And it was Ygryk who had just informed Penryck that Siv had left the iceberg. Penryck stepped out of the shadows now. “Lord Arrin, I have just received news from Ygryk that Queen Siv has left the iceberg in the firthkin.”
“Left? She has left?” Lord Arrin was aghast. “What now? How will we ever find the chick?”
Penryck stepped closer to Lord Arrin and, leaning in to him, whispered something in his ear slit. Lord Arrin cringed. The stench of these hagsfiends was overpowering. He wondered if one ever became accustomed to it. But he was soon distracted from such trivialities as he listened to the hagsfiend’s whispers.
“It is as I always thought, my lord. The egg was never there with Siv. The chick did not hatch at the firthkin, and if it did it would have been much too young to fly—certainly not against those spring winds of the firthkin. If Siv left, she must have been alone.”
Lord Arrin blinked. He’s right. Penryck is right. “But what now, Penryck?”
“Don’t you see, Lord Arrin, it is a blessing.” It was very odd hearing a hagsfiend say a word like “blessing.” A blessing was associated with Glaux, with faith, but never with magic. The word sounded curious from the beak of a hagsfiend, something like the krakish word for blood, “bleshka.”
“How so?” Lord Arrin asked.
“A mother yearns for her chick. If we find her, we can follow her. She will lead us right to the chick.”
“Aaaah.” Lord Arrin blinked. His amber eyes glowed with this sudden realization.
Penryck wondered yet again how stupid these owls were. Not only did they have no magic but they, who thought that hagsfiends brains were primitive, had their own unique ignorance. Lord Arrin might imagine that he, Penryck, was working for him, but in truth it was quite the reverse. Penryck himself had a grand scheme for domination, and if they could seize the chick…well…the world would be Penryck’s and he would not be just king of the N’yrthghar but the god of the nachtmagen universe.
The other owls and hagsfiends whispered among themselves as Lord Arrin and Penryck continued to confer.
“We need the best trackers,” Lord Arrin was saying in a low voice.
“Well, we know who that is!” Penryck churred. But it was not the soft gentle laughter of owls. Instead, it sounded rather like ice fracturing.
“Ygryk! How convenient.”
Penryck nodded.
“Invite her and Pleek to the war room,” Lord Arrin said, and then paused. “Of course, we won’t let Ygryk actually keep the chick. She could be its foster mother, nanny, nursemaid, perhaps.”
Penryck shook his head. “No, that will never do. She will want to possess the chick entirely.”
Lord Arrin blinked. “Well then, there is only one choice.”
Penryck nodded.
“She will be slain as soon as she leads us to the chick.”
“Precisely,” Penryck replied.
“And we know who our best assassin is—Ullryck,” Lord Arrin said. He then churred. This, indeed, is a good plan, he thought to himself. “Yes, yes, a good plan. Send for Ygryk and Pleek right now!”
Ygryk and Pleek followed Penryck as they flew through a tangled web of ice tunnels under the H’rathghar glacier. Their gizzards were tight. Their hearts beat rapidly. Never before had they been asked into this innermost sanctum where Lord Arrin had plotted and strategized against the H’rathian owls of the king. We are coming up in the world, Pleek thought. How they had made fun of him. No, worse. When he had first taken Ygryk as a mate, they all had sneered and treated him as if he were splat from a wet pooper of a bird, a seagull. But look at him now—and look at Ygryk—both of them flying toward the war room to be included in a high-level meeting.
Lord Arrin began at once. “We have invited you here to perform a special mission.”
“Your word is our command.” Pleek dipped his head obsequiously.
“Ygryk, I understand that because of your superb vigilance you have just discovered that Siv has fled the iceberg.”
“Yes, my lord.” Her voice creaked in the manner of those hagsfiends whose ancestors were said to have emerged from the smee holes that dotted the N’yrthghar. Somehow the heat or the steam from the holes and had given their voices an odd inflection.
“I know that it is difficult for you hagsfiends with your…” He hesitated as if searching for the proper word.
Don’t you dare say “primitive,” Penryck silently cursed.
“…With your unusual brains and thinking processes to master the art of reason, but I have deduced that it would be most logical at this time for Siv to set out in search of her chick.”
No credit for me, of course! Penryck thought.
“Therefore,” Lord Arrin continued, “my proposition is simple. Ygryk, you are a superior tracker and you, Pleek, have learned well from this good mate of yours.”
At last, Pleek thought, someone understands what a jewel my Ygryk truly is!
“I want Siv as my queen,” Lord Arrin went on. “You want a child. You get me my queen and her chick. I’ll keep the queen and you keep the chick.”
Pleek and Ygryk were overwhelmed. They slid from the ice shards they had been perched on and bent their legs so deeply that their talons skidded out from under them and their beaks dug into the ice. “Merciful and all wise Lord Arrin,” Pleek began, “how shall we ever thank you for this?”
Lord Arrin looked down at them groveling at the tips of his talons. “Oh, I’m sure we will find a way.” He blinked and the amber in his eyes cast golden shadows on the ice. He paused. “Now, you are dismissed.”
The Great Horned and the hagsfiend, bowing and scraping, backed out of the war room. Then Lord Arrin turned to Penryck. “Send for Ullryck. She’s got no longings for chicks? No notions of mothering?”
“Not our Ullryck, sir. ‘Twas said that her ancestors came from the deepest smee hole in the N’yrthghar, one that went straight down to hagsmire.”
“Perfect, then, for this job. Give her flight instructions immediately. She’ll need two burly fighters with her for the trip back. They’re not to set off until Pleek and Ygryk are a few leagues out. Her half-hags should be able to pick up their scent. Give her a cover story if they discover her; just say that I felt they might need some backup if things got rough.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“My lord?” Lord Arrin blinked at Penryck with a hint of contempt in his amber eyes.
Penryck was momentarily confused. Surely he does not want me to call him ‘Your Majesty’ yet! Not yet!
Penryck dipped his head. His shaggy black feathers scraped the ice. “Your Majesty?” At the very core of the word was a quaver of doubt. But if Lord Arrin noticed he chose to ignore it.
Fool! thought Penryck.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Passion of Ygryk
Pleek regarded his mate, Ygryk, who flew a good distance ahead of him, her head sweeping in a wide arc as she sniffed the air. How stunned his family had been when he had chosen a hagsfiend for his mate. “A disgrace,” they had hooted. “Outrageous!” screeched an elderly aunt. But where they saw filth, he saw a dark purity. Where they smelled the stench of crow, he experienced only the heady scent of nachtmagen. She was magnificent and powerful. The half-hags that flew in the fringes of her primaries served her well because she commanded them so expertly. And it was for this reason she was one of the finest trackers in the N’yrthghar. These tiny poisonous half-hags darted out from beneath the edges of her flight wings on short forays to detect clues from the long-vanished flight paths of owls. It might have been hours since an owl had passed through a patch of sky but a half-hag could sense the most minute vestiges in an air current disturbed by the wings of a particular owl. It might be anything—a tiny filament of down still spinning in a swirling eddy, the scent of a pellet yarped in flight. Nothing was too small, too insignificant, for these tiny poisonous creatures to detect. And their obedience to Ygryk was unparalleled, unequivocal, and beyond that of any other half-hags. This made Y
gryk the best tracker.
They knew exactly what they were looking for. As soon as Lord Arrin had given them their flight orders, Pleek had returned to the iceberg where Siv had nested. They waited until Svenka and her cubs were off fishing and picked up a feather Siv had shed. This was enough to provide the half-hags with her scent. Furthermore, Ygryk had explained to them, in that odd language that was used only by hagsfiends to communicate with their half-hags, how Siv’s flight marks would differ; because of her damaged port wing, she would be favoring her starboard wing. Therefore the air she passed through would be unevenly disturbed.
The half-hags’ first clue had been picked up in a maverick eddy that had spun off an air stream coming off the island of Dark Fowl.
“Two points north of east,” Ygryk called to her mate. She flipped her head back to make sure he was following. How incredible it seemed to her that a true owl had chosen her for his mate. How seldom this happened. She felt so proud. And Ygryk’s family was as proud as Pleek’s was ashamed. The only problem was that they had been unable to have offspring. Only a few of these rare unions provided offspring, and for most hagsfiends it was not a problem. But for Ygryk it was. Deep within her she had a longing that was different from anything she had ever known. She adored anything young and vulnerable. Now, many hagsfiends were fascinated by the innocence of chicks or cubs or pups, but it was not a loving fascination. Quite the reverse. They enjoyed killing the defenseless and the innocent. The blood of innocents was a tonic on which they thrived. They had even been known to eat their own young. Ygryk, too, had bloodied her beak countless times on young polar bear cubs left while their mothers went hunting. She had swooped down on a fox’s kit that had scampered from its den. And nothing was more delightful than a nest full of soft newborn bunnies. The pathetic mewlings of the mother before Ygryk would rip out its throat, the wide-eyed disbelief of those babies as she slowly ate them one by one, too stupefied even to run. But this fascination and thrill of power over the innocent had turned to something else when she had met Pleek and had thought of a chick of her own—half-owl, half-hagsfiend—a dear little creature. She had imagined it for so long. The chick would have, of course, two dark brown tufts that rose on top of its head, just like Pleek’s. And she pictured its plumage mostly black but shot through with some of the grays and tans of a Great Horned. Its eyes would be the lovely amber of Pleek’s. When she’d begun to realize that this was not going to happen, that there would be no chick, she tried to remember some old nachtmagen spells that she had heard about from an ancient crone of a hag who lived deep in the Ice Narrows. She had visited the hag. Kreeth was her name, and Ygyrk had looked at some of the peculiar birds Kreeth had produced from her experiments with puffins, which were prevalent in the region. Some had called the resulting birds monstrosities, but Ygryk found them quite charming.
“It can de done,” Kreeth had told her. “Better not to get an egg though. Better to get a hatchling or even a young owlet just learning to fly. Then if you set your half-hags around it and say the first spell, it will make the chick resistant to the poison. After that you must move on to the second spell.”
“And what is that?” Ygryk asked.
Kreeth waited to reply, then spoke. “You won’t like it, but it must be done. You must trust the spell. It is called the nacht blucken.”
“What is it? I’ll do anything.”
Kreeth had looked at her carefully. Yes, she believed this desperate hagsfiend would do anything. The passion was there. “You must pluck out one of its eyes,” Kreeth said.
“What?”
“You heard me. You must pluck out one of its eyes.”
“But how will it see to fly?”
“Fear not. It will grow another eye very quickly but where the eye was, the powers of the fyngrot will enter.”
“It will have fyngrot even though it started as a simple owl?” Ygyrk was stunned.
“There is nothing simple about an owl. Nothing at all. And if you get a special owl, one of great lineage and powerful ancestors, you will have created a most magnificent creature.”
When Ygyrk had told Pleek about this, their desire to find a chick that they could make their own became an obsession for both of them. And then when they had heard that Siv had laid an egg, the obsession became an all-encompassing passion. To steal the egg of King H’rath and Queen Siv, and when it hatched to ensnare that chick into the web of spells she had learned from Kreeth—why they dared not even imagine the possibilities! Their powers would exceed those of any living thing not just in the N’yrthghar but in the entire universe of owls, no, of all creatures.
A half-hag flew up to Ygryk and reported that a thread of down from the target owl had been detected amidst uneven air currents leading to the region just south of the Bitter Sea, near the Ice Dagger.
Ice Dagger! Bitter Sea! thought Ygryk. Open water! But nothing would stop her. Her passion, a mere spark in the beginning, was now raging inside her like a fire. She would fly through any wind, any storm, over any sea! The heat of her passion would keep her dry. She would become as impervious to seawater as hagsfiends were to the poison of their half-hags. She would get this chick. She would be a mother. A mother! The word screamed in her head. And if she had had a true gizzard it might have shattered from the tumult of her feelings.
Some time earlier, Siv had lifted off from the Ice Dagger where she had taken a good long rest. Her wing felt much restored and, with the wind dying, she hoped to reach the Bitter Sea by moonrise. If, indeed, she would even see the moon tonight. There was a thick cloud cover, which she blessed. Her disguise was good but still, as she flew, she took care to bury herself deep within any clouds. She tried to imagine what her chick might look like. Would he have her eyes or maybe H’rath’s, the amber sparkling with bright glints of gold? Would he have inherited her gift for verse? There were so many things to imagine with this chick. The hardest, of course, was to picture herself holding back, not rushing up to preen him, but concealing her own identity. But conceal she would. She was firm in her gizzard on this point. She would do nothing to endanger his life. When she found him—if she found him—she would observe him from afar and she would only approach him if Grank was not around, if he was alone. Grank knew her too well. He would recognize her instantly and although he would not betray who she was, it would make life more difficult for him and the last thing she wanted was to make anything difficult for Grank. She owed Grank if not her own life then that of her son. It suddenly struck Siv that for her there was no distinction between the two of them: Her life was inextricably entwined with that of her chick. There was, from her point of view, no separation. If he died, she would die. She knew this as well as she had ever known anything. But if she died, she felt deep within her gizzard that he would go on. And that was really all that mattered.
Through a sudden patchy thinness in the clouds, the retreat of the Glauxian Sisters came into view. Her cousin Rorkna was the abbess of the sisters. How she would love to light down there for a visit. It had been so long since she had seen her. But it would not do. There must not be a whisper of her presence in this region even if she was disguised as a gadfeather.
She thought now about her visit at the gathering of gadfeathers. She had actually found it rather pleasant. When she was young, she remembered her mother and aunts talking disdainfully of their slovenly undisciplined lives, their refusal to settle in with the rest of the owl communities, their desertion of their families, their rowdy ways and, of course, their reputations for stealing anything that wasn’t embedded in strong ice. But she had found in them a certain gentleness and she had never heard anyone sing as beautifully as the Snow Rose. If she were still the reigning queen in the Glacier Palace she would have invited the Snow Rose to come and sing there. She thought of all that now. She thought of what lovely times there could have been. She would have grown old in the palace along with King H’rath. Perhaps they would have had more than one chick, and they might have watched them grow up and grow s
trong and become knights of the H’rathghar like their father and grandfathers. And there would have been evenings of song and feasting. And yet she was ready to trade all that now for just one glimpse of her son.
CHAPTER NINE
Facts of Life
Hoole had become fascinated with the fire in the forge and the image that he had spied at the edge of its flames. It made his gizzard clinch every time he saw it. Lately the image had moved from the edge of the flame to the center and had become larger. It appeared to be some sort of bird, but it was not flying like an owl. It seemed to limp through the air. And yet his gizzard yearned for it, yearned for something he could not quite see or know.
It was about this time that many questions began to fill Hoole’s mind. And as close as he felt to both Grank and Theo, for some reason he hesitated asking them. Somehow he sensed that these questions might disturb them, especially Grank. Oftentimes, he had been on the brink of asking, and then would quickly decide against it. In many ways the questions were like the image that he saw in the fire. He knew something was there, but he did not recognize it. He did not know the words for it. And it was the same with the questions. They hovered at the edge of his mind and yet he did not have the words for them.
Brother Berwyck came to visit them often and although he frequently invited them to the retreat, Grank always found a reason to refuse. Grank did, however, permit Hoole to spend time with Berwyck. He knew that if Hoole were to rule he must be familiar with all kinds of owls, all species, and Boreal Owls were known for their tolerant and giving natures. He also knew that Brother Berwyck, like all of the Glauxian Brothers, was a scholarly owl. So there would be much Hoole could learn from him. Brother Berwyck himself seemed to understand that Grank was somewhat of a loner and respected his desire to remain aloof. Grank had never asked Berwyck not to tell his fellow Glauxian Brothers about them, but somehow Berwyck sensed that Grank would prefer it if he kept the knowledge of the two owls and their young charge to himself. Still he was made to feel welcome whenever he came to visit. Brother Berwyck had shown Hoole a cove that furrowed in from the Bitter Sea, which, in the springtime when the ice melted, was his favorite hunting ground. Oddly enough, the brother had a taste for fish even though he was not a Fish Owl. He had promised to teach Hoole how to fish, and although the young prince did not much care for the taste of fish, the sport of fishing seemed like it might be great fun.