Firewing Read Free

said.
    “Not those ones, no.”
    “Yeah,” said Rowan excitedly, turning back to Skye and Falstaff. “But remember those other ones who trapped all the bats and put explosive discs on their bellies and dumped them over the jungle!”
    And then all three were talking at once, retelling Shade’s amazing adventures—as if they’d forgotten Griffin was Shade’s son and that he knew all about this, anyway, and better than them. Griffin scowled, feeling they were somehow stealing his stories, treating them like something that belonged to everyone equally. But he supposed they did, in a way. Within the colony’s echo chamber, his father’s stories reverberated within the sphericalwalls forever, as part of the history of the Silverwings. Maybe Griffin didn’t have any special claim to those stories.
    Especially since he was nothing like his father, anyway. He’d known that almost from the moment he was born. His mother was a hero, but his father was practically a legend. Defeating Goth and the other cannibal bats, making peace with the owls, getting the sun back for the Silverwings. If his father did any more amazing things, the whole echo chamber would explode. When he’d first heard all these stories—from his mother, from the elders, from other newborns sometimes—he’d pictured his father as a giant, with wings that would blot out the moon. Then he’d learned his father was born a runt.
    That made everything much, much worse.
    A runt, and
still
brave and daring. When he was not much older then Griffin, his father had peeked at the sun, outflown owls, visited the echo chamber, tried to save Tree Haven from burning down, been blasted out to sea in a storm and survived. Griffin had had no adventures, had performed no valiant acts. About the most exciting thing he’d experienced was having a squirrel throw a nut at him, and miss.
    In just four more weeks, they’d start their migration south to Hibernaculum, and rendezvous with the males at Stone Hold. He would meet his father for the first time. And what would his father see? A little bat with weird fur. A little bat who wasn’t special in any way, wasn’t brave, or daring, or anything.
    “Rotten Humans,” Falstaff was saying. “We should fly down and scare them.” “We should tangle up their hair,” said Rowan. “We should pee on them,” said Skye.
    When everyone finished laughing there was a short silence, and then:
    “We should steal some fire.”
    No one was more surprised by this than Griffin, for it was he who’d spoken the words. He’d never said anything so outrageous in his life, and now everyone was staring at him, Luna with a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth—almost in a look of admiration.
    “Steal fire,” she said, as if mulling over an interesting possibility.
    “What for?” Falstaff asked.
    Griffin’s eyes darted back to the lapping flames, mind churning. Why had he gone and said that?
    “Well,” he began uncertainly, “the owls have it; why shouldn’t we?”
    A couple of years ago, the owls had used their fire to burn down Tree Haven. That had been his father’s fault. Shade had peeked at the sun, back when it was against the law, and been spotted by sentry owls.
    “But what would we do with it?” Skye asked.
    “All I’m saying,” Griffin repeated, “is we should have what they have. It’s only fair.”
    “But we’re at peace with the birds now.”
    “Doesn’t mean we’ll always be at peace,” Griffin pointed out. “And what about the beasts? Or the Humans? What if they want to make war on us? Isn’t it better we have fire, just in case?”
    They all had their eyes on him, and he thought:
I love this
.
They’re listening to me
. And the words just kept coming. From where, he didn’t know. Then again, this is what he did in his mind, anyway. Imagine things. Sure, they were usually colossal doomsday scenarios, but wasn’t it all really the same? Seeing something, and imagining what might,