Free Guardians of Ga'Hoole: To Be A King by Kathryn Lasky Page B

the wits and instincts for collecting information and passing it along. Invariably, they did have these qualities and were thrilled to be of service to the noble young king. Hoole recognized many of them from the battle, but luckily they did not recognize him in his gadfeather disguise.
    As he, the Snow Rose, and Phineas flew into the night, Hoole reflected on what he had learned so far. There definitely were hagsfiends around. But no one knew quite where. There were stories of a black feather here and there, or a rank crowish scent carried on a breeze. There were sightings of the queer black pellets they yarped.
    But it was not only the information that Hoole and his friends picked up that was important. While they had been traveling, Hoole had the sudden inspiration that some of the more promising smiths should be encouraged to fly to the great tree to train under the watchful eye of Grank and Theo, when Theo returned to the tree. He let this information be revealed in a casual chatty way. “I hear,” he said to one Rogue smith in Tyto, “that at the great tree, the one they call the Great Ga’Hoole Tree, which was named for the king, that one can learn colliering and smithing from the masters themselves.” In this way Hoole managed to send a half dozen promising Rogue smiths and colliers to the tree to begin their training. There would be battle claws aplenty when the time was ripe!
    On the border of Silverveil and The Barrens, Hoole, Phineas, and the Snow Rose had a rendezvous with Joss. Joss reported that Grank was delighted with the influx of smiths and colliers. There were now four forges going, with two smiths to a forge, so the supply of battle claws had quadrupled. New recruits for the invasion were arriving every day, and Lord Rathnik and his lieutenants were training them in the use of ice weapons. The ice weapons themselves were surviving well due to the cool weather and the preservative powers of the milkberry vines.
    Hoole and Phineas, who for so long had watched Theo at his forge, learned to discreetly throw out suggestions and pointers while still being careful to conceal their true identities. It was in this way that Hoole, Phineas, and the Snow Rose forged their own strong bonds with these owls. Most important, they wanted to know if any hags-fiends had been spotted in the Southern Kingdoms who were known to be aloof, reluctant even to reveal their name. Repeatedly the answer was no. Not one had been spotted. But in his gizzard, Hoole had twinges of doubt.
    “But we would have smelled something if they had been around,” Phineas said.
    “Oh, that crowish odor!” exclaimed the Snow Rose. She would never forget the terrible stench of hagsfiends in the Battle of the Beyond. “You never get used to it.”
    “But owls don’t have the best sense of smell,” Hoole argued.
    And then one night when they were visiting a Rogue smith in Ambala, Hoole saw something in the fire there that made his gizzard lurch. It was a hagsfiend! Hoole knew it as certainly as he had known anything.
    Phineas immediately realized that Hoole had spotted danger in the fire. The Rogue smith was looking at Hoole peculiarly. “What’s wrong with your friend?” In that same moment, the first wave of the crowish stench filled thedarkening night, and then the blackness of that night began to fade into yellow, and the yellow grew stronger as the outer edge of a fyngrot rolled in like a rising tide.
    “We have no weapons!” Phineas whispered. They must do something before the hagsfiend launched its half-hags with their poisonous loads. To do that, however, the hagsfiend had to be in range. It was the fyngrot, which was cast like a deadly net, that brought a victim into range and stilled the victim so the half-hags could take aim.
    “No ice sabers,” said the Rogue smith.
    Hoole seized a poker from the forge. It had the sphere of molten iron at its tip. Time seemed to slow and events happened in a dreamlike, liquidy way. But