Free The First Collier by Kathryn Lasky

whisper as she looked down on the egg, her own face now basking in the luminous light it gave off—“imagine using this precious egg as a thing for evil.”
    “It is unimaginable.”
    Siv gave a little shake of her shoulder feathers and straightened herself. She blinked and looked directly atme. “You will take the egg and care for it and raise the chick, then?”
    “With all the care and love that I can give. I promise you this, Siv. And if there is a night when you can come to see him…” She startled when I said “him,” and I nodded and went on, “Siv, if there is a time when the wars are finished and there are no more hagsfiends, I promise I shall send for you.”
    “Yes, of course, I know you will.” Her eyes had begun to stream with tears. She looked down at the egg, and it almost seemed that it was composed entirely of light. It was incandescent and appeared to have no substance save for the unearthly glow that emanated from it. And if the egg was nothing but light, Siv herself had become pure grief.
    “Where will you take it, Grank?” she asked.
    I breathed a sigh of relief. She had not sensed where I would take this egg.
    “I can’t tell you, Siv. If I told you, it would endanger not just the egg, but you as well.”
    “I don’t matter,” she said quietly.
    “Siv, don’t say that. You do matter.”
    “I feel as if I am nothing without my egg, without my mate.”
    “Now, now, milady.” Myrrthe tried to console her mistress, putting a snow-white wing lightly on her shoulder.
    “Siv,” I said. “You are still a mother, no matter where your chick is. You brought this egg into the world. You shall always be a mother, just as you shall always be a queen.”
    She looked up around her and murmured, “A queen imprisoned in her own Ice Palace.”
    At just that moment, there was a loathsome stench. We all froze and then, suddenly, the ice was washed in an eerie yellow glow.
    “Hagsfiends!” Siv whispered. “Hagsfiends!”
    “Noooo!” A shuddering cry came from Myrrthe, but I turned and saw her swell to twice her size. It was as if a large cumulus cloud had descended into the Ice Cliff Palace.

CHAPTER TWELVE
To the Bitter Sea
    A t the moment the word “hagsfiend” was uttered, Siv’s eyes went through an incredible transformation. The amber beam hardened, as hard as the metals that Fengo and I had extracted from rocks, as hard as the strong ice from which we made our swords. She grabbed an ice scimitar that had been H’rath’s and rushed out into the tunnel, ordering Myrrthe to go in an opposite direction. “You know where we’ll meet, Myrrthe.” It was not a question.
    “Yes, milady,” Myrrthe replied, and picked up a small ice dagger for herself.
    I knew immediately what Siv planned. She was going to decoy them, distract them. I reached for the egg and, clutching it with my talons, made for a back passageway out of the Ice Cliff Palace. I had no idea if I would ever see Siv again. But only moments before I had said that a mother whose chick was threatened was fiercer and more violent than any hagsfiend. The time to prove this had come.
    Once I had left the Ice Cliff Palace, I headed across the Bay of Fangs on a straight course for the Bitter Sea. There was an island there with a dense forest and trees with good hollows where I thought the egg and I would be safe. In general, owls of the N’yrthghar nest in ground burrows or the ice caves of a glacier or the many cliffs of ice along the coastline. We do not like tree nests. We prefer the solidness of ice and find the dank hollows and swaying of the trees in the wind uncomfortable. So I knew that this isolated place would be good for minding the egg until it hatched. There was also another reason I wanted to go to the forest: I had brought with me from the Beyond an interesting object that Fengo and I had made out of the metal we had drawn from rock. We had experimented with it, heating it up and then bending it. We had succeeded in