find out for sure.”

      “To the roots, Soren?” Gylfie asked.

      “That’s how you found out isn’t it, Gylfie?” Soren asked.

      Gylfie nodded. She was a bit embarrassed, for this was an acknowledgment that she had been engaged in the less-than-admirable activity of eavesdropping on the parliament.

      Thousands of inner passages wound their way through the Great Ga’Hoole Tree and some months before, Gylfie, who often had trouble sleeping and would rise for a wander through the tree, had discovered a place deep in the roots where there was a strange phenomenon. Something happened to the timber at a certain point so that the sounds coming from the owl’s parliament chamber resonated within the roots. Entering the root structure itself was a challenge for the roots were huge and tangled, but Soren and his friends had found an ideal place where they could listen.

      “Oh, I’m so excited!” Eglantine was nearly hopping up and down. “I’ve heard you talk about going to the roots but I’ve never been there. I’ve been dying to go.”

      There was a sudden silence as the other four owls exchanged glances. “You’re not thinking of leaving me out. You’d better not leave me out. No fair!” Eglantine said in a desperate voice.

      “I’m just not sure, Eglantine,” Soren said. “I mean, first of all you would have to promise not to tell Primrose.” Primrose, a Pygmy Owl, was Eglantine’s best friend, and she told her everything.

      “I won’t, I won’t, I promise. Listen, if it hadn’t been for me, none of this stuff with higher magnetics would have started,” Eglantine said.

      This was true. If it hadn’t been for Eglantine, who had been captured by the Pure Ones, imprisoned in the stone crypt of a ruined castle and exposed to the destructive powers of the flecks, none of this would ever have happened.

      “Well, all right,” Soren finally said. “But not a word of this to anyone. Promise?”

      “Promise.” The young Barn Owl nodded her lovely heart-shaped face solemnly.

CHAPTER FOUR

       Sprink on Your Spronk!

      “I cannot believe that teaching young and impressionable owls about such matters can really be helpful in the long run. Higher magnetics is a strange business. We ourselves have only begun to understand it all.” Dewlap, the Ga’Hoolology ryb, was speaking.

      The five young owls were perched among the roots, listening to the parliament’s debate. Soren was ready to explode. Of course higher magnetics was a strange business, especially compared to Ga’Hoolology, which was one of the most boring studies and chaws of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree. Ga’Hoolology was important, for it taught the processes of the tree itself and how to best keep the environment healthy and thriving, but it was also dull.

      In this debate, Dewlap and Elvan, another ryb, were on the spronk side while Ezylryb and Bubo, the blacksmith at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree, were on the antispronk side. Strix Struma was undecided. Suddenly the five young owls were aware of another presence. They felt a shadow slide over them in this darkest of places within the tree and they froze. Then all of them together flipped their heads around. It was Otulissa!

      What was she doing here? Soren was furious. Racdrops! he thought. Then Twilight beaked silently the words they were all thinking. “This really frinks me off!”

      ‘Racdrops’ and ‘frinks’ were two of the worst curse words an owl could say. There was only one worse – sprink, but no one ever said that. Not even Twilight. Say these words in the dining hollow and you were out in a flash. But Otulissa seemed unrattled. She merely lifted a talon to her beak to warn Twilight not to make any noise. Soren settled back down. There was absolutely nothing he could do about this now. They might as well just listen as the debate continued.

      “Higher magnetics is not a science,” Dewlap was saying. “It’s dark magic, one of the