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changed colors depending on the angle of the sun. He was much more like the owls of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree than he was his fellow kraals. The kraals realized this, too, and regularly left Flinn out of important activities. No one at the tree knew that Fritha was the daughter of a kraal, or that she would have become a kraal herself if it weren’t for her da sending her away. It wasn’t exactly that she was ashamed of where she came from…well, maybe she was, just a little bit.
    As a newly arrived young owl at the tree, Fritha didn’t dare talk about her kraal heritage. The Guardians’ infrequent encounters with the kraals had never been amicable. The kraals’ reputation, she learned, was worse than she had imagined. She had meant to tell her fellow Guardians the truth about her identity someday; she wanted to let them know where she came from and who she was. But night after night, season after season, she never found the opportunity or the courage. And now, she found herself leading this double life—sneaking away from the tree once or twice a year to see her father, inevitably telling lies in the process. With each visit, the lies and half-truths weighed more and more heavily on her gizzard.
    As Fritha watched her da fiddle with his pigments, she wondered again why he had chosen to send her away to a life so different from his own.
    “Da,” she began gently, “why did you send me to the tree? Why didn’t you keep me here and raise me as a kraal?”
    Flinn didn’t seem surprised by Fritha’s question. He put down his mortar and pestle, and paused before he began his long answer.
    “I was just a young owl myself when I first learned of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree,” he said. “I had heard of it in songs sung by passing gadfeathers, but didn’t know it was a real place with real owls until a raiding party returned one night with a certain little owl as a captive.” He seemed lost in his memories as he spoke.
    Flinn remembered clearly, he had been painting his feathers at a dye basin—red and turquoise. As he admired his own artistic creation, he spotted in his ice mirror a group of owls flying toward the lair. Ah! Finally! They’re doing it right! The four kraals were flying in the formation he invented, correctly this time. He called it the VAT, short for Vacuum-assisted Transport. It was one of his proudest inventions. He got the idea when he was flying with a group of Snowies through some rough winds the previous winter. Being a Pygmy Owl in these parts had its challenges, and the katabats were one of the biggest ones. He realized, as he flew with the four much larger owls, that if they all positioned themselves a certain way, they created a small still space in their midst where the heaviest winds were blocked. He was able to get through the katabats that way. With further experimentation, he found that he could expand upon the idea. If the owls flying around the periphery flapped their wings in a certain rhythm, they created a vacuum in the space between them. Whatever was in the middle got sucked along. Flinn was very excited to tell the other kraals of his discovery. He had thought it would be a great way to transport injured owls or fledglings and smaller owls who couldn’t fly through heavy gusts. But the kraals saw it only as a way to transport captives. Typical.
    Flinn wondered who was being brought to the rock cell in the VAT. He saw that the owl in the middle of the formation was very small, even smaller than he was. It must have been an Elf Owl, he decided. An owl that size was in for a bad time in the Pirates’ Lair. Until now, Flinn had been one of the smallest owls in the area. This prisoner’s diminutive size intrigued him.
    From the main room of the Pirates’ Lair, Flinn could see into the stone cell where the Elf Owl was being kept. He chatted with the guards and they gave up all the information like gadfeathers at a grog tree. The prisoner was called Gylfie, and she came from the