Free The War of the Ember by Kathryn Lasky Page B

lower-echelon owls of the preening unit. His beak was slick with yak butter and he was poking into the yarped pellet heap. Why would a preener be sticking his nose into yarped pellets? Were there ingredients for some kind of beauty treatment to be found? Hardly! The notion was disgusting and would certainly offend the vanity of any dragon owl worth its fancy plumage. Taya watched closely. Her eyes widened. She felt her gizzard clutch. He was arranging pellets carefully around something. What was it? Why doesn’t he leave? She was desperate to see why a preener would be hanging around this offal. Finally, he left.
    As soon as he was out of sight, Taya flew down. She looked about, then began to poke her beak into the area where she had seen the preener. Her beak struck something! With her talons, she began carefully pickingoff the top layer of pellets. When she got to the bottom of the pile of pellets, she noticed the ground had been recently disturbed. So she began scratching at the loose gravelly debris. Within half a minute she saw something all too familiar—the gleaming dark shell of a sterile dragon owl’s egg. At that moment, Taya thought she might faint dead away. Her first instinct was to destroy it. But this had to be part of some terrible plot, a heinous conspiracy, and if the conspirators knew she was on to them, it would make it more difficult to catch them. She first had to tell someone. Not the steward, obviously. For all she knew, he was the owl behind the plot. No, there was only one thing to do.
    She turned, spread her wings, and took off into a blast of cold air. Climbing over the blast with a fury, she began flying as fast as she had ever flown to the one place where she would be listened to: the owlery at the Mountain of Time. The H’ryth would hear her out. The H’ryth was the opposite of the high steward. Humble, meek, with a deep wisdom of the ages that sparkled like green glints in his pale yellow eyes. He was, after all, the direct spiritual descendant of the first H’ryth, Theosang.

CHAPTER TWELVE
“Glaux Speed!”
    T he rain was soft, slanting down from the clouds. Six owls had flown out of the great tree on a course due west across the Sea of Hoolemere. It was the Band, plus two Barn Owls, Soren’s sister, Eglantine, and the young Fiona. They were flying high in the uppermost stria of clouds. The sharp tang of the Hoolemere Sea cut through the rain. “It must be wild down there,” Twilight said.
    It was beyond wild, Soren thought. He had never seen such weather. The dark, roiling clouds were perfect for their purposes and yet the tumult of the storm winds, which always thrilled him in the same way as they had his mentor Ezylryb, now seemed disturbing. He looked up at the nearly black clouds and imagined that they reflected an even greater storm to come.
    Gylfie was navigating as usual. She now flew with a tiny device—a clock that was called a chronometer, which was based on an ancient instrument from the time of the Others, and consulted it often. She now gavea position report: “We are, to the best of my knowledge, over the Shadow Forest.”
    “The Shadow Forest must be getting hammered,” Twilight said.
    “Not many other owls would come out in this,” Digger said.
    “Let alone bury themselves in the upper cloud layer while three owls took care of business,” Gylfie added with a churr. For that, indeed, was the plan that had been worked out in much greater detail since the first strategy session.
    The Band, along with Eglantine and Fiona, were following Ruby, Wensel, and Fritha to the Palace of Mists. They would bury themselves in the stria just above the palace while the three owls collected the embers. When the three ember carriers departed the palace, they would take off in different directions and each would be covered by a pair of owls flying useen above them. One of each pair would be a Barn Owl who could track them, using its exceptional auditory skills, no matter what the