The moon claw had doubled in size and soon had swollen to a half moon, tilting slightly lopsided into the night. Each night, Beezar rose higher and the star of Kilyric burned brighter. Sometimes they imagined that they could see more than just the loom of the Distant Blue, but the continent’s true coastline.
“Yes, soon the Distant Blue!” Bells exclaimed. Her wings had grown duller in the night, and she shed more scales whenever they encountered contrary winds. But she seemed no less energetic. The creatures that she guided marveled at her strength.
On the sixth night, the moon had fattened to cast a bright silver light on the ground where Gwynneth had paused for a short sleep. A noise penetrated her dreams. The wind was up, but threading through it was a distinct sound — the footfalls of wolves.
Gwynneth jerked awake and shreed the alarm call. But before the brigade could rally, the shadow of a tail-less wolf spread across the ground.
“Take the pups to a safe hole!” Faolan howled.
“You’re too late!” snarled Heep.
SIXTEEN OUTCLANNERS, A NUMBER far exceeding the worst fears of Faolan and his friends, encircled them. Caila was stiff legged with fear in the middle of the snarling wolves, with Abban crouching by her side.
“You’re not going to succeed,” Faolan growled.
“Wait and see,” Heep snarled.
Edme stalked toward Heep, Maudie gripping her fur.
“Don’t go! Don’t go!” Myrr shook so hard he thought his legs would buckle. I can’t lose her. She’s my only mum! I can share her with Maud, but I can’t lose her.
It was as if a fire had been ignited in his marrow. Myrr bolted from their snug and hurled himself as hard as he could at Heep’s rump, still sore and bloodstained from the loss of his tail. Heep yowled as if his tail were being torn off all over again.
It was just the distraction the brigade needed. The Whistler charged the wolf next to Heep. The eagles plunged from the sky and began to fight on the ground, slashing at the outclanners with their powerful talons. Mhairie and Dearlea ran as a byrrgis, attacking the largest of the outclanners. Mhairie began the classic press of an outflanker, then the blood of a seasoned turning guard began to boil in Caila and she leaped forward. The mother and two daughters were now a byrrgis of three — Caila resuming her position as turning guard, Mhairie as outflanker, and Dearlea passing signals between her mum and sister.
Caila was running full out when from the corner of her eye she saw another wolf slide into the byrrgis position. Rags! But he was working with them. He had bitten into the hindquarters of an outclanner wolf, and they wrestled him to the ground.
“I’m running with you!” Rags growled. And the byrrgis of three was now four.
Then Edme gave a terrible howl. Two wolves led by Heep pounced on Faolan, and there was a hideous crack.
His spine! They broke his spine!
Fangs hung over Faolan’s neck, ready to rip into his life-giving artery, when the sound of a crack whipped across the night again. It was so resounding that it seemed to shake the stars.
“Urskadamus!” Faolan swore, and sprung to his feet.
Edme nearly fainted from relief when she saw Faolan jump up. It was the ice! she thought jubilantly. But the bridge shifted under her feet, and Edme’s marrow seized up. The blind wolf was stumbling over the western horizon. The bridge was breaking, crashing!
Gwynneth plunged out of the night to grab Maud just before the ice gave way, and the wolves, noble and savage alike, plummeted toward the water. Myrr clung to Caila and Abban as they fell.
“ABBAN!” Caila shrieked. But the seas seemed to part to embrace the pup. He paddled with his paws and sculled with his tail. He saw the slightly distorted image of his father, paws churning frantically as he tried to propel his head above water.
Abban heard a voice in a watery language. “You’re swimming, lad. You’re swimming. You can do it!”
It was Old Tooth. The narwhale whisked by Abban. “I’ve got business ahead.” He pointed with his tusk toward Heep. Abban watched transfixed as Old Tooth flashed by him, his sword bright in the moonlit water.
There was no sound. Nothing. That was what Abban would always remember — the immense quiet of that moment. There was only a thick plume of blood in the water and Heep impaled on Old Tooth’s tusk.
“The leopard seals will be coming. I’ll feed this creature to them. But the seals might go wild. Get well behind me.” There were other voices in the night. Abban took one last peek below the water, and the first voice he heard when he surfaced was Faolan’s.
“Edme?”
“Here!”
“Whistler?”
“Here!”
Abban knew instantly what this was even though he had never heard it before, having been born in the Outermost. It was a byrrgis roll call.
“Mhairie?”
“Here!”
“Dearlea?”
“Here!”
“Caila?”
“Here! But where is …?”
“Abban?”
“Here!” he called out. “I’m here, Mum. I am here!”
“Airmead?”
“Here!”
“Katria?”
“Here!”
“Burney and Toby?”
“Here!”
“And here!”
Gwynneth hooted from above, “I’m here with Maudie!”
“And we are here with Myrr,” Eelon called down.
Caila swam up to Abban. “Abban, thank Lupus!”
Abban opened his mouth to speak, and to his shock, his words didn’t tangle into rhymes. “I’m here, Mum, and he’s dead. Heep is dead. He’ll never bother us again.”
Caila howled out. Rags was flailing in the water, and she surged over to him. “Rags! Help me with Rags!” she called.
Mhairie and Dearlea quickly paddled up so they surrounded him.
“Don’t panic,” Dearlea said. “We’ll help you.” They pressed against him, buoying him up.
It was as if the Frozen Sea had melted entirely. There was an infinity of water, and the ice floes had shrunk to nothing. Abban swam over to his mother and sisters, who were giving Rags an emergency swimming lesson.
“Don’t worry,” the pup said. “It will all be fine. They’ll help us. They will, I promise. The whales will come.”
Old Tooth surfaced, issuing an indecipherable series of hoots and whistles that Abban seemed to understand. He turned around and spoke to Faolan.
“There’s danger! Leopard seals and sharks are coming.”
Faolan looked about. He saw a score of tusks swimming nearby. One broke off and headed for the desperate wolf Rags as the fin of a shark sliced through the water.
“The fortress, Faolan. The fortress against the wind. The narwhales!” Edme howled.
She didn’t have to explain. The narwhales, too, seemed to understand. They gathered in a tight circle around the brigade and directed a series of clicks, trills, and whistles at Abban.
“What are they saying?” Faolan asked.
“They say grab hold of their fins and climb onto their backs,” Abban replied.
And so they did. Caila and Abban helped Rags mount Old Tooth. The whales were huge, and it was easy for the animals to ride in twos and even threes on their long backs. The water around them churned, and the tusks of three dozen narwhales scraped at the night. Caila saw a pink froth on the water.
“That’s blood, isn’t it, Abban?” she asked quietly.
“It’s Heep’s blood. Sharks are tearing him apart. They might be hungry for more, but we’re safe. We’re safe, Mum.”
Just outside the barricade of the narwhales, they saw the slashing fins of great sharks and the occasional grunt of a ferocious leopard seal as it surfaced for breath. The sharks’ mouths revealed gleaming rows of sharp white teeth, and the fangs of the leopard seals flashed like daggers in the moonlight. But the narwhales swam on calmly, deliberately, and with a speed not matched by any of the predators who attempted to
circle them. With a flick of their powerful tails or a sudden jab of their tusks, they drove off any shark or leopard seal instantly.
From the back of the narwhale on which she and Faolan rode, Edme looked up into the night sky. Maud was safe in Gwynneth’s strong talons, and directly ahead of Gwynneth, Edme spotted the soft glimmer of Bells’s wings nearly bereft of their dust.
“Can you see her, Gwynneth?” Maudie asked.
“A bit, dear. But more important, I can hear her. Every little flutter of her wings.”
There was a large, hollow watery sound as if the sea had gulped. All the creatures turned their heads. The remnants of the Ice Bridge were riding low, with fragments breaking through the green water. Every animal in the brigade experienced a strange wistfulness. The bridge had sustained them for so long, and now it was being devoured by the sea.
Abban’s gaze lingered until at last he turned around to face the open sea before them.
THE WIND THAT HAD BEEN ON their noses died down, and the whales began to swim at a breathtaking speed. The Distant Blue seemed so close, but it was not until the following night, under an almost fullshine moon, that Eelon spotted the coastline of the new continent. On the breeze came a wonderful verdant smell — the fragrance of grass. All through the night, the travelers’ hearts soared as they drew closer and closer to this new world.
“New world.” The two words sang in their heads. No one slept, no one shut their eyes for a single second. As the sky lightened just before the true dawn, they spied the headlands. The Distant Blue was here and it was not blue at all but green and tranquil before their eyes.
They all drank in the sight of this new land, and no one more so than Dearlea. She looked back one last time at the open sea before the whales swam into the shallower waters of a bay. Behind them, the wreckage of the Ice Bridge rose from the water like the fractured bones of some monstrous mythical sea creature. And behind the bridge, far in the east, where the sky would grow dim and night would fall as the sun rose here in this new world, a nightmare faded. The Long Cold was over. The march across the Ice Bridge would soon become distant memory, too, but Dearlea was determined that it would not fade entirely. She knew that forgetting was for the dead and memory was for the living. The quiet desperation she had felt when Mhairie had said that there was not time for skree circles came back to her and so did the words she had spoken to her sister. Don’t you see, Mhairie, if we don’t keep telling the stories, we shall forget them. And if we forget them, our marrow will leak away, our clan marrow will vanish.
Now was not the time to forget. Now was the time to remember. Memory, Dearlea thought, is the life-pumping artery, the blood in that artery. Memory is the sinew, the muscle that stretches back to the Beyond and before the Beyond. Have we not come full circle? she wondered. Now is not the time to forget.
She felt a quiet despair, for there was song deep within her desperate to get out. Lupus, she would not die with the song inside her!
Her mother, who rode next to her on another narwhale’s back with Abban, turned toward her and howled, “Sing, Dearlea! Sing! You are a skreeleen. The first in this new world.”
So Dearlea threw back her head and sang.
And out of that dark place we fled
That broken land so scarred and dead
Our hopes our dreams forever gone.
Then did we follow this wolf so bold
To this place that did unfold
As if lost in mists of time
It was the Distant Blue
A new world sublime.
On a bridge of ice we walked and walked
We now give thanks to Lupus, to Glaux,
To Ursus and gods not known,
And to whales who carried us
The last way
To here in our new home.
The other creatures began to join in. The wolves howled, and from Toby’s and Burney’s deep chests came sonorous roars that stirred Faolan’s heart. Dearlea was so right to sing, to remind them of what they had left behind.
They had called their final shelter on the other side of the Frozen Sea the Last Den. Now they were clambering ashore onto a crescent of beach that was bare of snow or ice, but with an embankment above the high-tide line that looked rife with shelters. Here they would find their First Den.
Abban had turned back and entered the water. He was swimming toward Old Tooth.
Faolan barked, “We must join Abban and thank Old Tooth.” So the creatures swam toward the pod of circling whales.
“The tide is going out,” Abban said. “You must hurry, for they cannot stay here long.”
The blood of Heep still stained Old Tooth’s tusk, but Abban swam up to the spot just between the narwhale’s brow and his blowhole and licked the mottled gray skin with his tongue. He made some odd sounds, sounds that a wolf had never uttered. And Old Tooth closed his eyes contently and seemed pleased.
“We don’t speak their language,” Mhairie said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Abban replied. “Lick them just where I did. It’s a way of saying thanks.”
So each wolf and the two bears swam to the narwhales that had transported them and began to lick just where Abban had. The whales were soon flopping their tails happily, churning up the water.
Abban laughed. “Old Tooth says you better stop thanking them or none will want to leave and the tide will be gone.”
So the wolves and the two bears scampered out of the bay and onto the beach. Abban ran up to the highest promontory he could find, an outcropping of rock that overhung the bay. He watched the narwhales as they swam from the bay toward the distant horizon. He wept the tears of wilig, which were the special happy-sad tears that wolves sometimes cried. They did not sting as much as other tears, and some said they had an amber color.
There were no other kinds of tears to weep on this occasion. For Abban knew that he had within his one life really lived two — that of a wolf and that of a sea creature. It seemed somewhat miraculous that for a few brief and shimmering moments he had been granted these two lives, two worlds. Blessed he was, but how had it ever come to pass? How had he fallen into the immensity of the sea and found creatures so dear? How had he come to understand their language? Now it was time to say good-bye to the sea and these creatures who had saved his life and taken the life of Heep, who had tormented him since the day Abban was born.
Caila came up beside him. She seemed to read his mind. “May he go to the Dim World and never find his tail.” She nuzzled Abban’s withers. “Come now, let’s go down and join the others. The sun is setting. We should find a den.”
“Not yet, Mum. I want to stay up here for a while, until dusk falls. I can still see their tails and their tusks. I want to remember them always. They look so noble, so valiant, like the guardians you told me about.”
“You mean the owls? The Guardians of Ga’Hoole?” Dearlea padded up to them.
“Yes. You have to tell us what you know. We cannot forget them.” Dearlea nodded her head toward the east. “They are so far away, but we cannot forget them — the owls, the Guardians of Ga’Hoole.”
“I can remember.” Gwynneth alighted, and she cocked her head toward the east as if listening for a story to be brought on the wind.
“Once upon a time, a very long time ago, there was an order of knightly owls from a kingdom called Ga’Hoole, who would rise up into the blackness and perform noble deeds. They spoke no words but true ones. Their purpose was to right all wrongs, to make strong the weak, mend the broken, vanquish the proud, and make powerless the savage. With hearts sublime, they took flight.” The four wolves and the owl perched on the promontory for a long time. Just as dusk began to fall, the time the owls called First Lavender, the last of the whales’ fluked tails dipped over the horizon.
Edme came seeking the four wolves and Gwynneth. “Come down. Bells is leaving us,” she said quietly. They turned their backs to the sea. Abban was the last to follow, and before he left, he turned his head once more but th
e narwhales were gone. Not a trace of the Ice Bridge could be seen.
When they arrived on the beach, they found the animals standing in a circle, peering down. In the center of the circle, Maud was crouched close to the ground with a bit of gold dust on her muzzle. Edme entered the circle, settled next to Maud, and began stroking the pup’s flank with her paw. Gwynneth had alighted on Maud’s other side. Maud did not lift her eyes from Bells. Every now and then, one of Bells’s wings fluttered a tiny bit, but her wings were no longer gold. They were completely transparent. Gwynneth could hear her infinitesimally small heartbeat grow slower and slower.
“We’re here, Bells,” Maud said in a whisper as gentle as the brush of a moth’s wings. Maud studied her intently. So this was cleave hwlyn. This was what happened to her mother, but on a battlefield of cold and bloodied ice with savage wolves. If her mother had to die, why couldn’t it have been on this quiet beach? There was no blood, no savage shrieks, but only the sand and sky now with the stars about to break out.
“I know you are, Maud.” Bells’s voice was very faint.
Maud wanted to say something more, something important. But she couldn’t think of anything. Then some words spoken to her on the night of her own mother’s death came back. The words spoken by Bells. “My sorrows” — she paused — “golden one.”
“I gave you my last gold,” Bells said cheerfully. “And there is no cause for sorrow. Remember, fourteen years I have lived. So many years, so many lives. From caterpillar to moth. I have flown! What could be more … magical?” And then no more. “Magical” was the last word Bells uttered before she died.
Gwynneth put a wing around Maud’s shoulder, and Edme ran her muzzle through her hackles in a comforting gesture.
“Don’t worry. I’m all right,” Maud said, rising to her feet. “Look! Look!”
“Great Lupus!” the Whistler howled. “It’s the star ladder.”
And indeed Molgith, the first star in the ladder, was just appearing on the horizon.
“And the mist! The mist!” Maud cried. “The mist of Mum.”