(GoG Book 06) The Burning by Kathryn Lasky

Author:Kathryn Lasky [Lasky, Kathryn]
Language: abk
Format: epub
Tags: Children's Books
ISBN: 9780439405621
Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks
Published: 2004-11-01T08:00:00+00:00

The pirates’ lair was not in the icy cliffs of the high peaks but rather was a series of ground nests in dens between and underneath boulders. Gylfie was kept in a rock cell and guarded at all hours of the day. She was surprised to see that the land was not all glacier but a vast spongy surface covered with mosses and lichens and low shrublike plants. She had read about land formations like this; she thought it was called tundra. Beneath the tundra, the land was frozen solid and never melted but on top there was a short growing season when berries could be harvested. At night, the wolves howled, which she found very unnerving being confined to the ground and never allowed to fly. She could, however, peer out into the main dens of the pirates’ lair and what she saw intrigued her. These pirates might be clever with their windless vacuums for transporting prisoners but they were also incredibly vain. Plates of what they called in Krakish “issen vintygg,” or “deep ice,” had been polished to a mirrorlike finish, and the pirates spent endless hours painting their feathers and admiring their reflections in these ice mirrors. The dyes they used were made from the berries and the few sedges and grasses that grew in the summertime on the tundra.

Gylfie began to think hard about vanity and mirrors. She and the rest of the band had had some experience with mirrors, and she knew that vanity deceived, and was not a strength but a weakness. Long ago, when Gylfie, Soren, Twilight, and Digger had been on their long and arduous journey to find the Great Ga’Hoole Tree, it had been the Mirror Lakes in the region known as The Beaks that had nearly been their undoing. Transfixed by their own images reflected in the lakes’ surfaces, the band had almost forgotten how to be owls. They had forgotten their purpose, their goals, and all that they had risked and nearly died for simply because they had fallen under the spell of vanity. If Mrs. Plithiver, Soren’s old nest-maid snake from Tyto, had not been there and given them a blistering scolding, well, there was no telling what might have happened. Then a phrase came back to Gylfie from a book by Violet Strangetalon she had once read: The folly of vanity is the curse of the peacock, a nearly flightless bird, happy to remain so and to strut about for the admiration of earthbound creatures. Their appalling ostentation is equaled only by their appalling stupidity. There was also something else from that book that was quite haunting but Gylfie could not remember it.

She peered out of her cell. The two guards were gabbing about their new tail-feather treatments and posing for each other in front of one of the ice mirrors. They were big, four times bigger than Gylfie, and they carried ice daggers, and Gylfie knew they could use them. But surely there had to be a way out of here.

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