Read Guardians of Ga'Hoole 06 - The Burning for Free Online Page A

flight.
    In the meantime, Otulissa’s attention had been drawn elsewhere—to a handsome young Spotted Owl. He was quite attractive and flew with great style, and she had thought she might try to fly near him. Fat lot of good it will do me if I can’t even talk , she thought. Might as well forget it. It would only be a distraction. She hadn’t come here to socialize, but to learn. And he probably didn’t know that much, anyway. She was certain he had arrived only a few days before she and Gylfie did.
    After tweener, thirty owls or more rose in the crisp night air of the forest where Hoole had been hatched and began their nighttime meditation. The flight formation was a loose circle of owls that resembled the circle of the birch trees of the retreat. There was ample space between each one so that every owl could meditate without distraction. All owls were known for their silent flight, but these owls of the retreat flew in a silence more complete than either Gylfie or Otulissa had ever experienced.
    During this particular flight, Otulissa had chosen as her subject of meditation the legends of Hoole. She was trying to imagine what this forest had been like when the great owl had hatched in that glimmering time in the icy forest, when the seconds had slowed between the last minute of the old year and the first of the new. She was startled when she heard the air nearby ruffle with a stir of wings and then next to her a Spotted Owl slipped in. Not a Spotted Owl, but the Spotted Owl.
    “The silence is sort of getting to me,” he whispered.
    Otulissa’s head nearly spun around entirely. She blinked in astonishment.
    “Oh, go on, tell me you don’t like to talk,” he said. “I can spot a talker a league away.” He sent a riffle through his pinfeathers, a special trick Spotted Owls did that showed off their spots magnificently.
    Otulissa tried to repress a churr. Oh, how glorious! she thought. Words, language! “Aren’t we breaking the rules?” she whispered.
    “They don’t really have hard-and-fast rules here, exactly. You’re supposed to learn them—gradually. They don’t have any real rhot gorts, either.”
;
    “You mean flint mops?” Otulissa asked, for she was not sure of the Krakish words for the Ga’Hoole term for “punishment,” which was flint mop.
    “Yes, that’s it in Hoolian. But you speak pretty good Krakish.”
    “Oh, a little trouble with the passive subjunctive in irregular verbs, but thank you,” Otulissa said modestly and blinked in her most fetching manner.
    “What’s your name?” he asked.
    “Otulissa,” she replied.
    “Otulissa,” the owl said reflectively. “A very traditional name.”
    Otulissa felt a tingle of joy in her gizzard. Here was an owl of her station, of her background. He recognized that Spotted Owl females were often called by the ancient and distinguished name of Otulissa.
    “And what is your name, if I may ask?”
    “Of course. I am Cleve of Firthmore.”
    “Cleve of Firthmore!” Otulissa gasped. “The Firthmore Passage in the Tridents?”
    The owl nodded in reply.
    Otulissa’s eyes were blinking madly as she flew. “From the royal hollow of Snarth?” Once more, the owl called Cleve nodded. “Then you are a prince. For that is where the clan of Krakor comes from.” And, thought Otulissa, the clan of Krakor is the oldest and most aristocratic clan in the land of the Great North Waters. It was, in fact, the clan for which the Krakish language of the Northern Kingdoms was named. This was a clan of words, of stories, of legends. They were writers and tellers of history, of literature. It was the clan of her beloved Strix Struma and her cherished Strix Emerilla, the renowned weathertrix of the last century whose books Otulissa had intellectually devoured.
    “What are you doing here at the retreat?” Otulissa asked. “Is it a custom for royalty to come here?”
    “Not exactly. I really came because…well, how to put it? Much of my study back in the