Guardians of Ga'Hoole 04 - The Siege

nuts were running low. Soren and his friends had all grown thinner. There was no doubt about it. Their feathers were less lustrous, their eyes somewhat dimmer. When the portions in the dining hollow had first started to dwindle, they would recall past meals they had eaten.
    “Oh, remember the milkberry tart, the one Cook made with the maple syrup?” someone would say.
    “I’d settle for just the maple syrup,” someone else would say. And so it would go. But now no one talkedabout such things. They were still hungry—hungrier than ever—but they had somehow grown used to the gnawing in their stomachs. To wish for a milkberry tart seemed frivolous. They now only wished to live and not starve to death.
    And when the backbone of winter broke, as it would in a few weeks, when the ground began to thaw and the owls’ prey began to emerge from their burrows and holes, would they even be able to hunt? The enemy was out with their reinforcements of hireclaws, and they had encircled the great tree. They would be the first to pounce on the emerging prey. They were tightening the noose around the tree to cause starvation. If the Guardians could not fly over their usual hunting grounds, they would surely starve and the enemy would grow fat.
    “What are you doing, Soren?” Twilight asked. “Hoping for a bug to eat?” Soren had been scratching in the dirt beneath the perches of their hollow. He had felt too weak to even loft himself to his usual perch, which was much better for holding conversations than staying on the floor. But no one talked much these days. He had begun by scratching idly with his talon. But a design seemed to emerge.
    “What is that?” Gylfie said, coming over to look.
    Soren blinked. “It’s us.”
    “What do you mean?” she asked.
    “You see, here’s the tree and we are all in the tree, and here is the enemy, all around us. They can’t get in, because we don’t have any weak points in the tree, but we can’t get out. As Ezylryb said, this defensive strategy isn’t very mobile.”
    “In other words, we’re stuck,” Twilight said. “So what else is new?”
    “But what if we could get out?” Soren asked. Soren felt Digger stir beside him.
    “Digger,” said Soren. “What if we could dig out? Could we burrow out with our forces and then deploy our troops to two points, and catch them between us?” Soren lifted his foot in the air and snapped his two front talons together in the same quick movement used to catch bats on the wing. Their gizzards all began to twitch with nervous excitement. Then Gylfie said the word, the name that made it all seem possible.
    “Octavia!”
    “A pincer movement! Of course, I think it might be possible,” the old snake who tended the nests of both Madame Plonk and Ezylryb spoke in her slow ponderous manner with the inflections of the Northern Kingdoms. Octavia, unlike the other snakes who all had rosy to palepink scales, had a greenish-blue hue. She was a Kielian snake from Stormfast Island in the Bay of Kiel. Kielian snakes were known for their incredible musculature. They could actually dig holes.
    It was Ezylryb who had seen how useful these snakes, who were not blind like the rosy-scaled nest-maid snakes, could be in battle. He had come up with the idea for a stealth force of Kielian snakes that could tunnel into enemy territory. This was during a period when the War of the Ice Claws was raging in the Northern Kingdoms. On one of her missions in the stealth force, Octavia was blinded and Ezylryb lost not only his mate, but one talon. Ezylryb and Octavia, both maimed by war, had withdrawn from the military life and sought refuge for many years on an island in the Bitter Sea where the Glauxian Brothers had a retreat. Now, however, it was war again.
    “Would Ezylryb think this could work?” Soren asked tentatively.
    “You’ll never know until you ask him. I could be of help in the tunneling, even though I’m not quite as fit as I used to be,” said Octavia.
    “Well, there are all the digging units, the Burrowing Owls,” Digger said excitedly.
    “Yes, yes,” Octavia said slowly. But she seemed to hesitate as if there were something more she wanted to say.
    “Should we go to Ezylryb now and ask him? Should we ask the parliament?” Digger asked.
    “No!” Octavia spoke abruptly, then coiled up and swung her head. “Now listen carefully. Say nothing of this to anybody, not even Otulissa or Martin or any of your other Chaw of Chaw mates.