The War of the Ember Read Free Page A

It was hard to understand these bears, with their thick Krakish accent. Thankfully, many of them spoke a mixture of Hoolian and Krakish, and Dumpy was catching a few words here and there.
    “Gunda grunuch and see you in two years…Eeh, Sveep?” Then the most enormous head Dumpy had ever seen poked out of the cave and roared in a clear voice. “Svarr, you are about as romantic as a mess of seal guts. Love ’em and leave, huh?”
    “Well, mating season doesn’t last forever, and I’m getting sleepy. The katabats are blowing early,” replied a male bear who was treading water outside the cave.
    “You just want to skedaddle.”
    “Here, I’ll get you something to eat before I go.” The bear swooped an immense paw through the water and snatched up a large fish. “Bluescale—token of my affection.” He slapped it down on the rock ledge by the cave.
    “Great Ice!” Dumpy sputtered. The two bears looked up.
    “What do you want?” the bears roared.
    “That fish—that fish. Never saw one that color. Sky. I mean blue,” Dumpy said, alighting on the ice floe the male bear had just vacated. “I saw an owl that color. Blue…” Dumpy repeated the word softly, almost as if he were tasting it.
    “I’m out of here,” Svarr said. “Same time, same place, two years from now.” He yawned and began to swim off. “Hope you get some cubs. I’m sure they’ll be cute, just like their mum.”
    The female sighed. “As if he’ll ever bother to visit them.”
    “You mean he’ll never see his cubs?” said Dumpy.
    “Never.”
    “That’s very sad,” Dumpy said. “I mean, he doesn’t know what he’s missing.”
    The bear blinked. “What is your name, puffin?”
    “Dumpy.”
    “Well, Dumpy, mine is Sveep, and I think that is very astute of you.”
    “What’s ‘astute’?”
    “Smart, keen.”
    Now it was Dumpy’s turn to blink. “No…no one has ever called me—or any a puffin—smart, keen, or…or astute.”
    “Well, I’m calling you that. Now tell me, what is this about a blue owl?”
    Dumpy hoped he could give a halfway intelligible recitation of what he had seen. He began slowly. “There is this cave in the Ice Narrows. Two owls came to it. One had these feathers that you call blue, and the other…the other…”
    When Dumpy had finished the story, Sveep was silent for several seconds, then finally she spoke. “This does not sound good. Not good at all. But it’s owl business.”
    “What should I do?”
    “You must seek out the owls,” she said. “The Guardians of Ga’Hoole.”
    Dumpy’s head drooped. For a bird that possessed one of the most comical faces, with its bright orange beak and odd facial markings, Dumpy at this moment looked positively tragic. “I can’t,” he whispered into his breast feathers.
    “What do you mean ‘you can’t’?” Sveep said. She was beginning to feel that seasonal sleepiness that afflicted polar bears at this time of year, when they sensed the first signs of winter, when seconds, then minutes clipped off each day’s light. Nonetheless, she fought the lethargy that beckoned her insistently. This was important. “I repeat, why can’t you seek the owls?” Her words were becoming thick.
    “The Guardians are all so smart. I am so stupid.”
    This was like of jolt of summer sun through her body. “Nonsense! You’re the smartest puffin I’ve ever met!” she said emphatically.
    “Do you mean that?” Dumpy asked.
    “I mean it. You have to go.”
    “I’ll…I’ll think about it!”
    “Don’t think about it—do it!”

CHAPTER THREE
Chimes in the Mist
    D eep in the Shadow Forest, the darkest of all the forests of the Southern Kingdoms, there was a place where the thickly wooded land dipped suddenly into a cleft in the earth. The depression was hardly noticeable from above because the trees were dense, and mist from a waterfall obscured the land itself. Within this cleft, there was a stone palace left from the time of the Others, and in the