Book 12 - The Golden Tree by Kathryn Lasky Read Free Book Online Page B

your holy ways.
Give us comfort, let tumult cease,
bless each owl so safe we'l keep.
We sing m you, your glowing splendor
72 Radiant with magen's grace
So we ask that peace be with us,
and in you our trust do place.
Madame Plonk was in ful voice. The song was
    quite beautiful, except for the words, Otulissa
thought. And what a bunch of' racdrops they were! Look at Madame Plonk, strutting about in the air. One would have, thought her a peacock. Yet it wasn't even her own feathers she was showing off It was the frinking cloak she'd gotten from Trader Mags, It was purple - royal purple as she liked to remind everyone - and it was trimmed in ermine. ' Ermine is to eat, not to wear!' Otulissa muttered. Another owl. a Barred, swung her head around and blinked furiously at her.
"What did you say?' the owl cal ed Quinta hissed. "I said" - Otulissa said furiously - "Strumina Von Fleet would stare.'
"Huh? I thought you said, something about eating ermine."
"No, not at al ," Otulissa lied. "Strumina Von Fleet, you might not know her. An ancient sage from the Northern
Kingdoms, known as much for her unparal eled elegance as for her bril iant mind. A relative of mine,
    actual y. Thirteenth cousin once removed."
73 "Sssh!" someone else hissed, ' It's almost time for the Ultimate Elevation."
Ultimate Elevation, my butt feathers! Otulissa thought, but she did not say a word this time. One could not be too careful these days.
Something strange had befal en the tree. It had real y begun before the Band left but she had not taken notice of it then. The tree seemed to have entered a phase of eternal golden glory. But no one at that time had likened it to the glow of the ember itself. If anything, they spoke of it as a lingering tinge of color from the summer. But now owls compared it to the glow of the ember. It was, they said, as if the radiance of the ember had infused the very fabric of the tree. New nest-maid guilds had been started. One was a choir, the Choir of the Ember, that sang only songs composed for praise of the ember. Another group of nest-maids combined with a smal er group of owls wrote these hymns of praise. Owls who had once spent their days practicing their fighting skil s with battle claws and ice swords were now painting and composing poetry. And young'uns
    were learning at astonishingly accelerated rates.
Hatchlings rescued from forest fires were learning bow to read almost before their flight feathers had fledged, Fritha, a Pygmy Owl, was wel into a 62 74 study of higher magnetics, reading texts that had stumped Otulissa when she was much older.
Al this should have warmed Otulissa's gizzard. But she had felt a creeping dread. Because along with al this knowledge too many of the owls of the tree seemed to be growing more and more
obsessed with the ember. The knowledge was not il uminating but seemed shadowed in a strange way - shadowed by the glow of the ember, if such a thing could be. This in itself was somewhat of a puzzle, a conundrum for Otulissa. For like al owls she valued the dark, the shadows. Darkness, the night, shades, and shadows had always been il uminating for owls. They did not fear the times when the moon dwenked to nothingness. They reveled in the long winter nights when the days shortened to mere hours. But now she was begining to think of shadows as dangerous things. She herself had begun to read deeply into philosophical texts about
    begun to read deeply into philosophical texts about
the meaning of light and the absence of light, of darkness in the world of owls.
From her perch in the hol ow, she glanced about and caught sight of Eglantine peering with an intensely worried look at her best friend, Primrose, who had been asked for this ceremony to fly with a thimbleful of ashes shed by the ember. The little Pygmy Owl was doing a very good
63 75 job of it as she turned and banked in a tight circle around the "en-hol owed" ember, casting its ashes in what Otulissa had heard was cal ed the "flight path of