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We were both young’uns.” A quiet had settled on the owls. “When he was not a king but an outcast.” Kalo extended her wing and gently touched her brother’s shoulder with the tip. “He saved my mother’s egg. And from that egg came Coryn.”
    “Da, what is happening to Mummy?” a little hatch-ling screeched from where she crouched between her father’s legs.
    “Hush, Siv,” Kalo said.
    “Siv?” The blue owl blinked. “I’ve heard that name. Who is she?”
    “A queen. A queen from long, long ago in the time of the legends and these are her stories.” Kalo was standing on one leg, balancing perfectly as Burrowing Owls could, and with her other talon she clutched to her breast the book entitled Siv, a Queen’s Tale .
    Doc blinked away tears. This was some owl, this Kalo!
    The Striga opened his beak wide and cried out, “Ignite!” There was a great explosion and the creosote bush erupted into a ball of fire. The Striga ripped the book from Kalo’s talons.
    “Who ordered this…this insanity?” Kalo cried above the roar of the flames.
    “Your precious king, madam, your precious king!” the Striga said.
    What! Doc Finebeak thought. Has the entire world gone yoicks? And as if to confirm this, he heard a triumphant, maniacal hooting overhead. A formation of owls from the Blue Brigade was flying over the pyre. Each owl carried a book and dropped it into the fire. The flames seemed to reach up for the books, craving them, thirsting for them, and as each book dropped, the fire raged more fiercely. Random white pages fluttered up like scorched doves, the edges of their wings turning black and curling up until the page was consumed and disintegrated into a swirl of ash.
    Doc Finebeak observed it all. He could not tear his eyes away, he felt that he should not. There must be a witness to this horror. His gizzard was in turmoil as he noted every sickening little detail. Just before a book caught the flames, when it was still fresh to the fire, it wasseized with a series of odd little movements. Its pages, stirred by the heated wind, began to turn by themselves. The glue in the spines burbled and thin tendrils of dark smoke rose. And finally the edges of the pages darkened to amber. The amber turned to black, and then the book consumed itself. Some books, perhaps newer ones in which the glue was fresher, simply exploded.
    Doc Finebeak finally turned his gaze from the fire and looked in a mixture of horror and curiosity upon the face of the Striga. Nearly featherless now, the puckered skin was bathed in the shifting orange light of the flames. His yellow eyes glimmered and his beak hung open as he watched, transfixed by the terrible beauty of this forest of flames.
    “He’s mad,” Doc Finebeak murmured. I must take Plonkie far away, as far away as possible , he thought. Maybe to the Northern Kingdoms, who knows? She could become a gad-feather. Those are her roots . And the Snowy knew that if they were burning books now, what would be next, owls? And the first owls to be burned would probably be artists, great artists like Madame Plonk, the love of his life.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mists of Ambala
    I was expecting you,” came the familiar voice. The vaporous scarves of swirling mist that had seconds before seemed so random sorted themselves into spots, patches of light and dark, and gradually into a shape, a shape not unlike that of a Spotted Owl. Before them, perched on the edge of the huge eagle’s nest, was the elusive, ethereal owl known as Mist by most, except for a very few who called her by her original name, Hortense.
    “Hortense,” Soren blurted out. Gylfie and Soren had come to know her years before when they were both imprisoned in St. Aggie’s.
    A glimmer shivered through the vapors. “Ooooh!” Hortense said. “It’s so nice to hear my real name. You know, no one calls me that anymore and yet there are all these little Hortenses flying about in Ambala.”
    It was true, of course, that in Ambala the