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was a rather pretty Barred Owl who had spoken. “Lovely, ain’t he?” She looked at me, her amber eyes a bit bleary with grog.
    “Now, what be your name, handsome, and where be you heading?”
    I had no intention of giving an accurate answer. “Falen,” I answered, with the first name that popped into my head. If I had said Grank or Ragfir, Ifghar or Brakvik, or any one of our harsh names in which sounds grind up against one another, it would have been a dead giveaway that I was from the N’yrthghar. “And I am going toward the desert,” I told her.
    “Oh, now, what do you want to go there for, lovey? Notrees, bunch of low-class owls? Why, you know them owls, they dig holes in the dirt and live in them!”
    Now, Good Owl, perhaps you have already guessed that this Barred Owl, whose name turned out to be Maisy, was not of noble origins herself, and hardly what one might call a high-class owl.
    “Come share a cup with me, lovey,” she said.
    The last thing Maisy needed was another cup of the berry brew. We hopped upon the trunk of a fallen tree. A one-eyed Great Horned was setting out chestnut cups filled with a mash of berries and juice. “What’ll it be, Maisy?” By this time, Maisy was leaning hard against my port wing. “The usual.” She hiccuped softly. “Sorry,” she said to me with what I am sure she thought was a coquettish giggle. She tried snuggling up closer to me but fell over. She picked herself up and muffled a burp. The Great Horned winked his one eye at me.
    Another Screech Owl came up to the trunk. He had a nasty gash on his starboard talon. I could tell immediately that it was a wound made by an ice dagger.
    “Back from the north wars, eh, Flynn?” the Great Horned asked.
    “Yeah, and I got this to prove it!” He held up the wounded talon.
    “Hope you got more than that.”
    “Aye, they pay well, them norther owls.”
    “Where were you fighting?”
    “Up in the Firth of Fangs,” he answered.
    “Any fighting up on the glacier?” I asked.
    “Oh, yeah. A lot.”
    “How’s the king doing?” I asked.
    He shook his head. “Don’t know what to believe. Some say he’s dead. Others say he and the queen have fled. They say she done laid an egg. That there be an heir on the way and they be ‘fraid the hagsfiends will get it.”
    “Dead? Dead, you say?” I demanded of him.
    “I don’t say. But it’s what I hear.”
    I wondered how I had not seen this in the ember. Perhaps it wasn’t true. A Burrowing Owl who had been listening now interrupted. “Oh, the High King is dead, all right. I seen it,” the stranger said.
    “You saw it? How’s that?” I asked, trying to mask my emotions.
    “I come up to fight for the king,” the stranger went on. “You see, me brother was an ice harvester. He done got killed by them hagsfiends that Lord Arrin mustered for the first attacks a while back. I came to fight my brother’s murderers. So I was there at the last battle of the king. I seen what they did to him. Lord Arrin got him cornered,all right, but it was them hagsfiends that finished him, the one called Penryck gave the final…” He hesitated, then lowered his voice. “You know what they do, sir, don’t you?”
    “Yes,” I replied weakly. I knew Penryck. He was a hideous hagsfiend with extremely long tail feathers that stropped the air like razor ice. That and a crest of spiky tufts that grew along his spine gave him an almost reptilian appearance. Indeed, some called him Sklardrog, which in Krakish means “sky dragon.”
    “I saw the King’s head on the scythe. Yes, sir, I did, indeed. On Penryck’s scythe. I believe the lady, good Queen Siv, saw it, too.”
    “Oh, my Glaux!” I gasped. The very thought of Siv seeing this grisly spectacle made my gizzard lock. The stranger went on to give details, which I was too stunned to take in but would remember later.
    And it was too easy to imagine Siv now, the most beautiful Spotted Owl in the world, desperate, possibly alone,