(GoG Book 08) The Outcast (2 page)

“Why should we trust you?” the owl called Silvertip demanded.

“Why should we take your word?” the smallest of the Great Grays said. He was still much bigger than Nyroc.

The older one spoke again. “Perhaps, young’un, you’ll prove yourself someday. But until that day, we suggest you leave. Yes, leave, or if you want…”

“He’s got to leave Ambala, now, Tup.”

“Ambala? I’m in Ambala?”

“Yes,” the one called Tup said. “We are a peaceable place. We have suffered a lot through the years, first from the owls of St. Aggie’s when they stole the eggs from our very nests, and then from the Pure Ones. But since the last great battle when the Guardians of Ga’Hoole defeated them, we have had peace. We don’t want any more trouble.”

“I promise I won’t be any trouble.”

“Promises aren’t enough, young’un,” Tup said. There was a tinge of sympathy in his voice. He looked to his companions. “But seeing as it’s getting on to breaklight, why don’t we let him stay another day?”

There was some grumbling from the other two.

Then Silvertip spoke. “Well, as long as he agrees to stay right in this sycamore. There’s a hollow farther up the trunk that’ll do for the night.”

“Thank you,” Nyroc said meekly. “That is very kind of you.”

The third Great Gray added, “Well, you might change your mind about staying in that hollow. It’s haunted, you know.”

“Hortense, no need to frighten him.”

“Well, I just thought he should know,” Hortense said.

“What’s haunted?” Nyroc asked and looked at the owl called Hortense, an odd name for a male owl, he thought.

“The hollow,” Hortense replied.

“Haunted by my father’s scroom?” Nyroc asked in alarm. But the scroom had appeared only over the lake. Never had his father’s scroom followed him into a nesting place.

“Oh, no. It’s haunted by a Fish Owl named Simon. Your father killed him many years ago,” Hortense replied.

“What happened?” Nyroc asked with a sick feeling stealing over his gizzard.

“It was horrible.” Tup spoke now. “You see, Simon was a pilgrim owl who had come here from the Glauxian Retreat in the Northern Kingdoms to do good, help the weak, serve the poor. Your father, Kludd, had just been in a bloody and fiery encounter with the Ga’Hoolian owls. His mask was actually melting on his face. It was Simon who rescued him and nursed him back to health.”

“And he killed this Simon?”

The three Great Grays nodded.

“But why? Why would he kill an owl who helped him?”

Tup stepped forward on the branch and fastened his gleaming yellow eyes onto Nyroc’s black ones. “Because he was a brutal, insane owl. Simon knew he had survived, and Kludd wanted everyone to think he was dead. It would work to his purposes.” Tup paused, then added, “Of course, now he
is
dead.”

“But your mother is far from dead,” the owl called Silvertip said. “She is alive and well, and flying about getting hireclaws and Rogue smiths. They say she wants to have them make her fire claws.”

“But Gwyndor refused,” Silvertip said.

“Gwyndor! I know Gwyndor,” Nyroc said. “He’ll tell you that I’m not like my parents.”

“Gwyndor ain’t here to tell us any such thing, young’un,” Tup replied. “He’s gone to Beyond the Beyond.”

“You might consider going to Beyond the Beyond yourself,” Silvertip said in a thoughtful voice. “They don’t ask questions there about who you are or where you come from. They don’t care.”

“It’s a place for outcasts like yourself,” Hortense added.

“Outcasts like myself,” Nyroc whispered softly.
Is that what I am? Is that all I am ever to be? An outcast, destined to live
in a desolate place full of creatures so desperate they have nowhere else to go?

Was this to be Nyroc’s great destiny? The sum, the end result, of his so-called free will? His gizzard twisted in confusion.

Without Nyroc noticing, the three Great Grays silently lofted themselves into the air and were gone.

For three dreary days, Nyroc slept in the fishy-smelling hollow that had been Simon’s, and hunted in the patchy gray-violet light just before dawn, the dismal hours that owls called the “dregs of the night.”

How Nyroc had hoped against hope that the journey about which the good scroom had spoken so vaguely would be to the Great Ga’Hoole Tree on the Island of Hoole in the middle of the Sea of Hoolemere. What could be farther away or more different from the great tree where the noblest owls on Earth lived than Beyond the Beyond? That barren landscape with fiery mountains and enormous four-legged animals running in packs, that place of desperate creatures, the outcasts of a civilized world?

Nyroc felt as if he had been chasing his own tail feathers around in an endless argument. He finally rushed out of the hollow and swooped down by the lake’s edge. He tipped his face toward its shining surface just as the sun
was beginning to rise, turning the dark waters a pale rose color. He stared at his reflection. He did look like his mother!
Am I not so much more than feathers and bones, talons and wings? But what?
An answer began to come to him:
I am of the same blood as my parents but not of the same gizzard, brain, or heart. The egg that held me came from the body of my mother, but I am not my mother’s son, nor my father’s. I am more. I know that with all my heart and with all my gizzard. I reject all that they were. I have no parents. I have no home. I am what I am but I shall never call myself Nyroc again. I have no name.

N
yroc had the eerie sensation of someone watching him, following him perhaps. He now realized he had felt this since first arriving at the sycamore tree. And when he had been by the lakeside, almost swallowed by despair, in the back of his tattered gizzard he had sensed this presence watching. But he had been too distraught to care.

Now, as Nyroc approached the sycamore, he noticed a curious green glow emanating from the hollow. Cautiously, he poked his head in, then gasped in disbelief. Two luminous, bright green snakes were suspended by their tails from a ridge in the hollow.
Nest-maids?
No, these are not the nest-maid snakes he’d heard civilized owls often had.
They can’t be.

The snakes’ eyes glittered turquoise. Their fangs were long.
Nest-maids would never have such fangs!
Nyroc thought. Their tongues flicked about as if tasting the air, and they were the strangest tongues imaginable. They were forked like most snakes’ tongues, but one side was pale ivory and
the other was crimson. It suddenly dawned on Nyroc! He knew what kind of snakes these were. His mother had spoken of them. He had heard her talking about them to her top lieutenant, Stryker. She had wanted to recruit these snakes for a special elite unit in the Pure Ones. These were the flying snakes of Ambala. The most venomous snakes in the world!

“She sent you, didn’t she?” Nyroc asked.

“Yesssssss,” one hissed.

“I knew she would find me one way or the other,” Nyroc whispered. “Here.” He stepped into the hollow and thrust his chest out. “Just do it now. Do it quickly.”

“Do what now?” the other one said. The words seemed to slither off the snake’s tongue.

“Just kill me, quickly. Here, right to the heart.” He nodded his head and with his beak poked the feathers on his chest.

“What issssss he talking about?” said the first snake to his companion.

“We didn’t come here to kill you,” said the other snake.

“But I’m not going back with you. I will never go back to her, to the Pure Ones.”

There was a flash as both snakes, in one quick green fluid motion, slipped from their perches to the floor of the hollow where they arranged themselves into neat
coils. With their heads waving hypnotically they spoke in unison:

“We are not emisssssssssaries from the Pure Ones. We detesssst the Pure Ones.”

“You do?” Nyroc blinked in amazement.

“We do,” answered the first snake. “My name is Slynella and this is my mate, Stingyll.”

“But you said that she sent for me?”

Both snakes nodded, looping their heads into figure eights and then resting them in a knot on top of their coiled bodies. It was rather dizzying to watch.

“So who is ‘she’?” Nyroc asked.

“She is Misssssst,” Slynella replied.

“She is the watcher in the woods,” said Stingyll. “She has been watching you ssssince you arrived in Ambala.”

“She has?”

Both snakes once more went through the elaborate nodding procedure, unknotting their heads from the figure eights and then knotting them again.

“But who is she? Why does she care about me?” Nyroc asked.

“She is a very ssssssspecial owl.”

“Oh, she is an owl?”

“Mosssst definitely,” Stingyll answered.

“She often ssssends us on misssssions. The lassst time, I came to save a Barn Owl by the name of Ssssssssoren.”

“Soren!” Nyroc couldn’t believe his ear slits. “You helped save Soren?”

“Yesssss, that was some years back. He had been badly wounded. His wound became ‘gamby,’ as we ssssay. My venom ssssaved him.”

“Your venom saved him? I thought your venom killed.”

“It does that, too.” And both snakes now laughed, making a strange, slurred hissing sound.

“So who exactly is this Mist?”

“You shall sssssee. She lives with the eagles. Sssssome call her Hortensssse.”

“Wait a minute! Wait just one little minute. I have already met one Hortense, that Great Gray, very young and very rude. I didn’t like him a bit.”

“There are many named Hortensssse in the foresssst of Ambala. It is an honor to be named Hortensssse, no matter if you are born female or male. But Missst is the original Hortenssse, a hero beyond compare. They ssssay a hero is known by only one name in Ambala—Hortensssse. But there is truly only one Hortensssse, and she now calls herself Misssst and
she lives apart from the other owls. She lives with the eagles.”

“With eagles?”

Once more they nodded, but Slynella and Stingyll must have gotten tired, for this time they did only half a figure eight.

“And she really wants to meet me?”

“She does. She does, indeed.”

“Does she know who I am?”

But by this time the snakes were slithering out of the hollow and casting themselves onto the breeze that stirred with the new day. Nyroc hesitated not out of fear, but astonishment.
Flying snakes! Incredible. But I am seeing them,
he thought.

“Follow usssss,” Stingyll said, twisting his head around. “Follow usss!” Both snakes flattened themselves into ribbons that rippled in slow, undulating motions over the waves and billows of windy air.

Higher and higher they flew until they were far above the forest. Soon Nyroc spied a rocky promontory. Scraped by wind and scoured by endless winter storms, the rock had been worn to a smooth finish, and atop the promontory was the most enormous nest Nyroc had ever seen. Its circumference was at least the size of the crown of a very large tree. He had heard about eagles’ nests but he had
never seen one. No mere twigs were used in its construction. The nest was built from long, sturdy branches woven together in a seemingly haphazard fashion. And perched on its edge were two immense eagles. Between them was a figure that Nyroc could not quite make out. He was flying into a rising sun, which was difficult enough, and his day vision could not compare to his night vision. He was not quite sure exactly what he was seeing. But it seemed to him that a patch of speckled fog hovered between the two eagles. Or perhaps not fog, but Mist!

T
hey had just alighted on the rim of the nest. The smaller eagle, the male, nodded at Nyroc and spoke. “Welcome to our aerie. My name is Streak and this is my mate, Zan.” Zan made a series of nodding movements with her head. “I must explain,” said Streak. “My dear mate, Zan, had her tongue torn out in battle with Skench and Spoorn, the old leaders of St. Aggie’s. She is mute, but she can communicate with a language of gesture that Mist and I can understand.”

Nyroc had not been able to take his eyes off the strange patch that hovered between the two eagles. The patch was now assuming a more definite form and appeared to be an elderly and somewhat shrunken Spotted Owl. He could resist no longer. He had to speak to this creature.

“Are you a scroom?” Nyroc asked.

There was a gentle churring, the sound owls make when they laugh. “No. I am known as Mist or Hortense, and I am alive, very much so.”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Nyroc said. “But why do you look the way you do?”

“Well, it’s a long story but I’ll try to make it brief. In Ambala, where I was hatched, the streams and brooks and lakes—even the ground itself—are rich in a magnetic material called flecks. It was both a blessing and a curse. Some owls were hatched with unusual powers because of the flecks. My father, for instance, could see through rock.”

“See through rock?” Nyroc repeated.

“Yes. Quite amazing, isn’t it? But sadly his own mother went yoicks, lost her wits and every gizzardly instinct she ever had.”

“How awful.” Nyroc could not think of anything worse than losing his gizzardly senses—except maybe losing his wings.

“For others,” Mist, also known as Hortense, continued, “it disrupted their navigational abilities. But for me, I just suffered from being quite small. It took forever for my flight feathers to come in, and I was never a very strong flier.”

“But were you always so…so…”

“So faded?” she said. “No, that has come on with age. My feathers whitened, and some became transparent.” She paused a moment, then stuck her beak into her breast
feathers and plucked one. “Here, take a look.” She held out a small feather to Nyroc but he could not see it well enough to reach for it with his talon.

“By Glaux, I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“Few have, obviously. Because I’m so transparent.” She churred as did the eagle. Even Zan managed a sort of hic-cuppy laugh. And the snakes, who had woven their bodies like bright green filaments through the branches of the nest, also laughed. “However,” she went on, “being transparent has its advantages.”