Book 12 - The Golden Tree

The Golden Tree:
Guardians of Ga'hoole
Series (Book 12)
Kathryn Lasky
"Look at me, look at me!" the Great Gray hooted. His primaries sparkled silver in the moonlight as he carved a steep turn, then folded his wings and plunged toward a cresting wave. He swooped up, barely escaping the grip of the sea as the spume trailed behind him like a comets tail. Twilight looked to the rest of the Hand. "And they say seagul s do it better!"
Gylfie turned to Soren, and Digger sighed then churred softly. "We al know what's coming, don't we?
"Indeed!" Soren and Digger both said at once. Then Twilight began:

I don't just do it better
I don't even get wetter
I'm prettier - hey, beautiful!
I'm a gorgeous owl and not a gul !
Waves crash, grass grows
I can whup anything before it knows.
The winds were capricious at this time of year and the owls of the Band entertained themselves by sliding in and out of their folds, rising and plummeting on the rogue drafts that buffeted the Island of Hoole.
XI
11 There was nothing that owls liked doing more than playing with air, with wind, and none did it better than the Band. Despite the season, almost winter and the beginning of what the owls of the Great Ga'Hoole Tree cal ed the time of the white rain, the great tree stil retained the nearly golden glow of summer. It had remained this way ever

since Coryn, the new young king, had retrieved the
Ember of Hoole several moon cycles ago from the volcano in Beyond the Beyond.
Soren glanced toward the tree nervously. Its strange defiance of the seasons did not disturb him as much as knowing that his dear nephew, Coryn, was in his hol ow, brooding. It was understandable that the responsibilities of kingship weighed heavily on the young owl, but Soren knew that it was the ember itself that added immeasurably to Coryn's anxieties.
Inside his rather modest hol ow in the tree, the young king peered into the glow of the ember, the Ember of Hoole. Orange with a lick of blue at its center ringed with green, it was no simple coal, and he did not see simple things in it. Coryn was aflame reader, but reading the flames of a fire was different from understanding the shifting intensities of this ember. The images it yielded, like those of the flames, came without being beckoned, but they were more powerful than flame visions, often warped and not to he completely trusted. What the young Barn Owl was seeing now made his heart race and his gizzard quake. Peering into its

race and his gizzard quake. Peering into its
flickering blue center he glimpsed a spot of white that grew rounder and larger. Like a moon, he thought. Like...a seam slants across the white sphere....
Like ... like a scar . . . . Like my scar. No, not mine. NYRA's!
xii
CHAPTER ONE
A Golden Glow
Coryn, you look as if you've just seen a scroom." It was midday and most owls at the great tree were fast asleep. Soren, Coryn's uncle and chief counselor, had just entered the hol ow.
"If only she was just that - a scroom." Coryn looked up from the ember in its
teardrop-shaped iron cask that Bubo the
blacksmith had made.
So it's Nyra again! Soren thought. There had

been no sign of Nyra or any of the Pure Ones since
Coryn had retrieved the ember and defeated the Pure Ones in the Beyond. Nyra had escaped. Most owls believed that she was as good as dead, her troops virtual y destroyed, and the ember safe in the talons of Coryn, a youthful but canny leader. The balance of power had at last changed. But Coryn was stil haunted by her, and he imagined always would be, whether she was dead or alive. Of late he had become even more obsessed. Soren studied his dear nephew as the young owl peered into the glow of the
1 13 ember. His heart went out to him and he felt a sorrowful
twinge in his gizzard. The scar that slashed Coryn's face a wound inflicted by his own mother - seemed to twitch in a private agony. He felt compel ed to address Coryn directly now about this obsession. Perhaps getting it out in the open would be a good thing.
"Coryn, first of al , there is no evidence that she stil is alive. And second, even if she is, with her forces al but annihilated she can be of little danger."

Coryn jerked his head around, unlocking his gaze
from the glow. "But Uncle, Nyra is no mere evil owl, and if..."
"And if," Soren broke in testily. "I know, Coryn. I read the legends, too. If she is a hagsfiend ,..' "No, Uncle. Perhaps not a ful -blown hagsfiend but a relic from that ancient time who, through some twist of fate or nachtmapen, was reborn into this one. And if this is true..." He hesitated. "Wel , you know what I said when we finished reading the first legend of Grank the Col ier."
Yes, Soren knew. Coryn had concluded that if his mother had the taint of a hagsfiend's blood then his own blood must be cursed as wel . It was idiotic, but no matter how often Soren reassured him, Coryn could not be convinced. Luckily, none of the rest of the Band nor Otulissa
2 14 knew of Coryn's fears. The last thing Coryn wanted revealed was that he might be the offspring of a hags-fiend.
"So you saw something in the glow of the ember, I

assume?" Soren asked.
Coryn looked up and blinked with a sudden curiosity. "Why are you here with me and not in your own hol ow with Pel i and your little chicks? It's daytime. You should be sleeping.'
"I'm not sure."
"A dream?" Coryn asked.
"Maybe." Soren shut his eyes for several seconds as if seeking patience or perhaps the right words. "You know-how it is..., You have firesight and I have starsight."
"But starsight is when you dream about things that sometimes then happen. I don't understand what you are saying. You dreamed about me finding images in the ember? The images of my mother? Then you might wel know Why I am disturbed." "Yes. I dreamed. But I don't quite understand the dreams myself." Soren sighed. He had been asleep in the cozy hol ow that he shared with his mate, Pel i, and their three little chicks, Sebastiana, or

"Basha" for short, Blythe, and Bel , when suddenly
he realized that he was not in his own dream but another's - or perhaps sharing
3 15 Coryn's waking visions as he glimpsed them in the ember. It had rather unnerved Soren, because in the legends they had read that Kreeth, the infamous hagsfiend of ancient times, had an ability to do just this: to enter other creatures' dreams. Soren, however, was certain that it was starsight that he had experienced. Starsight was a peculiar and very rare phenomenon in which the stars in some mysterious way il uminated an owl's dream. Most creatures thought that during the day, when nocturnal animals slept, stars vanished, but for some they did not. The stars became little holes in the fabric of their dreams and through these holes they saw things that often came true.
And he had seen Coryn's vision, though it was not a dream of a terrible moon that turned into a scarred face, or of flames and fear and terrible loss. It was like fragments of a vision within a vision, a dream within a dream. But did this mean that Nyra stil lived? Would she come to kil her only son? Soren did not want to betray the slightest hint of fear

Soren did not want to betray the slightest hint of fear
or worry. This was a magnificent time for the great tree and for the young king. "As I said," Soren began to speak with renewed firmness in his voice, "you have no evidence that she's stil alive. Nor do you have any that she is a hagsfiend. She's just a miserable, evil owl. No more. No less." "Maybe a little bit more," Coryn said softly. 4 16 "What do you mean?"
"Soren, when we were reading those legends, especial y the parts about the
hagsfiends - particularly Kreeth, when she was angered by Lutta - it reminded me ...
"Reminded you of what?" Soren asked quietly. The glow of the ember cast deep red shadows that leaped through the air of the hol ow in a wild and antic dance.
"It reminded me of my mother. When I was very young and she would get angry with me her face seemed to grow even bigger. There was a
darkness like shadows beneath the white feathers of her face and her wings darkened near the edges.

too, and seemed to hang like rags, torn and
crowish. You know how crows' wings are ragged? At the time I thought it was my imagination, but while we were reading the legends and the descriptions of hagsfiends I kept thinking, 'This is familiar, I know this from somewhere.' The blood, the violence I learned of in those legends reminded me of a time in my own life: the Tupsi that required me to kil someone dear and close to me. And with my mother, as with Kreeth, it was not so much hate but the absence of any truly owlish feeling. She was so haggish."
Soren remained silent for a while. Perhaps the young king was right, but it would do him no good to brood endlessly about his origins and his inheritance. Blood hardly
17 defines one's character. We are made by our actions, not our blood, Soren thought. And Coryn was an owl of extraordinary courage, insight, wisdom and, most important, compassion. He of al owls had triumphed over the meanness of his life, the brutality of his upbringing. If he had haggish blood in his veins, he stil had the noblest of

gizzards.
Outside a bitter wind blew and, although it was midday, it might as wel have been night for the sky roiled with dark storm clouds. It was odd that even though it was now the season of the white rain, the milkberries that normal y turned white had a new luminous glow more reminiscent of summer and the time of the golden rain. Perhaps most curious of al , however, was that although many of the leaves of" the great tree had fal en as always at this time of year, they had left behind a shimmering shadow of themselves. And some had not fal en at al , and stil retained a golden splendor. The owls of the tree marveled at this peculiar phenomenon, exclaiming that it was like an endless summer. But Soren found this gilded beauty mildly disturbing. The shimmering nimbus of light that shone from where a leaf had fal en reminded him of scrooms, the unsettled spirits of dead owls that lurked until al their unfinished business on Earth was concluded. 6 18 The young king and his uncle Soren were silent, enveloped in the soft glow that streamed from the ember's teardrop-shaped cask. For several minutes, the two owls stood with their faces tipped

toward the light of the ember, each alone in his
thoughts. Most likely those thoughts were similar. Although they had read about the power of the ember in the legends, they knew it was not merely legendary. Its magic, with al of its good and its bad possibilities, was very real. With the ember came great blessings as wel as grave dangers. When the ember had been retrieved after a thousand years, they both suspected that a smal gash had been torn in the very fabric of the owl universe, an opening through which nachtmagen could seep. Nyra was the very embodiment of evil, but there had always been evil. Coryn wondered if, with this smal rip in the world of the owls, Nyra could gain a talon-hold through nachtmagen. And if she did have even a taint of hagsfiend blood, would this nachtmagen give her the powers of a creature such as Kreeth, the arch hagsfiend of the ancient world? In the legends, Kreeth - with her weird incantations and experiments - had created some truly horrendous monstrosities. Could Nyra perhaps be a descendant of one of her last and more successful experiments? Worse, even, than a simple
hagsfiend?

19 That was precisely what worried Coryn. For
what did that make him? This secret fear festered in him, haunted him, and caused him endless agony. Soren's reading of the legends, however, had given him other concerns and other truths. In his gizzard, he knew that the most important lesson of the legends was to embrace reason and not magic, good or bad. He under stood Coryn's obsession with his heritage, but he also knew that Coryn was intrinsical y good. To rely on magic, or to become obsessed with the ember could only distract Coryn from the responsibilities of his role as king. To be a true Guardian of the great tree had always been considered every bit as noble as being its king. But it was up to the king to instil this sense of nobility - and to lead. In the oath of the Guardians of the Great Ga'Hoole Tree, there was nothing about magic. And the notion of nobility through royal birth was rejected. The words of the oath that Soren had taken so many years before coursed through his mind and set his gizzard aquiver: I am the eyes in the night, the silence within the wind. I am the talons through the fire, the shield that guards the innocent. I shal seek to wear no crown, nor win any glory. . . .

That was the oath of the Guardians of the Great
Ga'Hoole Tree on the Island of Hoole in the middle of the Sea of Hoolemere.
8 CHAPTER TWO
A journey is Planned
The ember's glow bloomed like an enormous bloodred flower, casting vermilion shadows over the white-feathered faces of the two Barn Owls. "Coryn," Soren began to speak slowly. "I have been thinking. In the last few days many owls have come to the great tree. They are even cal ing it the 'Golden Tree' not just because of its golden glow but because a new era has begun since our defeat of the Pure Ones. Word of our library has spread. Owls are on the wing - and are less fearful. They want to know about our chaws. They are especial y interested in our weather and navigation chaws." Soren paused and blinked. "What do you say, lad? Shal we have a go of it?" And to himself he thought, Nothing like a little expedition with the Band to