The Hatchling Read online

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Away

  Nyroc was utterly and completely alone. He had no idea what he was flying toward. He knew only what he was flying away from: away from the rocky burnt-up canyonlands, away from the Pure Ones, away from his mother and the bloody scene that still boiled in his brain. He flew into the windless folds of the black night, wrapped himself in its cool silky darkness. He was weak, very weak, and he knew he could not fly far with his tattered feathers. But he had to fly just far enough. Just far enough to get away. The words played over and over like a chant in his head.

  He looked down. Those are trees, he thought. And perhaps if it were not night, I would see the green. But the tall timbers that poked at the sky seemed to be fringed in black needles. Yes, needles, Nyroc reminded himself. It’s winter. The leaf trees would have molted. Phillip had explained what leaf trees did in the winter.

  Phillip! He felt his gizzard lurch with despair. He could not think of Phillip now. Just think of away. Just think of away. Perhaps that is the Shadow Forest beneath me. It can’t be The Barrens for there are hardly any trees in The Barrens. Phillip said—He cut off the thought.

  Suddenly, Nyroc knew that he could not flap his wings a moment longer. He had to light down somewhere. He began circling. It was difficult. His ruddering was off. He gave the command to his tail but it just wouldn’t respond as it had in the past. The trees were dense. He had heard that trees had hollows. Maybe he would find one. Maybe not. He’d settle for anything right now. He suddenly saw a bright reflection like a silver blade split the night. It’s the moon come down to earth! No, of course not. It is the moon’s reflection. It must be a pool, a pond, a lake! He had heard about such things. Nyroc began a gradual dive toward the forest pool.

  He lighted down on a log on the pebble beach. A thin skin of ice had begun to form over the water. He crept toward the edge and looked down. There was still a patch of water left and when he looked and saw his own reflection he gasped. A seam ran diagonally down his face just like his mum’s except that his slanted from left to right down his face, while his mum’s had gone from right to left. His scar was still red with the blood that had caked in the seam. A shiver ran through his gizzard. I am exactly like my mum!

  And at that instant, two things happened. From the middle of the lake a mist rose. It began to swirl into a vague shape. It’s a mask! A metal mask! Then it was as if Nyroc had stepped out of his own body and was hovering over the lake, and yet when he looked down, his talons were dug firmly into the pebbles of the beach. Could he be in two places at once? Impossible! But inside his head he could hear a voice, a voice he did not recognize, calling to him. Come here, lad. Come here. Nod pule. He saw something like his own shadow moving out from him. It was going toward the swirling shape. Toward the scroom of my father.

  Yes, lad. It is I. Like your mum said. There is no escaping your destiny. You must go back, Nyroc.

  You’re here on unfinished business, Nyroc said without speaking.

  It is your business to finish, lad.

  What is that business?

  The mask glared at him and became mute.

  I am not on earth to finish your business. I have free will.

  Ha-ha! Ha! the mask exploded in harsh clanking laughter that made Nyroc’s gizzard shudder.

  So his mother had been right. He would be haunted by his father’s scroom wherever he went for the rest of his life. He was almost too weary and scared to think. How could he go on? He wanted to weep.

  Yes, how can you go on? The scroom’s echo of his thought rang in his brain and clanged in his gizzard. How can you do anything?

  What do you mean?

  To be a Barn Owl, Nyroc, is to be the noblest of birds. In your condition, frightened and nearly featherless, you are barely an owl and far from noble.

  Maybe I should return…The words were just forming in his mind when the echo clanged again.

  Yes, maybe you should return.

  No, no, never. How can I even think of that? He shook his head. This was not his voice speaking. It was the scroom’s voice that had insidiously seeped into his head.

  To return or not. That is the question, my son.

  No it isn’t, Nyroc replied.

  It is. It is a noble thing to be a Barn Owl, but nobler by far to be a Pure One.

  Then Nyroc suddenly remembered what Phillip had said to him when he had first begun to molt in that fox’s den and was so scared. You are more than just feathers, he had said. So he spoke in the strange silent way of the scrooms to his father. And, as he found the courage to speak, the burnished battle claws of the great warrior were no longer his inspiration. He saw something else in his mind’s eye. It was the dimly pulsating outline of a tree on an island in the middle of a vast sea. But it was more than just a tree on an island. It was a place where truth and nobility resided. Gwyndor was right when he had said that belief is found within, in one’s gizzard, in one’s heart, in one’s mind. It has no value if it is simply ordered like a command. So he turned to face the weirdly glaring mask of his father’s scroom.

  I am more than just feathers. I am brains and gizzard. It was not feathers that spoke to those crows. It was not feathers that figured out how to bargain with them and get a free passage.

  What are you nattering on about, lad? Even featherless it would be nobler to remain a faithful son and suffer the demands of this great and passionate Union of Pure Ones. You are pathetic! Yeepish!

  There was a deafening clamor in Nyroc’s brain. His gizzard quaked with fear and despair. But once again he roared back into the silent channels of the scrooms.

  I am not pathetic. I am not yeepish. My best friend has been murdered by my own mother. There is no question! I will not return—ever. Perhaps it would be nobler if I pick up battle claws and raise them against the Pure Ones. Yes, fight them!

  Then, suddenly, he realized he was back in his own body, the voice was gone, and the mask was dissolving into the night. Nyroc looked down. He was in exactly the same place at the edge of the lake. But he was badly shaken.

  Nyroc decided to take inventory of his state, featherwise. He peered once again at his face in the black mirror of the lake. The bloody mark left by his mother’s talons was still there. No scroom had made that. It was real. He sighed. Several of the very small darker feathers that ringed his facial disk had molted. He needed to examine the rest of himself. He began stepping slowly in a small circle so different parts of his body would be reflected in the dark water that was illuminated by the rising moon. He cocked and swiveled his head. Well, forget the plummels—they’re history, he thought. I must be the noisiest flier around…Oh, Great Glaux, is there an undertail covert left? No wonder I had trouble ruddering in for this landing…All the primaries seem to be there…But, uh-oh, what happened to the number eleven secondary feather?

  That was another thing Phillip had taught him—counting—along with some letters that he had scratched in the dirt with his talons. Phillip could count only up to nineteen, because owls, at least Barn Owls, had nineteen feathers on each wing. The first ten going inward from the tip of their wings were the primaries. Feathers eleven through nineteen were the secondaries. Anything beyond nineteen, Phillip said, was higher mathematics. But he had told Nyroc that the Guardians of Ga’Hoole owls knew all about higher mathematics. They were the smartest owls in the entire owl universe. But, hey,, thought Nyroc. I’ve got all my primaries. What am I complaining about? The primaries were the most important feathers of all, the power feathers that thrust a bird forward. He pivoted around some more and observed his image in the black water. And I’ve got most of my facial feathers, missing just one secondary. Yes, and several coverts, but I’ve still got wings. I’m an owl, I can fly—sort of.

  He promised himself that he would not whine and, like some little owl chick, say “no fair.” In that moment, Nyroc realized that although he had many more feathers to grow, he, in the course of this one night, between the time he had hurled himself into th
e Shredders until now, had grown up.

  He was not yet six months old, but his childhood was gone. He was a hatchling no more, an owl chick no more. He was a grown owl, with or without his feathers, and a member of a noble avian species, despite his mum and da.

  Nyroc knew that he must lie low, literally, and wait quietly and patiently for his feathers to grow in. He thought he was most likely in some owl’s territory, and he knew that owls did not like their air and their earth invaded by other owls. So although Nyroc longed to live in a hollow like the ones in the great trees of Silverveil Phillip had described, he must settle for a ground nest. If any small rodents skittered across this pebbly beach he would certainly hear them, but with winter set in—even now it had begun to snow—he could not count on bugs.

  A tree on a high bank of the pond had toppled in a previous storm. Its entire root base had been yanked up ferociously by the force of the winds. In a kind of limping flight that hardly got him off the ground, Nyroc went over to see if it might offer any refuge for a very tired and tattered owl.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A Fallen Tree

  The tree, in fact, offered Nyroc a variety of cozy nesting spots. In the huge exposed root-ball were snug little pockets heavy with clots of dirt and dangling twisted roots. In the thick trunk itself there were several hollows and smaller holes, none of which seemed to be occupied at the moment. He had worried that one of these spaces might make a nice den for a fox, and he certainly wasn’t up to taking on a fox. He had half hoped he might find a chipmunk, or a smallish rat, in one—he definitely was hungry.

  But more than hungry, he was tired. So just as the light began to shred the night, Nyroc settled down into a hollow that was halfway up the fallen trunk. He was so tired, he did not even realize that he had fallen asleep on a cushion of moss, the very same kind of moss that Phillip had once described to him, the softest to be found in a forest—rabbit’s ear moss.

  By the time Nyroc awoke the next evening, the world had turned white and the pond had disappeared entirely under a blanket of deep snow. His first thought was food! He was starved. But the sounds that he had fallen asleep with, the creaking of the trees in the wind, the clicks of a small creature’s paws on the pebbles of the beach, seemed distant, almost erased by the snow. How would he ever hunt for anything in the thickness of this silence? How would he even hear the skitterings of a mouse or a vole?

  He stepped cautiously out of his hollow and blinked. He was very cold with so few feathers, but he was also very hungry. Then he did hear something, a very small sound coming from the inside of the tree. He quickly stepped back into the hollow and listened. It was a crispy, creeping sound, an insect of some sort. But it was so cold, how could there be any bugs alive? Then he realized that inside this tree trunk it was not cold at all. Despite his nearly featherless condition, as he slept he had not been cold. As he was realizing this, an odd-looking thing crept right by his beak. He snapped it up before he had time to even know what he was eating. It was crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle. Yum! He swallowed it whole and immediately felt his hunger lessen. Then to his wonder, another one crept by. He snapped it up and scratched with his talon at the small opening it had come from. The wood seemed to be completely rotten and riddled with passageways that tunneled through the tree. Hadn’t Uglamore once told him that nothing was better than a good old rotten tree for food? And sure enough, inside the rotted trunk, there was a veritable feast of insects and worms and all variety of creepy-crawly things that he did not even know the names for, but they would certainly satisfy his hunger.

  Maybe his luck was finally turning. This uprooted massive and rotted tree was Glaux-sent. Bugs and worms were not as hearty fare as good bloody meat but he felt his energy coming back quickly and perhaps, he thought, when he had regrown enough feathers he would be able to go out and really hunt. And maybe by that time the snow would have melted.

  He ate and slept and rested. And for now he felt safe.

  Every day Nyroc grew stronger. He spent a great part of his time thinking, and although he was quite comfortable in the rotten tree trunk, well fed and warm, there was one incontrovertibly sad fact of his life. He was alone—completely alone. He thought a lot about this. The only friend he had ever had was dead. Although Phillip had never spoken the word “love,” the Sooty must have loved him, for he was willing to die for him. And did—murdered by Nyra, who in her very strange way claimed to love him. How could love appear in so many different ways? Did Nyra really believe that she loved him?

  And what of Soren? Had his uncle Soren still loved the brother who had tried to kill him for his own Special ceremony? Is that why Soren had hesitated in the cave during their last battle?

  What was this thing called love? Was it knowing another being so well and trusting what you knew? A kind of believing in someone? Not believing because someone told you to, but believing because you discovered that belief in your gizzard, your heart, your mind, as Gwyndor had said? Yes, belief and love might be wings of the same pair, Nyroc thought. But there was one thing about love that he was sure of and that was that love was stronger than hate. It had been Phillip’s love for him that made him defy his mother. It had been his love for Phillip that had made him say he would never return to the Pure Ones. And perhaps it was love, or the promise of it, that drove him on in his quest for truth that seemed to be leading to his uncle Soren. Whatever love was, it had a power beyond anything he’d ever imagined.

  Nyroc settled into his hollow and his daily diet of bugs. He hid from all other owls, afraid that Nyra had sent scouts out looking for him. He feared spies, too, who might fly to the Pure Ones with news of him. So he became a most unnatural owl—sleeping by night and hunting by day.

  As Nyroc huddled in the tree trunk, each day waiting for dawn when he could emerge to hunt, he would hear owls returning at dawn from their own night’s hunting. He liked this time of the day for he could overhear the pleasant domestic sounds of families preparing for sleep and eating their breaklight meal. Sometimes he would leave his hollow and venture near an owl family and hide behind a tree or bush to listen in. He liked the racket of the young chicks as they were promised a story if they ate all their vole or mouse, and then were coaxed to sleep.

  It was during those short hours between the last of the night and into the breaking of the dawn that he first heard the legends of Ga’Hoole. There was one he had been able to catch only fragments of. He wanted so much to hear it all for it was about King Hoole. At first, it had made him very nervous. For hadn’t his mother said that not since the ancient King Hoole had there been such an owl as himself? He was intrigued and frightened by the notion of Hoole. It seemed as if a winter storm would start to brew, setting the limbs creaking, and soon the words of the story would be blown away like the old dry leaves flying by. But finally there came a still night when Nyroc heard more of the story he had learned was called the Fire Cycle of the Ga’Hoolian legend.

  It was in the time of the endless volcanoes. For years and years, in the land known as Beyond the Beyond, flames scraped the sky, turning clouds the color of glowing embers both day and night. Ash and dust blew across the land. It was said to be a curse from the Great Glaux on high. But there was a blessing hidden in the curse, for this was the time when Grank, the first collier, was hatched. This was the time when a few special owls discovered that fire could be tamed…

  The story went on to describe how Grank, a Whiskered Screech, learned how to make all sorts of tools and weapons using the different kinds of coals spewing from the volcanoes. Grank learned all there was to know about fire, flames, coals, and embers. He not only learned about the glowing parts of the volcanoes but the peculiar drafts of air that swirled about them and the pockets of poisonous gases that could instantly kill a bird or any animal that was trapped in them. The collier Grank thought he had seen every flame, fire, coal, and ember a volcano could spew forth from its cone, until one night in the dead of winter in a swirling blizzard, he s
aw an amazing sight. The snow lay thick on the ground. The volcano that had just erupted was not an especially large or powerful one. All of the coals had been extinguished immediately upon falling into the deep snow. All except one. This coal was strange in appearance. As she was telling the story to the young’uns the mother owl’s voice suddenly grew soft and mysterious. Nyroc strained to hear from his hiding place. “The coal, like many coals, was orange but at its center there was a most unusual color, a deep sapphire blue. Grank peered closer still and saw that rimming the blue was a brilliant, dancing edge of green. This nugget of fire came to be known as the Ember of Hoole.”

  Nyroc’s eyes grew wide. He felt his gizzard grow still. Were these not exactly the same colors that he had seen in the flames of Gwyndor’s fire at the Marking of his father’s Final ceremony? But just at that moment one of the chicks did something bad. There was a mad fluttering in the hollow, and then a squeaky little voice cried, “It got away!” The mother began scolding. “I’ve told you a thousand times. Don’t play with the bug before you eat it. No more snacks before sleep for you. Playing with your food is vile, disgusting behavior. Cruel. Only the Pure Ones play with their food.”

  Nyroc cringed in his hiding place. It was true. He had watched the lieutenants and even his mum toss a dying rat about, the blood spattering everywhere before it was finally eaten. He never saw the fun in such sport, but he had never thought of it as wrong or even cruel.

  “But, Mum,” whined another, “finish the story, please.”

  Please! Nyroc thought. Please finish the story.

  “It’s a very long story, young’uns. It will take many days to finish it. Now, all of you to bed. Tomorrow is Eddie’s first Hunt-in-Snow ceremony. He must be rested up.”

  “Yes, I have to be rested. Hunting in snow is very difficult.”