“Yes. Sure. Anything, Primrose.”
“What’s Ginger really like?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it seems strange to me that she is always wanting to get you off by yourself.”
“Off by myself?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of like she’s jealous.”
“Jealous?” Eglantine blinked and stared blankly into space.
“Yeah, jealous. I don’t think real friends are jealous.”
“Real?”
It’s useless, Primrose thought. All Eglantine did was echo back her own words. This wasn’t a conversation at all. She didn’t know what it was, but it certainly was not two good friends talking.
So Primrose watched carefully for several days. She noticed nothing unusual. But then a week after she had come out of the infirmary, as the days of the summer, the season of the golden rain, began to shorten and the nights grew ever longer, Primrose noticed that Eglantine often simply went off by herself during free flight after class or chaw practice.
The third time this happened, Primrose decided to follow her. It was a dark, moonless night. Thick cloud cover obscured the stars and Primrose, not the most silent of fliers, thanked a wind that ruffled off the land and across the water, muting her wingbeats. She was surprised when she saw Eglantine set off due south. It was a long stretch of water between the Island of Hoole and any land. Indeed, the first land in that direction would be The Beaks, a place that they had been warned to avoid. Mrs. Plithiver was particularly outspoken about The Beaks and frequently recalled the time when she and the band went there, and the four owls had fallen into some kind of odd trance. The lakes in that region were considered beautiful but terribly dangerous. Why would Eglantine be setting off for The Beaks? What would ever draw her there? Well, thought Primrose, if it takes going to The Beaks to get to the bottom of this, then I will go. She might be small, but she was strong—strong of wing, strong of gizzard.
So Primrose flew on. She did wonder, however, what Eglantine was carrying in her beak. It looked like papers of some sort. She hadn’t had them at the beginning of free flight, but she had lighted down on some cliffs before setting out across the sea. After they had been flying a while, the cloud cover cleared off, and land appeared like a darker smudge in the distance. The distinct sharp hills of The Beaks could actually be felt before they were seen. The wind curled up from those hills in seductive thermal drafts, even in the coolness of the night. They were lovely to ride. And even on this moonless night, the fabled Mirror Lakes sparkled. Eglantine was heading for a fir tree that grew beside one of these lakes. Primrose knew that she would have to be careful now to avoid being seen. She swooped off at an angle and found a spruce to settle in on the other side of the lake, from which she could observe Eglantine’s movements. A large Barn Owl with a great shining face had come out on the limb of the fir tree.
“Mum!” Eglantine shouted.
Mum! Is she yoicks? And if this is her mum, why hasn’t she told Soren? Primrose blinked. It wasn’t a scroom. It was a real feather-and-bone owl. She could tell. Eglantine handed the owl the papers she had brought.
“Darling!” she heard the owl exclaim.
Primrose strained to hear more. She had to get closer. She carefully lofted herself in short flight to a closer tree, and then a closer one.
“Any centipedes, Mum?”
“Would I forget?”
“Oh, no, Mum. Of course not. Never,” Eglantine said. “Where’s Da?”
“Still hunting.”
“And Soren, too?”
“Yes, still out hunting.”
Primrose blinked in utter confusion. Soren? Out hunting in The Beaks? Soren was back at the great tree. What was happening? And that was Primrose’s second-to-last thought. Her eyes flinched. There was a blinding glare and then nothing. She felt herself being stuffed into some sort of sack.
And this was how Primrose arrived at her last thought: The sack into which she had been stuffed was the same kind in which rogue smiths often carried their tools. And once there had been a rogue smith in The Beaks. A Barred Owl. Soren, Gylfie, Twilight, and Digger had found him dying. At first, they had thought a bobcat had murdered the Barred Owl. But no, the Pure Ones, led by Kludd, had murdered him.
I shall die like the Barred Owl, I shall die.
And that was Primrose’s very last thought.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Gizzard Begins to Stir
Oh, that’s an interesting book, Eglantine,” Otulissa said as she came into the library. “I was just reading it the other day. It’s about the correspondences between the quadrants of the gizzard and those of the brain. I do believe that the owl who had the most perfect correspondence of brain and gizzard was our dearest Strix Struma.”
Eglantine flinched and then seemed to wilf so noticeably that both Otulissa and Soren, who was also in the library, jumped toward her.
“What’s wrong, Eglantine?” Soren cried.
“Why did you say ‘dearest’?” Eglantine asked Otulissa.
“Dearest?” Otulissa said again. “Because she was. Strix Struma was the dearest owl I have ever known.”
Eglantine seemed to freeze. “Only Mum ever said that word to us, Soren. You know it.”
Soren and Otulissa peered at Eglantine in complete bewilderment. “Eglantine, don’t be ridiculous. You can’t own a word. If Otulissa wants to use the word ‘dearest’ she can. Holy Glaux, what’s gotten into you?”
“Well, why don’t you call her darling instead?” Eglantine said stubbornly.
“I don’t like the word ‘darling.’ I think it’s phony and ostentatious. It sounds like some gewgaw that would be dangling all glittery in Madame Plonk’s apartment. Darling! Yecch!” Otulissa made a disgusting sound that came from the back of her throat as if she were spitting out a bad slug.
“Give it a blow, Eglantine,” Soren said. He rarely spoke rudely to his sister, but she didn’t even seem to notice. And this fact intrigued Digger, who had his beak buried in a tracking book he was researching for Sylvana, the tracking ryb on whom he had an enormous crush. Now why, Digger thought, did Eglantine flinch over the word “dearest” and not when her brother was pointedly rude to her?
Just then, Otulissa suddenly exploded. “Holy Glaux! This really frinks me off…It spr—” Otulissa seemed to be fighting with her own beak not to say the vilest swear word in owl language—the s-p-r word: sprink.
“What in the world is it, Otulissa?” Soren asked.
“Someone has ripped two pages out of this higher magnetics book.”
“You’re kidding!” Gylfie gasped.
“Look.” Otulissa held up the book. The jagged edges of torn pages prickled up from the inside of the book like an ugly wound.
“Dewlap?” Digger said.
“She hasn’t been in the library since she collapsed after Strix Struma’s Last Ceremony.”
“Who would do this?” Digger said. The owls looked around in utter bafflement.
But suddenly there was a great commotion outside the library sky port and Ruby flew in. “Primrose is missing!”
“What?” they all said.
“She never came back from night flight.”
All their heads swung toward Eglantine. “Didn’t you notice?” Soren asked.
“I came in early and went to sleep, and then this evening I got up late and thought she was already out. Gee, I hope she’s all right.”
Digger observed Eglantine closely. Her words sounded hollow to him.
The search-and-rescue chaw members, as well as those in tracking, were now organizing the other owls to divide up into small groups to conduct a search. Because they were the most experienced, each senior member of the search-and-rescue chaw would lead owls from other chaws on the hunt. A member from the tracking chaw would accompany each group for the groundwork of finding any traces of a downed owl.
They were given only a few minutes to get ready. Eglantine rushed back to her hollow.
r /> “What’s going on?” Ginger asked her.
“Oh, it’s Primrose. She seems to have gotten herself lost.”
“Oh,” Ginger said and yawned.
Eglantine blinked. For just a split second, it was as if she had stepped out of her own body, her own feathers, and was listening to herself. Why did she sound this way? Primrose is my best friend. Why don’t I feel anything? Why do I sound so weird? Am I me? Where is me? It was almost as if a stranger inhabited her body, her gizzard. Gizzard? Did she still have one? She had not felt anything in her gizzard, not a twinge, in days, weeks!
This should panic her, she realized, but oddly it did not. Something is wrong. Something is very strange, but why don’t I care? All I care about is seeing Mum and I don’t even care that she forgets and calls me ‘darling’, not ‘Eggie’ like she used to. Even when the other owls discovered the pages that she herself had torn out of the higher magnetics book, Eglantine had felt nothing. Not guilty, not happy that she had done it, although her mum was happy when she’d brought them to her. In truth, Eglantine didn’t even know what happy was anymore, just as she didn’t know what sad was. She should be sad about Primrose. But it was just too much trouble, too much energy to feel anything. And the oddness of it all struck her now. Her gizzard was still as a stone. She looked at Ginger and out of curiosity said, “You know, Primrose is my best friend. It’s funny I don’t feel sad or anything.”
“Well, maybe she’s not really your best friend, Eglantine,” Ginger replied. She paused and walked up to her. “Maybe I am.”
Eglantine looked at Ginger a very long time and then squinted her eyes. “No, no. I don’t think so.” And for the first time in days she felt a dim little pulse in her gizzard.
“Suit yourself,” Ginger said amiably, and turned her back.
Eglantine had been assigned to a team of trackers and rescuers led by Digger, who was one of the best in the tracking chaw. Eglantine was a trainee in search-and-rescue and knew many of the basics, such as how to first scan for crows’ nests in any vicinity. Crows were known to mob owls, especially owls flying alone in daylight hours. And then, of course, the searchers tried to listen for any cries of distress. Barn Owls were renowned for their hearing abilities. With unevenly placed ear slits and slightly concave faces that could scoop up sounds from any direction, Barn Owls were able to detect the slightest noise—from the chirp of a lone cricket to the heartbeat of a mouse. As Eglantine flew, she felt that something was just a little off-kilter. Her sight and her hearing were not matching up as they had in the past. That was weird. Oh, well. She just began to say the words to herself when she thought, Oh, well? I shouldn’t be thinking “oh, well” It can mean life or death for an owl if its hearing and its vision don’t match up. I should be in a complete panic. But I’m not. What is happening to me? What has happened to me?
“For Glaux’s sake!” Martin, a little Northern Saw-whet and a good friend of Soren’s, shouted at her. “Watch where you’re flying, Eglantine! You nearly clipped me on that last turn.”
“Sorry,” she said mildly.
Digger swiveled his head around. What is wrong with Eglantine? he wondered for perhaps the tenth time in the last couple of hours.
There was no sign of Primrose. They had flown out in multiple directions and found nothing. There was now talk of contacting their slipgizzles in certain regions of the Southern Kingdoms. They returned before dawn. Eglantine skipped breaklight and went directly to bed. But she did not sleep. All morning and through the afternoon she sat perched above her bed of moss and down. It was scratchier than the one that her mum had fixed so lovingly for her in the dream hollow. She blinked and wondered. Is that all I feel anymore, just the softness or roughness of something? Then there was another little pulse, a twinge in her gizzard. That dream, the very real dream, it had been nice, even lovely. I can visit the dream hollow as I please…as I please. But does it please me? And Ginger is nice, but she’s not like Primrose, is she? Primrose was never jealous. Something stirred uncomfortably in her. Jealous. Primrose had said that Ginger might be jealous. Friends were not jealous. But Ginger wasn’t exactly a friend. Why am I thinking this? Eglantine wondered. And then like the bits and pieces of debris that swirled in the eddies and currents of the Sea of Hoolemere, Primrose’s exact words came back to her:
“Yeah, jealous. I don’t think real friends are jealous”
Real! Something wasn’t real. As if playing with a puzzle, Eglantine began assembling the scattered pieces. Real…Primrose is real. A real friend. Ginger is not quite real…Dreams are not real…Then she thought about her mum. And then about Ginger some more. And dreams. Could dreams be prisons? What if she didn’t want to be in this dream? Would her mum just melt away? Would she, herself, even care? After all, Eglantine didn’t really care about anything anymore. So what would it matter? Her thoughts went around and around, and she always came back to the same thought: Nothing really mattered. Suddenly she realized that she was caught in a dream that she could not escape. And now her gizzard gave a huge lurch. How could she escape? How could she make herself care? How could she find what was real again?
To escape the dream, I must look into my dream mum’s eyes. I must look behind her eyes. I must see what is real and what is not. I must go back one last time. A terrible dread began to swim through Eglantine’s gizzard.
And she was glad.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Lucky Charm
Primrose blinked. It was daylight now. So the night was done. She wondered if the owls at the great tree had missed her yet. And what about Eglantine? Was she still here or had she gone back? She was not sure how long she had been in the hollow, but at least they had let her out of the bag. A Sooty Owl, a species related to Barn Owls but more gray than buff-colored, stuck his head in. “I have orders for you to go to sleep. Settle down in that nest, now. You’ll never sleep on any finer moss. And she plucked down from her own breast for you and arranged it herself.”
How kind! thought Primrose. “What if I don’t want to sleep?”
The Sooty Owl blinked and then made a series of clicking sounds that Primrose supposed was to intimidate her. “It’s not a question of what you want. It’s an order.”
“In the Great Ga’Hoole Tree we get to sleep when we want to.”
“Well, guess what, Sweet Tuft? You ain’t in Ga’Hoole anymore.”
“I take it I am among the Pure Ones,” Primrose replied.
“You take what you want. Now get to sleep,” the Sooty snarled.
Primrose flew up to an interior perch and lighted down. “Not there. Down here in the nice fluffy bed.”
“I sleep better on a perch.”
“Down in the nest! And that’s an order.”
Primrose never heard of anything so ridiculous. Why was it so important where she slept in this hollow? She was a prisoner no matter what. So she settled into the nest, which indeed did have the softest, fluffiest moss she had ever experienced. But despite the luxurious trimming of this nest, she could not get comfortable. She then sensed a strange buzzing in her head and her gizzard seemed to grow still. She stepped away from the nest and the buzzing stopped. Pygmy Owls, weighing less than two ounces and measuring just a sliver more than seven inches long, were extremely sensitive to environmental changes that might not affect larger owls. And as soon as she stepped away she felt her gizzard change. She lifted one talon and touched the approximate place where her gizzard was lodged. She tried to picture in her mind Otulissa’s diagram with the quadrants. She remembered reading the book on humors and discussing it with Ezylryb as he explained about the four basic humors. Ezylryb’s words came back to her.
“You know how in all of our brains there are tiny bits of magnetic particles much smaller than flecks. They are sometimes called iron oxides. They aid us with navigation because they help us feel the earth’s magnetic field. Imagine, however, if something disturbed those bits in our brain…”
Something is disturbing my brain,
Primrose thought. And something is happening to my gizzard as well. She vividly remembered Ezylryb’s mangled talon pointing to the diagram. In an older owl, exposure to flecks could disturb the humors, and cause navigational problems, but in a younger owl like herself—yes, and like Eglantine—it could shatter all internal systems. Ezylryb’s words were so clear now it was as if the old Whiskered Screech’s voice was inside her own head.
The gizzard itself becomes almost like stone, incapable of sorting out feelings and emotions. It can even cause delusions. That is what fleckasia is all about.
Primrose now knew: She was being shattered, and Eglantine already had been!
“Hey!” the Sooty Owl called in. “Didn’t I tell you to bed down? Do I have to come in there and sit on you?”
At your own risk, thought Primrose. She had to stall for time. “Sure, sure, just have to yarp a pellet,” she answered.
“Well, yarp and get to sleep.” Then she heard the Sooty give a big yawn.
She went to a corner of the hollow to yarp. She felt better as soon as the pellet came up, but she wasn’t sure if it was because of relieving herself of the pellet or just stepping away from the nest. Obviously, flecks had been embedded in the nest materials. Then she remembered several times when she had awakened in her hollow at the Great Ga’Hoole Tree and Eglantine had been restless with her supposedly “lovely” dreams. An image came back to her. It was Ginger bent over Eglantine, patting her as if to soothe her, but maybe she was not soothing her. Maybe she was poking in flecks. Glaux knew where she got them.
“Finished with that yarp yet? Now back to bed or I’m calling Her Pureness.”
Oh, Glaux, Primrose thought. I am right in the middle of something really bad. She had to think fast. She couldn’t scatter the nest because the flecks would drift all over the place. She touched the amber bead that she wore around her neck. Good-luck charm, she thought. Well, show your stuff. She rubbed it absently with one of her tiny talons, then let the chain it hung from drop back down on her breast feathers. She felt an odd ruffle and looked down. She blinked. All the soft feathers in which the amber bead lay were sticking straight out. She blinked again. She had never seen her feathers or any owl’s feathers do that.