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Chapter Text

“Hollykit, from this day until you receive your warrior name, you will be known as Hollypaw,” Fireheart says. The words do not get easier the third time he says them. He feels exposed on top of the Highrock, his fur and bones laid bare before his Clan, because this is not his duty. It shouldn’t even be a duty — it is an honor, naming new apprentices for one’s Clan, but Bluestar’s mind has descended so far into madness that he cannot even be aware if she knows that a ceremony is occurring. Lionpaw stands with Brackenfur, his fur puffed out and his too-amber eyes bright; Jaypaw looks down and away, and Cinderpelt’s eyes are burning with something like reproach, with something like rage, but Fireheart pushes it down and away — down, down, down, until all he feels is the sinking emptiness of being trapped under ice, of coming up for air but inhaling water instead.

Bluestar was his mentor, a shining beacon of light in a time where jeers sank like claws into his pelt, when he wasn’t sure if he had a place in a Clan at all. And now she’s a shell, hollow and torn asunder by claws she should have been safe from, had every reason to trust. Tigerstar is gone, yes, but his legacy remains in more than one way — Bluestar’s visage, shattered and aching; Goldenflower’s level glares, while even her own father spits at his grandkits; Lionpaw’s eyes, so eerily familiar that they are nothing less than a copy, sent by StarClan to test his resolve; Hollypaw’s pelt, where every stripe is a match… and, worst of all, her ambition, the way her eyes gleam when she looks at the leader’s den, the way she stares up at Fireheart when he assigns patrols, the way she becomes Hollystar in all the kit-games she plays.

This is the reason he has to take her on. This is the reason no one else can mentor her. If she is, at her core, the cat he thinks she might be — well. He won’t make Pinestar’s mistake. “As Cloudtail is a warrior,” he continues, his tongue numb and his posture held carefully loose and his ears pricked forward, not pinned — not pinned, not pinned, not pinned — “I am able to take an apprentice. Hollypaw, I will do my best to pass on all I have learned to you.”

Instead of looking to his new apprentice first, as he should, Fireheart glances to where Goldenflower sits, alone now that her kits have left her side. Her eyes are dark and unreadable, her gaze fixed to her paws; when she lifts her head, her green eyes gleam with warning.

Fireheart swallows, turning his attention deliberately to his new apprentice. Logically, the only thing Hollypaw should be feeling right now — the only thing any kit should be feeling when they’re given their apprentice name — is pure, uninhibited glee. But Hollypaw does not run to him, nor does her tail lift joyfully in the air. Instead, she picks her way deliberately toward him, her head down and her green eyes dull with wariness. Fireheart feels a prickle of guilt as he leans down to touch her nose, but he pushes it down viciously. She’s the daughter of Tigerstar, he reminds himself. She shares his pelt, and she shares his ambition. She’s dangerous. And yet, as Hollypaw trembles, as she finally lifts her nose and presses it delicately to Fireheart’s, as she immediately ducks her head and moves away, tail nearly between her legs, Fireheart feels guilt.

Hollypaw comes to a halt at Sunningrocks, held suddenly shock-still. Her gaze takes in the rocks themselves, baked warm even in weak light, and then her head turns to the river and does not move again. The leaf-fall breeze ruffles her thick fur, muddling the tabby stripes into something that almost resembles the river itself. Looking at her like this — when her eyes are cast away from him — only accentuates her resemblance to her father, and Fireheart winces behind her. Hollypaw doesn’t seem to notice — she just continues to stare, across rushing water and into the clumps of foliage and trees beyond, unscarred by the fire that had almost taken her life.

“This is Sunningrocks,” Fireheart says, hoping that the confusion he’s feeling isn’t threaded through his voice. He’s at a loss, honestly, as to why she’s staring so intently into RiverClan territory — she hadn’t done this when they’d begun the trek along its border, but now that they’d arrived here, it’s as if she had somehow become a different cat — as if some river spirit had transfixed her, frozen her to the earth.

It’s quiet for a long moment. The rush of the river and the tapping of branches fill Fireheart’s ears, but still he rocks side to side, uncomfortable at the display. Just as he’s about to order his apprentice onward, because what good could she be doing here, staring into RiverClan’s territory, she speaks.

“Silverstream died here,” Hollypaw says, “didn’t she?”

Fireheart blinks, thrown. “Yes,” he confirms. He follows her gaze, then, but he doesn’t see any RiverClan warriors, anyone who would give his apprentice pause.

“Featherkit and Stormkit are over there,” Hollypaw says next. “Or—Featherpaw and Stormpaw?” She pauses, turns to him, brow muddled. “I don’t remember them, not really,” she confides, “but I miss them. They were… they were here, and then they were gone, and I don’t know what to do with that.”

“Their mother was a RiverClan queen,” Fireheart says, surprising himself when his voice comes out almost gently.

Hollypaw looks at her paws. “That doesn’t mean they weren’t my siblings, once. Do you think they’re happy there? Do—do you think they’re happier there than they could be here?”

Fireheart sighs, sitting down and wrapping his tail around himself. “I don’t know,” he says. “But I do know that Silverstream was loved, and that her cousins will look after her kits like they’re their own. And—you won’t remember him, but my friend Graystripe went with them. Being their father was more important to him than staying with his birth Clan. That’s what family does, I suppose,” he adds, even if… even if he doesn’t believe it, not in the same way Clan cats do. “They give up what they have to to keep you safe.”

Hollypaw huffs something like a laugh. “You mean fathers don’t usually abandon their children to try to take over a Clan?” she asks. There’s amusement in her tone, but it’s overlaid by bitterness.

Fireheart flinches. Hollypaw watches the motion, but her gaze gives nothing away — it’s hollow, barren, and despite the color, Fireheart sees her father in their cold depths.

Hollypaw smiles without humor. “That’s a no, then,” she decides, and turns to look back over the river. Her claws are curled in the mud, and Fireheart gets to his paws and moves away, to where he knows Silverstream is buried. He thinks often about Graystripe, but very little about the queen he’d loved — or the kits she’d borne, the kits Goldenflower had nursed alongside her own. “Watch over them,” he whispers to the grit at his paws. There are smooth stones here, stacked deliberately; Fireheart knows they come from RiverClan, but can’t bring himself to be angry for the trespassing that brought them here. Didn’t RiverClan deserve to grieve?

“Is this the spot she’s buried?” Hollypaw asks from behind him. Fireheart startles, leaping up into the air and whirling around, his front claws outstretched. But it’s his apprentice who greets him, not an enemy warrior. She’s backing away even as he bares his teeth, her own claws sheathed even as her body language closes.

Fireheart’s heart races. “Yes,” he confirms, and, with a conscious effort, he draws his claws back in.

Hollypaw’s eyes flick to the stones, and then she disappears into the rushes, leaving Fireheart to gape after her. “Come back!” he orders, dashing after her. “You’ll cross the RiverClan border!” A bolt of anger runs through him, because of course he couldn’t trust Tigerstar’s daughter to listen, to obey, to stay put!

And then… and then he’s reminded, for a painful moment, of tearing after Cinderpelt as she flew from place to place, never stopping, never considering where she was going — and where had that led her? To the Thunderpath, to a trap that Tigerstar had set, to an injury so debilitating that she could never be a warrior.

Your fault, he thinks at Hollypaw as she emerges back, a black, river-worn stone held in her maw. Your blood. His claws start to unsheathe as she approaches — with Tigerstar’s blood running through her veins, she’s taller than him already, even if she’s untrained. But she passes by him harmlessly, unaware of the blood rushing through his ears, and sets the stone in the place Fireheart had once sat. “Watch over them,” she whispers, a prayer and a pleading, leaving the offering and backing away. She looks over the river one last time, and then she comes to Fireheart’s side, looking at him expectantly, as if she hadn’t just fished a stone from the river for a dead cat. As if she hadn’t just asked a dead queen to look over the kits that had once nursed at Hollypaw’s side.

Fireheart stares at his apprentice for a long moment, and then he leads on.

As soon as Hollypaw has emerged behind him and into the clearing, she’s swarmed by her brothers, and not just the two who’d shared a nest with her. Swiftpaw, full-grown and muscled and definitely dangerous, with an attitude that could spell danger for any cat in range of his vitriol, is nudging his sister’s side enthusiastically, asking about her first day out in the territories.

Fireheart watches this, a little stunned, because — because, well, Swiftpaw seems to hate everything and everyone who doesn’t happen to own the names ‘Longtail’ and ‘Goldenflower,’ and somewhere along the line he’d forgotten that the two litters were related.

Hollypaw’s stiff posture melts into something relaxed, and Fireheart maybe feels like he’s intruding, but he can’t look away, because did Tigerstar ever look this relaxed even once in all the time Fireheart knew him?

Yes, his mind supplies. Around Whitestorm and Lionheart and Bluestar. Until he put his claws to her throat.

“How was your first day?” Swiftpaw asks, ruffling the fur on top of Hollypaw’s head. “Drive off any rogues?”

Hollypaw giggles, pushing against the black-and-white tom with a shoulder. “Not hardly!” she exclaims. “What, did you do that on your first day?”

Swiftpaw puffs himself up. “Of course I did,” he said, and Fireheart rankles until he realizes that — stars above — Swiftpaw is joking. “I chased a big hairy stray all the way back to the mountains!”

“Liar!” Lionpaw accuses, flopping on top of his brother.

 Even at six moons, Lionpaw is as bulky as a full-grown cat; Swiftpaw groans as the golden tom falls on him, but takes it good-naturedly. “Prove it,” he challenges, pushing his brother off with one black paw.

Jaypaw hisses with annoyance as Lionpaw sags dramatically onto his shoulders instead. “Can’t you see that my day isn’t over?” he asks, gesturing to the herbs between his paws.

“Oh, please,” Lionpaw says. “I know Cinderpelt released you ages ago. You just want to impress her. Admit it,” he adds to Jaypaw’s sour expression.

“I will do no such thing,” Jaypaw says delicately, and then sighs. “Pass the jay, will you?”

Obligingly, Hollypaw slides the prey over, and her brother takes a grumpy bite. “Better?” she teases him.

“No,” Jaypaw says, spitting feathers at her.

Hollypaw reels back, laughing, and steals a bite from the jay as Jaypaw tries to ward her off with sheathed claws.

Fireheart’s stomach growls at the sight; it’s only then that he realizes that his chest is aching, his limbs weak and his paws feeling like stone. He itches to turn around, to leave the happy siblings behind, but he keeps the group in sight as he heads to the fresh-kill pile instead, dragging a stale-looking mouse from the bottom. He’s deputy now: he has to do his part, and that includes eating old fresh-kill. And monitoring potential threats. The conversation seems normal, but that might not last. What can he do but watch and wait?

So if Fireheart settles just within hearing range of the apprentices, that’s his business; if he wants to hear what they say, that’s just him protecting his Clan. He deserves to protect them, has to protect them, and… Tigerstar might not have been Swiftpaw’s blood father, but he’d still had a bit of a paw in raising him, and this was why he was not yet a warrior. It was a fluke — his assigned mentor and a stepfather he hadn’t asked for had kept him an apprentice long after he should have been a warrior. In fact, he hadn’t been apprenticed long after Fireheart himself had become a warrior, and Fireheart… well, he’d become a warrior early.

His pelt itches with guilt as he moves slightly closer, now able to hear the group’s words clearly.

“—dead queen, Hollypaw? What’re the dead going to do for them?” Lionpaw asks as he tears past the feathers of a robin.

“I just wanted her to look after Feather and Storm,” Hollypaw defends. “They were our siblings once, if you care to remember.”

“Barely,” Lionpaw returns. “I don’t even know how you remem—”

“Lay off your sister,” Swiftpaw’s voice cuts in, “or I’ll have to squish you.”

“Squish me?” Lionpaw squeaks. “I’m bigger than you!”

“I’ll help,” Jaypaw says darkly. There are still leaves at his paws, and he stares down at them almost as if he can see them, ears twitching as he sorts and unsorts and sorts again.

“You’re tiny!” Lionpaw says, using one enormous paw to knock him off his center of balance.

Jaypaw makes a sound of annoyance, and then it’s Hollypaw who’s first to tackle Lionpaw, her striped tail streaming behind her as she bowls him into Jaypaw’s pile.

“Watch it!” Jaypaw protests. He makes a cursory effort to gather his supplies back up, but then Lionpaw rolls his sister over and the leaves are crushed beneath their weight. The blind tom sighs, his brow furrowing; seemingly with nothing left to do, he tackles Hollypaw. Soon it’s an all-out brawl in the clearing, and disapproving eyes emerge from dens and from the outskirts of camp.

Is this what siblings do? Fireheart thinks, blinking at the commotion. He can’t remember his own siblings, save Princess; all he can conjure of them are vague memories of fur color and snippets of voice. He has Cloudtail, but Cloudtail has his own life now; and besides, he’s Fireheart’s nephew, not his sibling. For a long moment, Fireheart wonders what life would be like if Princess had joined him in the forest, feeling cold from head to tail.

Finally, he looks up to see that Swiftpaw has joined the scuffle. He’s smaller than his siblings already, but much more well-muscled, an adult cat to near-kittens. He takes Jaypaw down first, though the gray tabby doesn’t seem like he wants to put up much of a fight; Lionpaw is next, Swiftpaw using his bulk against him until he trips over his paws. And then there’s Hollypaw, the only one left, and she’ll be a brilliant fighter one day. She has the instincts, she’s holding her own, she’s… in the dirt, her pelt coming away as light as Runningwind’s.

(It isn’t until later that Fireheart realizes that to train Hollypaw at fighting is to train an ambitious cat to kill.)

Having successfully wiped the floor with his siblings, Swiftpaw stretches out over all of them, which is a feat in and of itself. It’s one medium-sized apprentice against two larger and one smaller, but he makes it work, placing his face just at the base of Lionpaw’s ear.

“Squished,” Swiftpaw says, licking the inside of his brother’s ear. Lionpaw lets out a vaguely disgusted noise, but lets his head fall to the ground in defeat.

“You’ve got to teach us that sweeping move!” Hollypaw pipes up from the dirt, and then Swiftpaw’s purring, and then so is Hollypaw, and then Lionpaw and finally Jaypaw, and Goldenflower wanders over and starts cleaning the excessive dirt off of his apprentice’s head, and the scene is so innocent that he wonders why his chest is burning, why he feels like he needs to sink his claws into bark and stone and earth.

I’m jealous, he realizes suddenly. He hadn’t been listening to them to protect anyone or anything; he’d started that way, perhaps, but then the warmth had crawled into his muscles and the coldness of being alone had traveled through his spine. I’m jealous of apprentices. I’m jealous of Tigerstar’s kits.

The thought sits in his belly like a stone for longer than he cares to admit.

“Swiftpaw,” Goldenflower says mildly, her voice open and friendly, “I think I hear a squirrel in that thicket.” She inclines her head toward it, and her son perks up, looking toward it with enthusiasm Fireheart doesn’t usually see on him.

The black-and-white apprentice blinks back at his mentor, and Longtail — in a show of gentleness that doesn’t surprise Fireheart, not really, not when it comes to Swiftpaw — chuckles and bunts Swiftpaw’s side. The apprentice is taller and broader than Longtail has ever been; it hits Fireheart yet again that Swiftpaw has been an apprentice practically since Fireheart himself has been a warrior; that Cloudtail hadn’t even been an apprentice for any standard length. A pang of guilt hits him as the two disappear into the underbrush, and he lifts his gaze to express something — anything — like it to Goldenflower, but when he meets her green gaze, it’s already burning.

“I hope you don’t take me for a fool, Fireheart,” Goldenflower hisses, her voice low, as soon as Fireheart’s eyes have caught her own. “I know exactly why you apprenticed Hollypaw to yourself, and it had nothing to do with her promise.”

Fireheart comes to a sudden halt, his fur fluffing out. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he says. His voice is an attempt at being measured, but it’s largely a failure, and he wonders if he really sounds as reedy as an apprentice or if he’s imagining it.

Whatever the case, Goldenflower ignores him. “Plenty of kits want to be leader someday,” she says adamantly, her face twisted into something both pained and resolute. “Just because Tigerstar went about it the wrong way doesn’t mean that Hollypaw will do the same.”

“Pinestar—”

“Abandoned him,” Goldenflower hisses, jutting her muzzle into Fireheart’s space. “His own father abandoned him to become a kittypet because of what he might have done. And who’s to say that he would have done it, had Pinestar stuck around?” Her muzzle wrinkles, ears going flat. “And who’s to say,” she continues, pushing past some sort of almost-instinct to choke on her words, to put them back where they came from and never let them see the light of day, “that Bluestar was telling the truth about Tigerstar’s fate in the first place? Or that Goosefeather wasn’t mad? I knew him, you know. He was quite mad, I think,” she laughs. “Got his own sister — Bluestar’s mother — killed, nearly starved us all to death before that, and yet she’s going to take his word about a kit?”

“Goldenflower,” Fireheart says, aghast, but the golden she-cat isn’t done. Her hackles are rising, her voice rising with them, and she takes a step forward as Fireheart takes one back.

“Bluestar isn’t who you think she is,” the queen growls. “She’s not some—some perfect paragon of what’s right, not even when she was sane, and I don’t say that lightly.” She laughs, then, cold and angry, seeming stretched-out and torn apart and incorrectly pieced back together, the layers just far enough apart to be wrong . “You see this scar?” she asks, indicating to her own pelt. “Bluestar gave it to me when we were apprentices, when we weren’t supposed to have our claws out. I was happy,” she adds, “for my first battle scar, but you have to understand, Fireheart. Bluestar has lost a lot in her life, but she’s not innocent, and for as much as you’ve done for this Clan, the way you look at my kits makes you complicit in it.”

Her head raises at a sound in the gorse, but Swiftpaw and Longtail don’t reappear, and Goldenflower lowers her head once more. “You’re judging barely-apprentices by their eye color and the stripes on their pelt and where their blood comes from, as if you haven’t spent seasons trying to prove that all of that doesn’t matter,” she hisses. “Oh, that pretty orange kittypet with the guileless eyes, what will he ever make of himself?” she taunts, and this is wrong, because Goldenflower has never taunted him before, never made him feel like less.

“Their father is Tigerstar,” Fireheart hisses. “He tried to kill his leader! He killed his deputy — his friends — twice! He injured Cinderpelt! He conspired with Brokenstar! What makes you think your kits won’t be like him?” he asks, furious.

Goldenflower laughs, her gaze incredulous. “I never took you for a fool,” she says. Her tail lashes. “You’re the same as they are, you know. All four of you will always have to prove your worth. You’ll never stop having to prove it. And if you’d just— listen, just watch for one heartbeat, you’d realize that Jaypaw despises his father. That Lionpaw doesn’t have the ambition of a kittypet who’s gone to the cutter. That all Hollypaw has ever wanted is to be like you, and that she begged for you to be her mentor right up to the very moment she realized you hated her, and then do you know what she did? Well,” she says impatiently to Fireheart’s silence, “do you?”

“No,” Fireheart admits.

“She resolved to be perfect,” Goldenflower laughs, “as if any cat can ever be, and then you chose her anyway, but by that time she knew it wasn’t because you wanted her. No, you just wanted to protect everyone else from her. Newsflash, by the way, Fireheart,” she adds, a twist of humor to her words. “If you wanted to make her less dangerous, you probably shouldn’t have apprenticed her to the best fighter in the Clan.”

Fireheart sputters, his mind reeling — what was he supposed to do with this information? What was he supposed to believe? He’s always admired Goldenflower, knows that she’d loved Tigerstar down to her bones but was loyal to ThunderClan down past the marrow; being called out, here, so close to Twolegplace, so close to where his fence bordered the forest and where he’d proved himself for the very first time… it’s painful. “Goldenflower,” he tries again, but then the brambles rustle for real this time, and Swiftpaw steps out, a huge squirrel trapped in his maw.

“Look, Goldenflower!” he says, and he’s ready to be a warrior, but Fireheart is starting to learn that all cats are kits when it comes to the ones they love. “I chased it across three trees!”

“He did,” Longtail confirms warmly, his tail held aloft. He’s so achingly proud of his apprentice, the cat he’s raised into a formidable warrior in everything but name, and Fireheart’s chest aches in turn as he watches the three of them, gathered in a loose circle that, for one reason or another, excludes Fireheart.

The ginger tom sags as they speak, watching them with a peculiar feeling curling in his chest, and doesn’t realize until he’s come back up for air that Goldenflower is still watching him, her forest-green eyes cold as shards of ice.

It’s sunhigh in the sandy hollow, but the air is starting to go frigid. Fireheart’s breath clouds the air as he begins to demonstrate a move — one perhaps too difficult for a cat his apprentice’s age, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe she needs to fail, to learn that she can’t do everything perfectly. Maybe that will dull the ambition in her eyes, the rampant perfectionism, the way she has taken the apprentices’ den and practically made it into her court.

Hollypaw watches him carefully, every flick of her gaze calculating, as he finishes the move. Her paws knead at the ground, her claws carefully sheathed — he knows from experience that most apprentices unsheathe their claws while watching demonstrations, excited by the prospect of learning to battle, but there’s still a reservedness to Hollypaw’s movements, something carefully constructed and pulled in until the only glimmers of it he sees are when she flinches when he scolds her, when he knows his eyes grow cold and his body language stills into something that could be construed as grim, if you were from another Clan. Or, he supposed, if you were the child of Tigerstar, an echo of everything wrong with ThunderClan.

“Now you,” he says, instead of thinking, the only thing wrong? What about Bluestar? What about the dogs? What about ShadowClan again? He can’t think about those things. He can’t put words or thoughts to them, because if he does he might collapse under the weight of running a Clan as a young warrior and the weight of looking at someone he’d considered like a mother and seeing hatred stare back.

He wonders if that’s what Hollypaw sees in him.

Still, the brown tabby pulls herself carefully to her paws, tilts her head, and then twists her body exactly right for the move, performing it without a single flaw. Fireheart is silent. He should be singing her praises, he knows, because she’s just pulled off a difficult move on her first attempt — in her first moon of being an apprentice, no less, but she looks at him and her eyes are dark and he knows that she doesn’t expect the praise, doesn’t think it’s coming.

“Good job,” someone says, and he doesn’t realize until Hollypaw’s eyes light up, until her tail curves forward in surprised triumph, that he himself has said it. But there’s something right about how Hollypaw’s posture eases, how every calculation bleeds from her pelt like they’d never been there. “Good job,” he repeats, consciously now, because Hollypaw is smiling wide, her purr loud and her paws dancing on the sandy floor of the training hollow.

“Thank you,” she says, her voice breathy and surprised and joyous. “Thank you,” she repeats, and looks at him like he’s hung the moon. Like he’s the only father figure she’s ever known and she’s finally, finally impressed him. And isn’t — and isn’t that what this is, a strange echo of when he’d looked at Bluestar like every star in the sky was threaded through her pelt?

“You deserve it,” he purrs. “That move took me several tries, you know. You’re going to be a great warrior.”

For a moment, Hollypaw’s eyes glow like every single star he’d once thought belonged to his own mentor, not so many pawsteps ago. And, for the same moment, Fireheart looks at her and doesn’t see Tigerstar, doesn’t see how her stripes line up with his, doesn’t see calculations and burning ambition and the way she flinches away from her own Clan. No — this time he sees Hollypaw, his apprentice, the future of his Clan. He draws his tongue over her forehead in praise, unwilling to let Hollypaw withdraw back into herself — not again, not right now — and she leans into it as if she was his own kit, as if this was sharing tongues outside the apprentices’ den after a hard day, as if he hadn’t spent her entire life flinching from her, glaring at her, and for perhaps the first time, he doesn’t see Tigerstar reflected in Hollypaw’s green eyes, but Fireheart’s own self, his own history and drive and ambition, lost and now found.

Chapter Text

“Okay,” Fireheart says, “come at me.”

Hollypaw narrows her eyes at him for a moment, then feints left. Fireheart doesn’t move as she whiffs past him, striking nothing but air. The shock of it causes her to stumble, and she rolls over and over in the sandy soil until she comes to a halt against an oak, looking up at him wearily. “Not fair,” she complains.

“Plenty fair,” Fireheart counters, chuckling despite himself. He nudges the apprentice to her paws, and she comes up with a groan, her gaze fixed up at the sky. “No apprentice of mine will ever be beaten by anyone.”

“Not even Longtail?” Hollypaw shoots back.

“ Especially not Longtail,” Fireheart says. Then he blinks. “When did you figure out sass? You were so respectful a moon ago.”

“I think it was when you stopped glaring at me all the time,” Hollypaw says, and it’s a joke, but there’s a serious undercurrent to it, one that his apprentice doesn’t even seem to notice.

Fireheart sighs, ignoring the way his stomach lurches. “Go on. Again.”

Hollypaw grits her teeth, digging her claws into the sand as she launches straight forward this time. He leaps over her, and she skids a few tail-lengths before collapsing into a heap. “It’s not working,” she says. “I can’t hit you.”

“Maybe not, but you can hit Lionpaw.”

Hollypaw giggles madly from where her face is pressed into the earth, clearly exhausted from their long training session. “His face,” she says as she pulls herself up. “I destroyed him.”

“Soon you’ll beat the older apprentices too,” Fireheart says. “But you won’t beat me.”

“Is that a challenge?”

“A fact,” Fireheart says, puffing himself up, and Hollypaw takes the distraction to lunge again, this time nearly cuffing his ears.

“Mousedung,” she says, panting.

He blinks at her, flicking the ear she’d nearly grazed. “I couldn’t hit Bluestar either,” he shares. The words surprise him as they come out of his mouth, but he doubles down. “She would swat me all over this clearing. I was more a mossball than an apprentice.”

“Really?” Hollypaw asks, perking up. “You?”

“I had talent, but no finesse,” Fireheart admits. “But I came into my own. Just as you will,” he adds.

“What do I have? Finesse but no talent?”

“You’re pulling off moves that make nearly-graduated apprentices quake,” Fireheart responds. “You have plenty of talent. You just got unfortunate enough to get me as a mentor.”

“Humble,” Hollypaw mumbles.

“That’s what Cinderpelt always said, yes,” Fireheart agrees. Hollypaw’s ears flatten with embarrassment; Fireheart shakes his head with something like amusement. “Again.”

Hollypaw huffs out a breath, but obeys. It’s sunhigh now, and they’d started before dawn; Fireheart’s stomach is rumbling, and he knows Hollypaw is exhausted, but the more progress she can make the better. It’s dangerous in the forest, more dangerous than it ever has been before, and she and her brothers are the youngest apprentices. They’ll have the easiest time of losing.

(Fireheart can’t see anyone else lose.)

This time, Hollypaw tries sliding from the beginning, and she’s rewarded as her paw brushes through fur. Fireheart jumps back, surprised. “Good job,” he praises, blinking. “That’s more like it!”

“I didn’t even get you,” Hollypaw responds, confused.

“No, but you did get the tangle I’ve been working on getting out.”

Hollypaw makes a face at him.

“Pelt health is very important,” he adds. He’s not sure why it’s so much easier, here in the Sandy Hollow, to put aside his feelings on Tigerstar and see Hollypaw as her own cat, but something in his chest always eases when he’s sparring, when there’s all of the adrenaline and none of the danger. Even when his sparring partner is a young apprentice, unable to make much headway in beating him.

For her part, Hollypaw looks mutinous. Fireheart is sure she’s gotten that expression from Swiftpaw, but he’s also sure Hollypaw will beat her older brother in a spar before he’s even halfway through with her.

Fireheart tilts his head. “Did I tell you to stop?”

Hollypaw takes a deep breath. “Sorry, Fireheart,” she says, and then she’s circling behind him, and he’s pretending not to see it. He hears her give a groan as she leaps, obviously sore from the day, and steps aside, putting one paw into her side as she’s airborne. She hits the ground with an oomph.

“What did you do wrong there?” Fireheart asks.

“I made a sound,” Hollypaw reports. She looks frustrated with herself. “I know to be quiet! I do, I promise!”

Fireheart touches the top of her head with his nose. “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he says. “It’s been a long day. What do you say — one more attack and then we’ll call it. You can have the biggest thing on the fresh-kill pile.”

“Really?” Hollypaw looks up at him with wide eyes, not bothering to try to get up.

Fireheart moves closer, peering down at her and nudging her with a paw. “We’re not going anywhere if you don’t get up,” he points out.

Hollypaw huffs. “I’m up, I’m up,” she says, and, as Fireheart finally realizes just how silent the forest has suddenly become, she lunges again.

A howl sounds. It’s close, echoing through the trees and rattling Fireheart’s bones. He freezes in place, looking out into the trees, but Hollypaw’s trajectory is already set. Perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of frustration, perhaps out of anything, her claws slice through the thin fur of his flank and tear gashes into his skin.

Fireheart’s gaze turns from the forest and bores into Hollypaw’s own eyes, which are large and frantic as she tries desperately to shake the blood off of her paws. “Fireheart!” she cries. “I’m so sorry. I’m — the dog, and I was leaping for you, and I was afraid, and my claws—”

“Save it,” Fireheart says. His tone is harsh (too harsh, he realizes later, but later isn’t now), and he pushes Hollypaw ahead of him as she babbles near-incoherently, her eyes wide with horror. “We need to leave. Now. Now, Hollypaw!” he commands as she lingers, shocked, watching the blood trail down Fireheart’s leg.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers again, before finally turning tail and fleeing, Fireheart on her tail. The dog howls again, lone and eerie even in the strong light.

“Faster,” Fireheart urges. “Hurry!”

Hollypaw’s tail is between her legs, and she leaves pawsteps edged with blood behind as she runs. Fireheart feels the same blood drip from his leg to the ground. Grimly, he hopes that his blood won’t lead the dog home, but then it howls again, more distant this time, as if it wasn’t interested in their scent at all. Then what…?

“I didn’t mean—” Hollypaw’s words rattle Fireheart back into the present, and he shakes his head as if clearing cobwebs.

“Quiet,” Fireheart orders. His ears are strained, listening intently to his surroundings, but the sounds of the forest are returning, birdsong and the rustling of prey and the buzzing of the last surviving greenleaf bugs. “You’re okay. We’re okay.”

But nothing is okay, not really. He’d grown too comfortable with her. He’d trusted her. But she wasn’t a younger version of Fireheart after all, was she? She’d spilled his blood, hadn’t she? In a place where Fireheart felt at his most safe, when he had started to bring down the thorn walls he’d surrounded himself with? Perhaps he’d been right to begin with: she was Tigerstar’s blood, through and through.

After all, a tabby can’t change their stripes.

Sandstorm is in front of the nursery with Whitestorm, playing with the latter’s kits as Fireheart storms into camp, his tail lashing. Hollypaw slips from the tunnel behind him, her posture still contrite, but Fireheart can’t care about that. He has to keep his pelt flat when it wants to spike, his ears pricked when they want to fold back, his mind from seeing Hollypaw’s pelt matched with Lionpaw’s eyes.

Sandstorm gives him a look as between dodging Sorrelkit's clumsy strikes at her pale fur. He gazes balefully back at her as he circles the camp, his steps heavy and chest aching. He itches to go back out into the forest, but he’s closed off Snakerocks and the Great Sycamore, and now the training hollow is going to have to go, and ThunderClan’s camp is between the two, and when he’d brought his concerns to Bluestar she’d scoffed and muttered about a fitting end for traitors, so what is he supposed to say now that they’re effectively surrounded?

He barks off orders for Dustpelt and Brackenfur to fortify the walls, and both take their apprentices with them; Fireheart struggles with himself as he watches Lionpaw bound after his mentor, but eventually takes to sitting outside Bluestar’s den, listening to her breathe. She’s having a nightmare, clearly — he can hear her paws scrabbling in moss and her short, desperate breaths, but she won’t thank him for waking her. She won’t thank him for anything, these days, and now she’s blaming WindClan for what the dogs are doing, ignoring the fact that they might all be slaughtered in their camp—

Fireheart breathes deep. He desperately wants to slump against the Highrock, but he doesn’t dare — there are always eyes on him now, if there weren’t before. The wounds on his flank sting, but they were made with untrained claws, and they aren’t deep. Cinderpelt might scold him later for not being treated, but he can’t face her now. Jaypaw might be fitting into his role as a medicine cat, might be looking up to Cinderpelt, but they’re both still angry at him. As if he had a choice! What could a blind cat do in the territories, especially now? He’d be eaten by a dog before Fireheart could even assign him a warrior mentor!

Fireheart’s claws dig into the hard-packed ground of the hollow, creating little furrows. He stares at them, desperate for something to ground him, and then he’s up and pacing again, ignoring Whitestorm and Sandstorm and Runningwind’s attempts to catch his eye.

He needs to call the senior warriors together. He needs to get through to Bluestar. He has a denfull of apprentices who deserve to become warriors. Tigerstar is leading the Clan that borders Snakerocks closely. Maybe if we’re lucky, Fireheart thinks darkly, he’ll trespass straight into a snake. Or a dog.

But were the dogs really an accident?

Fuming, Fireheart strides toward the warriors’ den and collapses outside of it, his narrowed gaze focused on the apprentices’ den, where he can see Hollypaw’s bowed head being groomed thoroughly by her oldest brother. Both of her littermates are off with different tasks, and Hollypaw’s paw is still tacky with Fireheart’s blood, but Swiftpaw is gentle with her, and she starts to relax under his guidance. He can’t hear the words Swiftpaw is murmuring, but their gazes catch, once. There’s something there, under the surface, anger and disappointment and sadness, and Fireheart knows it isn’t for Swiftpaw, though the tom has earned his warrior name thrice over by now. It’s for his sister, for Hollypaw, the apprentice Fireheart chose. The apprentice Fireheart fears, damn it all.

Fireheart is the first to look away, down at his paws and then over to the camp barrier, where four cats are beginning the work to fortify it. But it won’t work against dogs. It didn’t even work against the rogues Tigerstar recruited to help him kill Bluestar.

It doesn’t even keep the demons in Bluestar’s mind at bay.

Fireheart buries his head in his paws. There’s so much he needs to do — it’s broiling in his chest, the pressure almost at its breaking point. He’s at his breaking point.

He looks back up, watching Hollypaw with narrowed eyes. Had he been too harsh? Was he letting his preconceptions bleed through? Had it been an accident? Was the stress blinding him? If it hadn’t been an accident — what did she have to gain? And why hadn’t he been expecting it? Had he let his guard down? Fireheart’s teeth clench, his body freezing as he stares blatantly across the clearing. If that dog hadn’t howled, what would have happened? Nothing? Everything?

Fireheart is so tired he feels dizzy with it, with the strain, with the idea that at any moment the walls of the camp might come crumbling down, with a prophecy of fire burning at his pelt, melting his flesh. He needs sleep. He can’t sleep. Everything is — fuzzy, indistinct. Hollypaw is Tigerclaw is a cat he’s never seen, redder and with a kittypet collar drawn tight around his throat, sorrow in his eyes. The camp swarms with unfamiliar pelts, unfamiliar scents, but it’s undoubtedly the camp he calls home.

Could it be— Pinestar? He leans closer to look for stars in his fur, but he collides with something solid instead. Blearily, he looks up, and the vision shatters around him, shards digging into the edges of his consciousness like sharpened claws. “No,” he mutters, reaching out for the pieces, but a gentle paw stops him in his tracks.

“Fireheart?” comes the not-ghost’s voice, and with a jolt he realizes that it’s Sandstorm standing before him. He waves his too-heavy tail in some sort of greeting, and the pale ginger queen plops down beside him as if she had any right — no. 

Fireheart breathes in and out, slowly and steadily, until the world stops spinning quite so much. She had every right to be here. Fireheart wants her here. He’s just—everything is stretched out before him, tight enough to snap, and he doesn’t know what to do, what to say, how to act, what he’d just seen. 

“Sandstorm,” he finally greets, voice choked, but doesn’t take his eyes off of his apprentice, who’s now grimacing down at her paws, no longer overlaid by a specter from the past. Is she feeling guilty? Should Fireheart feel guilty? But it’s too late; he already does —

“I want Rainkit,” Sandstorm says casually, stretching out in front of him. “And then when you’re leader I want you to name him Rainstorm, because I have to carry on my legacy somehow.”

“Sandstorm!” Fireheart hisses, attempting to move her with a paw. He’s changed his mind — he doesn’t have time for this, for sharing tongues, or for her anger or disappointment or whatever she’s feeling. He can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t… he sighs. “Please,” he begs her. What if Pinestar had a message? “I need to watch.”

Stubbornly, she stays, fluffing her fur up and rolling her neck. “I’m not going to be complicit in you spying on your apprentice,” she says, poking Fireheart in the face with her tail. “Now you can’t see her.”

“It’s just — training this morning — vision—”

“What, she looked at you and you thought she was personally going to send you to StarClan at seven moons old?”

Fireheart’s brow furrows, but the pressure in his chest is lessening all the same. “You don’t think very highly of me.”

“You think seven-moon-old apprentices are going to grow up to be just like the father they’ve never met,” Sandstorm points out.

“I got the point from Goldenflower, thanks,” Fireheart sighs. He closes his eyes, pressing his face into Sandstorm’s short fur. She doesn’t shift away, which is an improvement, but she does sigh, and he feels her shake her head with something like exasperation.

“Don’t think this means I’ve forgotten about you passing me over. There are three of them, Fireheart. Brackenfur, really?”

“I trained him,” Fireheart points out.

“Yeah, and if you count him, this is your fourth apprentice. You know how many I’ve had? None.”

Fireheart narrows his eyes at her. “You aren’t actually angry,” he accuses. You’re trying to cheer me up, he doesn’t say, because she’ll deny it. Still, warmth pools in his chest, melting some of the ice that had built steadily upon itself.

Sandstorm rolls her eyes. “Of course I’m angry,” she says, “but I’ve decided to forgive you. For now. If one of my mentor’s kits aren’t in my possession by their sixth moon—”

“It’ll be another story,” Fireheart finishes. He sighs, allowing his head to drop onto his paws again. “I just… I dream of him, at night. And then he becomes… well, one of them.”

Sandstorm makes a surprised noise, her posture softening. She rolls on top of him, then, the weight of her smoothing some of the sharpest edges of his lingering panic. “They’re just dreams,” she comforts him, voice quiet.

“That’s what they said about my dreams of the forest,” Fireheart says, feeling frustration crawl up his spine. “That’s what they said about how StarClan visits me in my sleep. What says this isn’t real?”

Sandstorm sighs, runs her tongue over Fireheart’s spine. “Fireheart,” she says softly, “they’re so, so young. They have the potential to be anything, you know? Anything. She’s known you as a parental figure longer than she ever knew Tigerstar, and it’s not even close. You have no idea what direction her path will take her in. Maybe she’ll be revered in stories for seasons to come. Maybe she’ll be an ordinary warrior. Maybe she’ll stray off the path. We can’t know, not for sure.”

“They say a tabby can’t change their stripes.”

Sandstorm huffs. “I don’t actively go out of my way to torture you anymore, do I?”

Fireheart is pointedly silent.

Sandstorm rolls off of him. “I see your point,” she says, “and I am lodging a formal complaint, because here I am forgiving you your transgressions—”

“—I was trying to protect you—”

“—forgiving you your transgressions,” Sandstorm repeats, and Fireheart knows it’s something like a joke, but it stings all the same, “and you’re busy thinking that your dust-covered, laughing apprentice is some sort of evil mastermind.”

“It does sound a little silly when you say it like that,” Fireheart mutters, poking his head above hers to catch a glimpse of Hollypaw flinging herself out of said dust and onto Swiftpaw’s back. Jaypaw has joined them; Lionpaw is working on the wall close enough to fling bits of debris in their direction, and Jaypaw is doing his best to deflect them, exasperated fondness clear on his face. “I… I just can’t do it again. Do you understand?”

“StarClan willing, he’s gotten what he wants.”

“He hasn’t,” Fireheart says, looking at the three apprentices who share his blood.

Sandstorm is quiet. “No,” she says eventually, her shoulders sagging. “Probably not.”

Fireheart winces as he pulls a wound on a sharp bit of gorse tunnel, but doesn’t make a sound. There’s utter silence as the group begins to spill into camp, led by a bloodied and broken Bluestar, and Fireheart is near the end of the group, trailed only by Graystripe, now again a ThunderClan warrior. His chest aches — he’s happy his friend is home, he’s sad for Bluestar, who’s been rejected all over again, he’s worried for the future, and not just with Sunningrocks — and he’s bone-tired, sleep pulling at his limbs even as his scratches smart.

The camp looks the same as when he’d left it, at least — Cinderpelt is at the entrance to her den, waving injured cats forward into the clearing, but that’s the only thing that indicates battle. Well, that and the apprentices’ den, where young cats are nearly spilling over each other in their haste to get into the clearing at large.

Hollypaw’s first out, because of course she is — she’s taller than most of them, but slim and wily as well, not beyond using her influence with the other apprentices to make it to her mentor or loved ones first. “Fireheart! Fireheart, you’re back!” she cries. “They wouldn’t let me come, even though I begged, but you—” his apprentice breaks off, coming to a sudden, dusty halt just before she’s set to collide with him. “Oh,” she says then, taking him in. Or, rather, he realizes a moment later, taking in the cat behind him.

Fireheart stares at her, wondering at her odd reaction. “Graystripe, this is—”

“Hollykit,” Graystripe interrupts, blinking. “Or—Hollypaw, now, wouldn’t it be? You’ve gotten big!”

Hollypaw’s face shuts down. Fireheart wrinkles his nose at her questioningly, but her eyes haven’t strayed from Graystripe since he made his way into camp. “Why are you here?” she asks, indicating with her tail to the steady stream of cats moving through the camp and toward the medicine den. “Shouldn’t you be busy licking your own wounds, RiverClanner?”

“It’s not like that,” Fireheart says quickly. “Graystripe has rejoined ThunderClan!”

If he expected this to clear Hollypaw’s face, he's sorely disappointed. Hollypaw’s expression muddles even further, her eyes going dark. “Rejoined…?” she asks slowly. “You’re not… you’re not evil, are you? So… why?”

Fireheart opens his mouth, because what does Hollypaw mean by ‘Graystripe isn’t evil,’ but his friend beats him to it.

“Leopardstar wanted me to attack Fireheart,” Graystripe explains. “And I… I couldn’t do that, so...” He breaks off for a moment and then seems to regather himself. “So she exiled me. And then Bluestar—”

“You’re joking.” Hollypaw’s voice is colder than Fireheart has ever heard it, the tone flat and unyielding.

“He’s not joking,” Fireheart says, and now Lionpaw and Jaypaw are coming up behind their sister, their faces inquisitive. “Leopardstar ordered him to attack me, and he attacked her instead.”

Hollypaw looks as if ice could form on her whiskers. Her gaze flicks to Fireheart and then climbs its way back to Graystripe, gaze so hard that, despite himself, Fireheart takes a step back. “What about Featherkit and Stormkit?” she asks.

Graystripe makes a sound in his throat. “They’re apprentices now,” he says. “They’ll be okay. But I couldn’t attack Fireheart. He’s my best frien—”

“And Featherpaw and Stormpaw are your kits,” Hollypaw yells, loud enough to be heard across the clearing. “You’re telling me you abandoned them? For what? For him?” Hollypaw’s gaze snaps back to Fireheart, and maybe it’s an odd time to realize that he’s never seen hatred in their depths before, but it’s certainly there now. Her tail lashes once as if to emphasize it, stalls, and then keeps going. “You should have attacked him! Your leader’s word is law, or have you forgotten that?”

“Hollypaw—” Fireheart tries, but Hollypaw’s wild gaze turns to him, her pupils blown and teeth bared, and suddenly he’s frozen in the moment when Tigerstar pinned him down in Bluestar’s den, fangs poised for the kill.

“Your kits need you!” Hollypaw screams. “It’s hard enough with one parent, and now they don’t even have any kin, because you didn’t fight for them to stay here and then you didn’t fight to keep yourself there!” Her flanks heave as she staggers forward, and her brothers look too shell-shocked to do much of anything. “You’re pathetic! A pathetic, cowardly, awful father, and—and I thought Tigerstar was a bad father, but at least he wants us! At least he wants us to live with him, to be with him, and you’re—you’re here, in ThunderClan, instead of in RiverClan with the kits who need you!”

Graystripe takes a step forward. “Hollypaw, it’s not like—”

“No!” Hollypaw yowls. “No, you don’t get to speak to me like I’m a kit. You don’t—I thought—” and she breaks off laughing for a second, the sound manic and desperate, “I thought only evil cats would do something like abandon their family, and—maybe, maybe I’m not wrong,” she says, her voice sliding into coldness again. “They might be apprentices, but what’re they going to think when you don’t come home, huh? When they realize that their father, the cat who’s supposed to love them the most in this world, the only parent they have, left them for his good old pal Fireheart and his merry band of kit-haters?”

“I—”

“Look around, Graystripe,” Hollypaw hisses, her face screwed up in hatred. “Look at what you’ve chosen. Crookedstar and Leopardstar gave you a chance and you blew it. And now you’ll never live in the same Clan as your kits again. What do you think Silverstream will say when you meet her in StarClan? ‘Oh, it’s good that you didn’t attack your friend-turned-enemy’? No! If I was her, I’d pin you down and rip out your throat, because no one abandons their own kits when they give even a single mousetail about them, and now you’ve shown them what you really care about. And it’s not them. It never was them, was it? It was your pretty girlfriend and then it was the Clan you gave up, and it was never them! It was never them at all, was it? Admit it! Admit it!”

“Hollypaw!” Fireheart finally manages, his voice firm at last. “Stand down!”

Hollypaw’s eyes turn to him again, and there’s something otherworldly in them, as if she’s a cat trapped in the wrong space and time, a cat possessed by the knowledge of families come undone, and for a moment Fireheart honestly thinks she’s going to lunge — at him or at Graystripe, he’s not sure. But then she steps back, her face still a mask of hatred and contempt, and turns pointedly away, her steps carrying her toward the medicine den — toward Swiftpaw and Goldenflower, who had gone with him. Her brothers don’t even spare him a glance before they follow their sister, all three of their tails lashing angrily in the dying light.

“Well,” Graystripe says, trying for a joke. It’s Graystripe-typical, something he’s done since the day they’d met as near-kits, but now the tone makes Fireheart’s pelt itch. He shouldn’t be irritated at Graystripe — he’d saved Fireheart’s life, hadn’t he? — but Hollypaw’s words play themselves over and over in his ears, and Fireheart can’t help but feel something like scorn for his old friend, as hard as he tries not to. “That didn’t go well, did it?”

“Understatement of the season-cycle,” Fireheart says shortly, but takes his old friend to make a new nest anyway.

Fireheart lets Brackenfur and Lionpaw lead the way deeper into the territory. They’ve skirted the Sandy Hollow along the river and are headed toward Tallpines: there have been no reports of dog activity in the area, though the smell lingers, and the Clan is beginning to look leafbare-lean before the season actually arrives. They need to bring back as much prey as they can catch — the fresh-kill pile is empty more often than not, and neither the elders nor queens have been fed.

Hollypaw trails at a respectful distance behind him, though she usually leads her siblings; Fireheart feels a pang of guilt for the rift between them, but stamps it down as he moves. “Smell anything?” he asks.

“Dog,” says Hollypaw, her voice neutral. “Stale, but strong. Vole. The river. A—” she stops, crouches. Fireheart pushes her bushy tail down with a practiced paw. She glances at him, but he can’t read her gaze; Cinderpelt shakes her head at him, waving her own tail, and he remembers holding the gray she-cat’s tail down under the brush. It had constantly been curved high in the air, rattling any brush she tried to duck under, and had initially made her a poor hunter. It’s a fond memory, but one glance at her leg has him sobering. Hollypaw leaps, and a mouse goes down under her claws. She looks up at him, fragile hope in her gaze, and he praises her accordingly, though the words feel like ash in his mouth.

Brackenfur gives him a sidelong glance, but Hollypaw doesn’t seem to notice his mood; her tail curls up, her prey held proudly in her jaws, and it’s Cinderpaw standing there — Brackenpaw — Cloudpaw — Hollypaw again, eyes amber; Hollypaw, eyes green and clear, her black stripes stretched over her whole pelt.

Fireheart blinks, and Hollypaw is tabby again, with Goldenflower’s pine-green gaze instead of something brighter, something wilder. Fireheart shakes himself vigorously.

“Got ants in your pelt?” Cinderpelt asks. Her voice is cold, and the fur along Fireheart’s spine prickles.

“Walked through a cobweb,” Fireheart lies.

Cinderpelt sighs. “We need those,” she admonishes. “Watch where you’re going, and collect them with a stick. I know you think you’re invincible,” she says, casting a disapproving eye at his scratches, “but the rest of us aren’t.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Fireheart snaps. “Why do you think I have us out here, looking for prey and herbs? For fun?”

Both Cinderpelt and Brackenfur look taken aback. Their apprentices eye each other, their ears back and tails held low.

“I thought you wanted to take the siblings out at once,” Brackenfur hedges. “They’re close,” he adds, looking at the way Hollypaw has pressed herself between them.

“Hollypaw, Lionpaw, Jaypaw,” Fireheart instructs brusquely, “go look in that thicket for anything useful. And don’t stray, understand?”

Jaypaw’s face twists, but Cinderpelt lays her tail over his shoulders, and the gray tabby nods tersely and stalks off, his siblings hot on his heels. Hollypaw looks back, her eyes wide, but Fireheart breaks the gaze before a connection can properly be made.

“StarClan,” Fireheart hisses once he’s sure they’re gone. “You were both once my apprentices. I trust you more than anyone. It’s good to have them together, sure, but it’s good to have you both with me.”

Brackenfur looks pleased, but Cinderpelt frowns. “You gave me Jaypaw,” she says.

Fireheart sits heavily. “I did.”

“He didn’t want to be a medicine cat. But he’s blind, and you didn’t let him try.”

“These are trying times,” Fireheart spits. “Snowkit got taken by a StarClan-forsaken hawk—” he breaks off, tilting his head awkwardly at Brackenfur as the large golden-brown tom winces.

“You could have let him try. Just because I chose to be a medicine cat because of a disability doesn’t mean that he should have been forced to.”

“They told me you could never be a warrior,” Fireheart says, pained. “I’d do anything to take back that day on the Thunderpath—”

“I wouldn’t,” Cinderpelt interrupts softly. “I would have been a good warrior, I think, but I’m a good medicine cat too. I like what I do. I like helping cats. And, as much as he complains, Jaypaw does too.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Yellowfang gave me a choice,” Cinderpelt says, pressing her head into Fireheart’s shoulder. Fireheart feels cold and adrift, his chest empty and hollow. “Jaypaw never got one. None of them ever did.”

“Lionpaw was a replacement,” Brackenfur adds quietly.

“You took Hollypaw because of her ambition and her pelt,” Cinderpelt agrees, “not because you wanted her.”

“I had to—”

“You didn’t have to do anything, Fireheart,” Cinderpelt says gently. “I know what life here has cost you. Don’t think I don’t,” she says as Fireheart opens his maw. “You lost your old life, your innocence, cats you loved and destinies you wanted, the trust you should have been able to have in your Clan, your mentor—”

“Bluestar isn’t dead,” Fireheart says sharply.

Cinderpelt tilts her head. “Isn’t she?” she asks. “She isn’t the cat who welcomed you to the Clan. She isn’t the cat who trained you. She isn’t even the cat who made you deputy, is she? Not anymore.”

Fireheart exhales, bowing his head until his chin hits his chest. “No,” he finally admits. “She isn’t.”

“You’re our leader,” Brackenfur says, “and you’re not much older than we are. It must take such a toll.”

“But you can’t—you can’t do this to her,” Cinderpelt says. “Brackenfur and Cloudtail and I, we were lucky to have you as our mentor. But Hollypaw—Hollypaw didn’t even know her father, Fireheart. Her eyes weren’t open yet when he was banished.”

“Tabbies—”

“Superstition,” Cinderpelt says, “and an undeserved one at that. I understand why you’d believe it. You came from a world where cats don’t have nine lives or visions from the stars. But Hollypaw’s just a cat. An apprentice who looks up to you. A cat who wants to be like you, not the father she never knew.”

“I’m trying so hard,” Fireheart says. “I swear it. I just—when I look at her, sometimes all I see is a ghost.” Literally, he thinks, mind cast back to that reddish cat, whose eyes had spoken of long, cruel seasons.

“She’s her own cat, Fireheart,” Cinderpelt says, placing a paw atop Fireheart’s. “The sooner you understand that, the better.”

Fireheart closes his eyes, imagining a forest not devastated by flames and roamed by dogs, where he didn’t have full control of a Clan, where the only worries he had were sending out patrols and deciding where to take Hollypaw. But that wasn’t his life; the forest had always been dangerous, had always been beautiful and threatening and heart-wrenching, but worth it all the same. “You’re right,” he says. He sighs. “You’re right.”

And then he turns and walks into the thicket the apprentices had disappeared into, his pelt catching on thorns through sheer carelessness. The apprentices, when he finds them, are in a loose semi-circle, trying to remove a spider out of a wrap of cobwebs.

“It’s easy—” Lionpaw says.

“Then you do it!” Hollypaw interrupts, her muzzle wrinkled as she tries to hook a claw into the pest.

Jaypaw snickers, then nudges his siblings with two jabs of a paw as he senses Fireheart’s approach. Hollypaw screeches as the spider is jostled onto her paw, and she shakes it desperately as Lionpaw laughs.

He stops laughing when the spider flies from Hollypaw’s leg to his own face, and he takes off into the gorse, followed closely by a yelling Jaypaw.

Hollypaw goes to follow, but stops short as Fireheart steps in front of her. “Fireheart?” she asks, her eyes wide. “I’m sorry. I swear we were just gathering webs and then Lionpaw realized he’d gotten a spider stuck in his bundle—”

“No, no, it’s not about that,” he says, and then nods at the small pile of prey to Hollypaw’s left. “Besides, you look like you’ve been doing well.”

Hollypaw blinks. “It’s… just a few mice and voles,” she says hesitantly.

Fireheart doesn’t respond. They stand in silence for a long while, Hollypaw’s stance getting more and more anxious.

“Hollypaw…” Firestar begins finally, hesitantly.

“What?” Hollypaw asks sharply, then looks away, clearly chastising herself. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean—”

“You didn’t mean to be harsh,” Fireheart says, “and you didn’t mean to claw me,” he adds, gesturing to the still-healing wounds on his flank.

“No,” Hollypaw says faintly. “Neither.”

Fireheart sits. “You remind me a lot of your father,” he admits after a moment. “And—”

Hollypaw looks taken aback. “I don’t remember him,” she interrupts, her voice high and reedy. “I don’t care to. He abandoned his Clan, tried to kill his leader, did kill his deputy. He’s a traitor, through and through,” she spits vehemently. “I hate looking the way I do. I hate the stares and the half-veiled insults and the way no one trusts me, no matter what I do. Smallear makes the elders look through prey for deathberries,” she says with vitriol. “I’m—I want to be like any other cat, and no one will let me. I wanted to be your apprentice for so long, and you praise me one second and look at me like I’m evil the next. I’m—” she breaks off. “I’m tired, Fireheart. I’m sorry for clawing you. I didn’t mean it.”

“I know you didn’t,” Fireheart says. “I’m sorry. I should have led with that.”

Hollypaw’s shoulders slump.

“You remind me of him,” Fireheart continues, and this time Hollypaw is silent, “but at the same time, you’re nothing like him. You share his better traits, and few of his worst, and yet…” he trails off. Hollypaw scuffs her paws in the dirt, as if waiting for the other branch to fall. “And yet I’m treating you like your paws are set on the same path. They’re not,” he says strongly, trying to make himself believe it. “You can be anything you want to be, and I’m a fool for thinking differently.”

His apprentice’s claws dig into the dirt. “Do you really mean that?” she asks hoarsely, “or are you going to take it back at the next sign of trouble?”

“I won’t lie to you. I’ve made mistakes, and I’ll make them again. But if you let me…” he trails off again. “If you let me, I’d like to be a better mentor to you.”

Finally, Hollypaw meets his gaze. “I’d like that,” she says simply.

“Good,” Fireheart says, feeling a weight lift off his shoulders, “because I’d like that, too. You have a lot of promise, Hollypaw, and—”

There’s a yowl in the distance, high and desperate. Brackenfur.

“Up the tree,” he instructs instead. “Hurry!”

“But—Lionpaw and Jaypaw—”

“I’ll find them, I promise. Hurry. Please. Up the tree, now!”

Hollypaw’s gaze is frantic, but she obeys, her claws digging into bark as she propels herself upward. Fireheart bolts forward as soon as she’s high enough, heading wildly in the direction of the yowl.

He’d thought Tallpines was safe. Perhaps he’d been wrong.

“I’m closing down the territory,” Fireheart says.

Longtail’s nose scrunches. “You’ve already done that,” he points out. “Snakerocks, the Great Sycamore, and the Sandy Hollow.”

“More of it,” Fireheart says wearily. 

“More of it?” Willowpelt exclaims. “We’re already starving!”

“Cinderpelt, Brackenfur, and I caught strong dog scent near Tallpines, and Brackenfur — Brackenfur saw it,” Fireheart explains. It’s an effort to keep his head high. He can feel the pinch of hunger in his belly, the fear of lack of prey, but they can’t risk losing anyone else. They can’t. 

Brackenfur nods solemnly. Cinderpelt glares down at her paws. Strictly, Brackenfur shouldn’t be here — this is a meeting for senior warriors — but he’s a witness. He’d seen a glimpse of the dog as they’d retreated, their apprentices and Cinderpelt pushed ahead. “It was huge,” Brackenfur breathes. “Bigger than any dog I’ve ever seen.”

“Are we going to have to evacuate?” Runningwind exclaims.

“Surely not,” Mousefur says sharply, pushing a sharp elbow into her brother’s ribs. “We’ve lived here for generations. We can’t be pushed out now.”

“My kits…” Willowpelt trails, her gaze fixed on the nursery, where Sandstorm is entertaining the three.

Whitestorm rests his chin on Willowpelt’s head, and her expression softens, though Whitestorm’s own gaze is hard. “Is this the right choice, Fireheart?”

“I know it is,” Fireheart says. “The dogs — if one or two of us were out there alone…”

“Disaster,” Frostfur summarizes. “But this leaves us little room to hunt. The area between here and Fourtrees…”

“Near the Thunderpath, too,” Runningwind contributes. “If we trust ShadowClan, that is.”

“Never,” Longtail hisses.

“And Sunningrocks,” Brindleface adds grimly. “If RiverClan doesn’t try to take them again.”

“They’re still licking their wounds from last time,” Goldenflower growls. “They wouldn’t dare.”

“Are you so sure about that?” Mousefur snipes. Then she looks to Fireheart. “It might be worth the risk,” she says. Her voice is grim. “One or two of us to keep the Clan fed—”

“I’m not sacrificing any lives,” Fireheart says. “We’ll figure something out, okay? Just — spread the word. Sunningrocks is as far as any patrol is to go to the west, and the tunnel beneath the Thunderpath on the east.”

“Won’t the other Clans know something’s up if we don’t mark the borders?” Frostfur asks.

“Let them,” Fireheart says bleakly. “If they trespass to investigate, their fate is on them.”

The grouping looks at each other mirthlessly, clearly weighing what Fireheart is saying.

Finally, Whitestorm speaks. “Fireheart is right,” he says. “We can’t risk destruction by hunting in the areas overrun by the dogs. It’s not worth the risk.”

“We can’t do this forever,” Brindleface growls. “Someday we’re going to have to do something about the dogs. We’ll have to drive them out or kill them, or we’ll be the ones who are fresh-kill.”

Fireheart sighs. “Let me worry about that,” he says gently. “For now, all the rest of you need to worry about is keeping the Clan fed. And alive,” he adds. At a noise from the warrior’s den, Fireheart looks up, spotting a pair of brown ears poking from behind the overlapping branches. “Dismissed,” he says wearily, dragging himself to his paws.

“Hollypaw,” Fireheart calls softly as the other cats disperse. “What have I told you about eavesdropping?”

“Nothing, technically,” Hollypaw says mutinously. “And it’s not my fault!”

“Well, then whose is it?” Fireheart asks.

“Mine,” Swiftpaw says, coming out from behind his sister with a wince. “I swear I was just showing her how to weave thorns into the walls without sticking herself,” he defends. “And then you all started the meeting—”

“—and we didn’t know what to do—”

“—and so we listened,” Swiftpaw finishes. “I’m sorry. We should have gone.”

Fireheart sighs. “I’ll be speaking to Longtail about this,” he says, and Swiftpaw winces again, “but most of this will be common knowledge soon enough. I think your current confinement is punishment enough.”

“Will we get to go out without our mentors if we go toward Fourtrees?” Swiftpaw asks desperately.

Fireheart shakes his head.

“I should be a warrior twice over,” Swiftpaw spits then. “You know it as well as I do!”

“I do know,” Fireheart says, “but I need you to set an example for the young apprentices. Please, Swiftpaw,” he adds to the black-and-white tom’s mutinous expression. “I can’t lose anyone.”

“Well maybe if we addressed the dogs—”

“Not an option.”

“There could just be one! We might be afraid over nothing!”

“Maybe,” Fireheart concedes, “but are you willing to risk your siblings’ lives over it?”

Swiftpaw looks down and away; Hollypaw looks like she might slide out of her own pelt with embarrassment. “I can take care of myself,” she says softly.

“Not quite yet you can’t,” Fireheart says. “Stay in camp, Hollypaw, unless you’re with me or another senior warrior. That applies to you, too, Swiftpaw. Okay?”

Swiftpaw gives a terse nod. In comparison, Hollypaw’s assent is much more enthusiastic, and soon she’s herding her older brother across the clearing toward where they store the materials that make up the outer walls, babbling all the while.

It’s adorable, but something awful bubbles in Fireheart’s stomach. He stares after them with narrowed eyes, but what can he do but believe them?

Besides, he comforts himself. How could any apprentice leave camp unnoticed?

Chapter Text

Swiftpaw’s corpse, when they find it, is horrific. He’s been pulled apart, used as a chew toy by beasts so large that a single tooth has taken out one of his eyes; it remains there, pulled out by the bone underneath, and Fireheart cringes as he takes it in.

Sandstorm hisses, long and low. “StarClan have mercy,” she says, and Fireheart’s stomach turns. The leafmold underneath Swiftpaw’s body has gone red; as he places his paws in the corpse’s shadow, blood seeps through his toes and onto the tops of his paws.

The patches of white on Swiftpaw’s pelt are stained red with blood; only a few white strands stand out from the carnage, seeming almost unnecessarily bright. The wounds are grievous: one of his legs is crushed, his spine is bent in half, and his tail has been ripped from his body. The remaining eye is open, scowling defiantly at nothing; Fireheart stares into it until, finally, Longtail pulls a gentle paw over it and closes it forever. He raises his head; Fireheart expects his gaze to be accusing, but only exhaustion and grief war in their depths. “Thank you for bringing me,” he says as he tugs the tooth from where it’s pierced bone. “I… wouldn’t have wanted to… not be able to see how he died. He went down fighting,” he says, and his voice warbles, a choked sob escaping his throat. “He died like a warrior,” he adds, and begins to groom the blood from the tom’s white chin.

It’s not what he expected Longtail to say, not after Fireheart had failed Swiftpaw so utterly, but he can hear the genuineness behind it all the same. “I’m sorry we were too late,” he says, looking away as Longtail does the beginning work of preparing Swiftpaw’s body for others to see it. For his siblings to be able to see it, most likely. Fireheart’s jaw clenches as he remembers Hollypaw, left sleeping in her nest. Oh, StarClan. What is he going to say to her? What is he supposed to do?

Sandstorm blinks harshly, chasing away tears. “We need to find Brightpaw,” she says roughly. “The Clan needs to mourn them.”

There’s a horrifying thought in Fireheart’s mind that maybe the dogs have dragged her away, made her into a meal, but then Cloudtail’s voice sounds, loud and desperate. Brightpaw is alive.

And, all of a sudden, the focus shifts from the mutilated corpse of Swiftpaw to the — oh, StarClan — similarly mutilated Brightpaw, whose face is ripped half-off, whose pelt is carved by terrible fangs, whose ears are ragged and whose bones are crushed and… it would be a mercy, Fireheart thinks, to slit her throat right now, but — he can’t. He can’t, and Cloudtail is busy trying to figure out how to move her, and Longtail has seemed to find the will to fight, and even Sandstorm, the most practical of them, looks determined.

They find moss to press to her seeping wounds; Sandstorm runs back to camp to fetch Cinderpelt; Fireheart sends word with her to call the other search parties off, if they’re still out. Snakerocks had been the most likely location, after what Fernpaw had told them, but he’d wanted to cover his bases. He’d hoped… Fireheart closes his eyes for a moment, but only allows himself a heartbeat before he’s back up and working, letting the others help lift Brightpaw onto his and Cloudtail’s backs before the remnants of the patrol head to Swiftpaw’s broken body, intent on bringing him home.

Bleakly, Fireheart wonders if his own apprentice’s corpse would be strewn on the rocks, had Swiftpaw not excluded the youngest apprentices from his daring plan, or if she would be like Brightpaw, a corpse still breathing, blood bubbling from her nostrils and seeping through moss that covers the white sheen of scarred bone.

Selfishly, Fireheart is glad he doesn’t have to know.

“I’m not stupid!” Hollypaw yells as he tries to block her in the apprentices’ den. It’s not an easy task: she’s quite a bit taller than him now, and she’s beginning to gain some of her father’s bulk. “I know what he’s going to look like. So get out of my way and let me see him!” She shoves her way into the clearing, then, nearly bowling him over in the process. He reels back, eyes still on her as she blinks, eyes adjusting to the light. For a moment, it seems she doesn’t see the terrible wounds, but then she gasps, jaw falling open. “No…” she trails, taking a few soft, hesitant steps forward, as if Swiftpaw is merely asleep and not torn apart, barely recognizable even under the strong morning light. “No!” she cries suddenly, throwing herself forward and burying her face in Swiftpaw’s blood-soaked flank. Her littermates trail after her, and Fireheart doesn’t try to stop them; they merely stumble forward, Lionpaw’s eyes wide and Jaypaw’s ears pinned to his head.

Lionpaw’s gaze sweeps over Swiftpaw’s entire body — or, at least, what’s left of him — before he too sags in front of the body, pressing his nose to a patch of Swiftpaw’s pelt that Longtail had managed to clean before the apprentices had escaped their den. Jaypaw makes room between his siblings and touches whatever part of his brother he can reach first. It’s a heart-wrenching sight, made worse by the fact that Goldenflower is still off searching for a son she’ll never find. And, in that moment, with his apprentice and her siblings grieving over a cat who has basically been ripped apart, Fireheart is absurdly, horribly grateful to Longtail, whose head and neck are resting over the worst of Swiftpaw’s wounds, those that have nearly torn his head clean from his body. No apprentice needed to see that. No sibling needed to see that. And certainly no mentor ever should have.

What a waste, Fireheart thinks, even as the guilt swamps him. You would have made a wonderful warrior, Swiftpaw.

It’s late when Fireheart goes to check on his apprentice, the sun already close to its zenith. He’d sat vigil for Swiftpaw all night, side-by-side with Longtail, who didn’t seem to know whether he was thankful for the company or if he wanted to push Fireheart away. He’d watched as the vigil dwindled from nearly the entire camp to the bare bones that remained — just the ones closest to Swiftpaw… and, well, Fireheart, who probably didn’t deserve to be there, judging from the way Longtail had stared at him with empty, hollowed-out eyes all night.

Goldenflower had been more gracious, her eyes kept closed and pelt smooth as she rested her chin on Swiftpaw’s newly-cleaned fur. Her kits, exhausted by grief and a long night awake, slept around her, looking much younger than they were. Only Hollypaw had been awake for most of the vigil, her green eyes boring into the area where Swiftpaw’s warm gaze had once been and her face stony and solemn until her eyes could stay open no longer.

When morning had come, Goldenflower had sent her kits off to sleep in the apprentices’ den, and Fireheart himself had arranged Swiftpaw’s funeral, gathering elders and helping Cinderpelt and Goldenflower and Longtail weave final herbs and blessings into the black-and-white apprentice’s pelt. It was, he decided, the least he could do. He should have fought harder. He should have done more. He should have known, damn it all. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t done any of those things, hadn’t known until Fernpaw had confessed — far too late — to Dustpelt, of all cats, and now — well, now he can only watch helplessly as Swiftpaw’s tail, carried separately from his body, disappears through the gorse tunnel one final time.

Fireheart sits heavily in the bloodstained dust Swiftpaw has left behind. His mind reels, thoughts tumbling over themselves in meaningless waves, and he sends a longing glance toward the warriors’ den, even though his stomach rolls at the thought of sleep. He knows he can’t avoid it forever, but he also knows that once he does, he’ll be waking the whole den with nightmare-fueled caterwauls. Sighing, Fireheart heads toward the apprentices’ den instead, his mind whirling as he wonders what to say to her. To them, because they’re the last apprentices left in camp, the others whisked away before they had to watch their denmate’s final journey.

“Do you think our lives will ever get better?” Lionpaw’s voice sounds from the den, muffled by layers upon layers of branches but clear all the same.

Hollypaw’s voice comes next, her voice dull with exhaustion. “Sleep, Lionpaw,” she orders more than suggests. There’s a rustling that suggests she’s rolled over in her nest; Fireheart knows from experience that they’re side-by-side to the point where one couldn’t be distinguished from the next. Jaypaw grunts, probably taking one of Hollypaw’s paws to his side, and there’s a hissed apology followed by heavy silence.

“I’m not going to shut up because you tell me to,” Lionpaw says, and this is the most bitter Fireheart has ever heard him.

“What about if I tell you to?” Jaypaw asks, his voice nearly indistinguishable.

Lionpaw growls, and the sound sends Fireheart into an unwilling crouch. “You’re not listening! I know you get it worse than I do, Hollypaw, and you just — you just take it, as if ThunderClan doesn’t hate us for what we don’t even know!”

More rustling. “If we can just…” Hollypaw’s voice trails off. “If we can just prove ourselves to them, then—”

“Then what, Holly?” Lionpaw’s voice is louder now, angry.

“Be quiet!” Jaypaw admonishes. “Do you want the whole Clan to hear?”

“If we were normal apprentices, the camp hearing wouldn’t matter!” Lionpaw hisses, but his voice has dropped enough to where Fireheart has to strain to hear him. He should — he should leave, shouldn’t he? This is a private conversation, but. But. Tigerstar’s visage flashes in his mind’s eye, a cruel grin stretched across tabby fur as dogs pour from behind him, and he moves almost unconsciously, his body slipping silently downwind almost of its own accord.

“What are you saying, Lionpaw?” Jaypaw’s voice is sharp. “We are who we are, and we can’t change that. Keep your head down and eventually—”

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Lionpaw growls. “You don’t get nearly as many stares, or whispers, or curses, or anything, just because you don’t look anything like him! I should be so luck—”

“That’s not his fault, Lionpaw,” Hollypaw cuts in, her voice hard. “We’ve all been dealt different prey.”

“Why aren’t you upset?” Lionpaw asks, his voice rising again. “Your own mentor hates you! He only took you in the first place because he’s worried you’ll slit his throat in his sleep, Holly. He doesn’t care that you’re good at fighting and hunting and strategizing, he just wants you dead!”

A silence. Fireheart’s heart pounds. He swallows hard, his lungs seizing. That had been true, once, but — it wasn’t anymore. Was it? Hollypaw was a good cat, nothing like her father, and yet he still paused every time he saw her pelt, noticed the way the stripes on her forehead match up perfectly with her father’s.

“That’s not true,” Hollypaw says, but her voice is timid, unsure, and Fireheart’s done this to her, made her doubt her place, and he’s trying so hard to squash everything that tells him to distrust her, but by StarClan, sometimes all he sees when he looks at her is Tigerstar’s pelt blocking Fireheart’s view from Bluestar as she whispers his name—

Lionpaw interrupts his thoughts. “It is,” he insists, and there’s rustling that indicates that he gets up, sounds of pacing echoing from the den. “It’s always going to be like that here. We’ll never be one of them. Don’t you understand that? There’s nothing we can do to earn their respect.”

“That’s not true,” Hollypaw says again, angrier this time.

“What are you saying?” Jaypaw asks. “Stop beating around the bush and tell us, for StarClan’s sake.”

“What I’m saying—” Lionpaw breaks off with an angry huff. “It’s just. Maybe Tigerstar was right about this Clan.”

There’s silence for a long moment. Fireheart’s heart, he thinks, stops in that time, his blood turning to ice and snow and a strange form of strangling, choking fire.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Jaypaw says, irritation on his tongue. “Tigerstar tried to kill Bluestar, and that’s that. He was exiled, Lionpaw.”

“The only cats who saw anything were Bluestar — who hates us — and Fireheart, who — guess what, Hollypaw — also hates us!”

“Shut up!” Hollypaw hisses. “You’re wrong. Fireheart doesn’t hate us. Cinderpelt says he’s just — he’s working through growing up knowing that our father was a murderer and that no one would believe him. Don’t — don’t make up lies because you’re angry that Swiftpaw is dead!”

“And why is he dead?” Lionpaw presses. “He should have been a warrior before we were ever apprenticed, and now he’s died an apprentice. He tried to prove himself, even though he shouldn’t have had to, and now look what’s happened! What’s going to happen to us, huh? Are we ever going to get our warrior names, or are they going to drag us out into the clearing and slit our throats before you ever have even a chance to slit Fireheart’s?”

“That isn’t going to happen,” Hollypaw says with conviction, and Fireheart feels pride bubble up in his chest despite himself. “You’re tired — we all are — and you’re coming up with lies in your head because you can’t think straight.”

Lionpaw hisses, but it’s cut off. Fireheart wonders, vaguely, which of his siblings had smacked him.

“Just sleep,” Jaypaw concurs. “We can talk about this again when we’re not all out of our minds with exhaustion.”

“But—” Lionpaw protests.

“Sleep,” Jaypaw insists, and Lionpaw gives a final huff before the den falls silent. 

Fireheart waits another long moment, his ears trained on the apprentices’ den, but eventually the uneven breaths become long and shallow, and Fireheart turns and heads out into the forest. He has, he decides, a lot of thinking to do.

Fireheart takes prey to Cinderpelt’s den most mornings. It’s a bit of a ritual, starting all the way when his former apprentice was first injured, but now he has two mice swinging from his jaws — the last of the fresh-kill pile. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do; Cinderpelt and Lostface needed their strength. The smell of them makes his stomach rumble, but he pushes down on the instinct to bite into their flesh and trods on, trying to keep his head up.

He almost misses his apprentice sitting in the shadows of the lichen, but he shouldn’t have, because she’s sitting straight and tall, staring at the ferns that separate the area from the main camp like it might hold all the answers even Fireheart can’t grasp. He drops his mice.

“Fireheart,” Hollypaw says, dipping her head without glancing at him.

“Hollypaw,” he returns, sitting beside her. “What are you doing here?”

His apprentice hesitates. “Holding vigil, more or less.”

“Why?” Fireheart asks, confused. “Cinderpelt says she’s going to live.”

“I know.” She looks at him then, her gaze hard. “It’s great news.”

“Doesn’t sound like it is,” Fireheart comments.

There’s a long silence, filled only by the murmuring of the Clan, the stirrings of the trees above, the gentle bite of a leaf-fall morning.

“It was Swiftpaw’s plan,” Hollypaw says at last. Her voice is bitter, filled with longing and loathing and horrible grief. “Swiftpaw’s stupid, hairbrained scheme that got Lostface injured. And yet,” she adds, curling her claws in the dust, “I wish she’d died instead. It’s so stupid,” she adds. “I’m being so awful. If either of them deserved to die, it was Swiftpaw, and Lostface was always kind to me, Fireheart. I—I don’t know why I feel like this. I hate her for living. I want—” she breaks off. “If I could just go back in time—if he’d said something, anything—”

“What would you have done?” Fireheart asks softly.

Hollypaw looks down at her paws. She flexes her claws into the dirt, no longer afraid of unsheathing them in Fireheart’s presence, and a sad sort of gratefulness buzzes through him. “I don’t know,” she says, clearly despondent. “I miss him. I miss him so much, Fireheart. It’s like my chest has been carved open. I feel like I’m bleeding. It hurts worse than any claws.” She closes her eyes, rocking a bit from side to side as her tail flicks atop hardened ground. “Why did he do it?” she asks at last, her voice broken and small.

“He wanted to prove himself,” Fireheart says. “He wanted to be a warrior, and thought that facing a dog or two wouldn’t… be impossible.”

“He was wrong.”

“He was,” Fireheart agrees, pauses. “Do you blame him?”

Hollypaw looks at him incredulously. “Of course I do,” she says. “Of course I do. I do, I do, I hate him so much—” she cuts off, the anger bleeding away. “Or, I wish I could. I wish. I wish I could—I just... he’s dead, and — and Lostface went with him. She didn’t try to talk him out of it. None of the older apprentices did,” she adds with a sardonic twist of her mouth. “And he didn’t involve us. Wanted to keep us safe. He couldn’t even keep himself safe! But I still blame her, Fireheart. I wish I didn’t, but she lived and he died. She lived, and he died.”

Fireheart breathes in, out. “Blame is a tricky thing,” he says carefully. “There’s no right way to go about it. But… if you blame anyone, don’t blame Lostface. Blame me.”

The anger streams from his apprentice in a rush, turning to bewilderment. She looks down at him with wide green eyes. “What?”

“I should have tried harder, done something,” Fireheart says. “Bluestar didn’t want to give them their warrior names because of StarClan, because of who their mentors were… and Lostface’s mentor was Whitestorm, but Bluestar—she barely even trusts him anymore. It seemed impossible.”

Hollypaw’s brow furrows. “So you stopped trying,” she concludes.

“I did.”

“Swiftpaw was more than ready. He’d been ready for moons.”

“He was.”

Hollypaw’s jaw tenses. She looks away. “Why did you give up?”

“Because Bluestar is our leader. Because her word was law.”

“That didn’t mean anything when you wanted Graystripe back,” Hollypaw accuses.

Fireheart winces, looks up at the sky. It’s a bright, bright blue, with nary a cloud marring its surface; at the edges of the clearing, the trees are a riot of reds and yellows. It’s a beautiful day, one of those days where he should be taking his apprentice into the thick of the forest, letting her lead him on a hunt, but the threat is too great. So much of their territory is closed now; the fresh-kill pile is winter-storm empty, and Fireheart can almost feel his ribs pulling at his skin. “You’re right,” he says, because what else can he say? He’d protected Graystripe, stopped two siblings from attacking the mother he’d discovered by careful, painstaking investigation, and yet he’d let two cats be mauled — one to death and one nearly — right under his nose.

“You didn’t care, did you? Not about someone like Swiftpaw. Not when there were other, more loyal cats to worry about,” Hollypaw says sarcastically. “But you were wrong. Swiftpaw was more loyal than anyone! He went to do something about the threat when even you wouldn’t.”

Fireheart winces. “I—”

“I looked up to you,” Hollypaw says, voice broken. “I thought—I thought we were beyond it. But we’re not, are we? You’re always going to look at me and see someone else. You’re always going to be haunted by my father.” She grins, hangs her head. “I defended you,” she says, and Fireheart already knows this, but he’s quiet as she starts moving her head from side to side. “I told them that you were a good cat. That you’d make the right decisions.” Her head rises. “And now Swiftpaw is dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Fireheart says.

Hollypaw blinks at him, eyes hard. “So am I,” she says, and then she’s sweeping away. He’s sure that, if she could, she’d be out the gorse tunnel in a heartbeat, but she’s always been a rule follower: she course-corrects at the last moment and nearly crashes into the apprentices’ den, her tail lashing as it disappears.

Fireheart can feel eyes on him; his fur prickles uncomfortably, but he merely dips his head and collects the prey, heading solemnly into the medicine clearing.

Cinderpelt’s eyes are sympathetic. Lostface won’t look at him. Cloudtail’s murmuring into the ear that isn’t bandaged, not even sparing Fireheart a glance. “Heard everything?” Fireheart asks. There’s a bite to his words.

“She doesn’t mean it,” Cinderpelt says, using her paws to spread a poultice on a huge gash in Lostface’s side. “She’ll come around.”

“She should blame me.”

“No. She shouldn’t.” Cinderpelt’s voice is sure, and she casts a meaningful glance at her mangled leg.

Fireheart sighs. “I could have done more,” he says.

“Not without endangering your Clan, and I think you know that, deep down. In the end, Swiftpaw’s choices were his own. He won’t have to live with the consequences, but Lostface will.”

Fireheart looks away. “It shouldn’t be like this,” he says.

“You’re right. You’re our deputy and the one leading us, but our leader’s word is still law. Now,” she says, packing herb-soaked moss into a deep wound, “what are you going to do about it?”

Chapter Text

“It isn’t WindClan,” Runningwind says, hushed, glancing over his shoulder as if Bluestar will appear from nowhere, the desire for vengeance dripping like water from her pelt.

Fireheart’s tail lashes against the ground. Somehow, the sensation of it does something to center him, because otherwise—StarClan, the stress is unending. “I figured as much,” he says. “WindClan knows what it’s like to be bereft of food. Not that I think they would never do it, but as things stand between our Clans—”

Runningwind looks grim. “I know. We’ve been allies since you brought them back to the territories, but knowing that our biggest enemy is now leading their long-standing enemy…”

“...Could be beneficial or disastrous,” Frostfur finishes, emerging from the shadows layering camp. Her white fur immediately gleams where the light of the moon touches it, but then she’s gone again, swallowed by the dim.

Vaguely, Fireheart wonders how she’d learned how to disappear like that. “Thank you for coming,” he says instead.

Frostfur nods neatly, her blue eyes gleaming. “This had best be life or death,” she murmurs. “I’m not keen on leaving Brightpaw for too long.”

Neither of the toms comment on her use of Lostface’s old name.

“Bluestar wants to attack WindClan,” Fireheart says. “She’s convinced that they’re stealing prey.”

“WindClan would never risk their current position with us for a few rabbits,” Frostfur says immediately. “It’s far more likely that Tigerstar is trying to strain relations between us in order to sow discord and make us much easier individual targets.”

Runningwind cuts her a glance. “You know that, we know that, and Bluestar would have known it within seconds. Well. Before,” he adds, sounding as if he’d been out tasting deathberries.

Frostfur sighs deeply. “There’s no way to make her see sense,” she says finally. “I tried, when she named Lostface, but…” she trails off. The muscles in her shoulders bunch and then release, her jaw working.

Fireheart feels his heart dip into his paws. “You can’t think of anything that would—that would stop her?”

Frostfur’s gaze flickers from Fireheart to Bluestar’s den. “Treason,” she accuses. “You’re planning treason.”

Fireheart flinches.

“That’s why you brought us here,” Frostfur continues. “Because you thought, somehow, that we were the best suited to—to help you plan treason right under Bluestar’s nose!”

“I can’t let the attack happen,” Fireheart says tersely. “It will weaken both Clans, and we can’t afford any more weaknesses. Swiftpaw was as good as any warrior, and Lostface too. Now—” he cuts himself off.

Frostfur looks, for a moment, much older than she had any right to be.

Fireheart’s chest seizes in sympathy. She’s lost more than most to Tigerstar’s crusade — all three of them have, but Frostfur… Frostfur had lost her mate and had two of her kits scarred irrevocably, with no guarantee that one would have any quality of life at all.

Runningwind’s green gaze drops, and he lays his tail over Frostfur’s shoulders. “It’s been a long time since we were Bluestar’s apprentices, Fireheart,” he says somberly. “What is it that you want from us that Whitestorm can’t give you?”

“Trust,” Fireheart spits. “Whitestorm may like me, may help me, but you understand me, don’t you? You know Bluestar as well as you know your own families. You know that this—” he whips his tail, frenzied, to point at the leader’s den “—isn’t right, isn’t natural, isn’t her. You know that we have to stop her before she makes a mistake too large to fix. You know she’s on her last life,” he accuses, voice spiking up several notches even as he tried to bring it back under control, “and you know that Tigerstar will destroy us, given the chance. You know, and you know me, and neither of you were anything but kind to me when I came to this Clan, when I failed Cinderpelt, when I—”

“You never failed Cinderpelt,” Frostfur interrupts. “Saying that you did undermines what she has accomplished. She may be a medic — she may have had to give up on her first dream — but there’s nothing stopping her from finding a new dream, is there? You got her off the Thunderpath. You brought her home. Fireheart, have you lived all this time thinking—thinking I was upset with you? For saving her life?”

A sob forces its way from Fireheart’s throat. Vaguely, he understands that Runningwind is ushering them farther and farther from the main camp, away from where they might be heard, but all he can hear is the way his pulse sounds, rabbit-flighty, in his chest. “I thought you deserved to be,” he shot back. “I was supposed to take care of her—” he stops, his chest heaving.

Frostfur shakes her head. “You did,” she murmurs. “Hush, now. You took care of her, and then you trained Brackenfur, and you were so young, and you did so well. All of my children—” she stops and snorts, shaking her head “—except maybe Thornpaw—know it, and he’ll get over himself. You did the best you could, do you understand me? And it was enough. All of my kits are still alive. They’re still here, with me. Because of you.”

Silence.

Then: “Did you just try to wake the entire camp after all of the sneaking around we had to do to even pull off a secret meeting?” Runningwind asks incredulously.

Despite himself, Fireheart snorts.

Frostfur makes a breathy noise that sounds as if she’s trying desperately to hold in a laugh of her own.

Runningwind doesn’t even try—he’s wheezing on the ground before he can say anything else, a purr rattling so hard in his chest that Fireheart thinks that might wake the camp.

“This is the stupidest conversation we’ve ever had,” Runningwind manages.

“This is the only conversation we’ve ever had,” Frostfur points out, and then nearly collapses herself.

It’s like a weight has lifted off them, even for a moment, and now instead of hunkering down under a bitter leaf-fall night they’re floating above it all, high in the greenleaf air. Fireheart doesn’t nearly collapse — he goes full-force into it, laughter shaking him to the point of pain.

Runningwind stuffs his own tail in his mouth to try to quiet himself.

Frostfur attempts to look like the reasonable oldest sister and fails miserably.

“This wasn’t—this wasn’t in the meeting plan,” Fireheart laughs.

“No, I’d imagine it wasn’t,” Frostfur wheezes.

“This is the stupidest conversation I’ve ever had,” Runningwind decides. “I’m upgrading it.”

“There are dogs coming to kill us all,” Fireheart says, “and we’re laughing like kits given too much catmint for their kittencough.”

“We should make this a regular thing,” Runningwind replies.

“What, sneaking around in our own camp like some sort of ShadowClan spy?” Frostfur inquires. “Talking about our leader like she’s lost her mind?”

“Well—”

“Don’t start, Runningwind. This is. This is so idiotic I can’t even begin.”

Fireheart struggles back into a sitting position. His sides protest, but it’s a good kind of protest, a release of tension through to his very soul. “I needed that,” he says.

“I have no idea how we would have explained that,” Runningwind contributes. “Imagine someone just coming out of the warriors’ den and realizing that we were all losing our minds.”

“That probably wouldn’t have been the best thing we’ve ever been caught doing,” Frostfur decides.

“Not the worst, either,” Runningwind contributes. “Remember when we put the owl pellet in a starling and had Mousepaw take it to her?”

Frostfur’s face hardens. “Turnabout is fair play,” she says seriously.

“We’re all just the same cat, aren’t we?” wonders Fireheart. “In different stages of our lives.”

“StarClan, did Bluestar only train cats with a certain personality?” Runningwind asks. He makes a face. “Ugh, there are hairs in my mouth.”

“Who would have thought?” Frostfur asks rhetorically.

“We’re so going to get caught,” Fireheart bemoans.

“You could have just ordered everyone out on patrol so we could have had this conversation at a normal hour,” Frostfur points out. “You are deputy of this Clan. No one would have questioned it.”

“No, it was probably smart,” Runningwind manages, spitting out hairs and letting out a few more breathy chuckles. “The last time a deputy organized everyone to be out of camp—”

“Right,” Frostfur says, features immediately softening. “We could have gone out of camp?”

“Leaving the camp with only Bluestar in charge?” Runningwind retorts. “We basically need a deputy for the deputy in order for anything to get done already.”

“Definitely not promising, knowing Tigerstar,” Frostfur mutters.

“And Bluestar’s even gone sour on Whitestorm, since he and Tigerstar were such good friends.”

“It makes more sense than her turning on one of us, unfortunately.”

“Huh?” Fireheart asks, thoroughly confused. “Why?”

Frostfur’s tail flicks with agitation, laughter long gone. “His father’s name was Thistleclaw. He—”

She continues, but blood roars in Fireheart’s ears. He recognizes that name. Faceless queen, he thinks. Ambition. Hunger for power. An image of a younger Bluestar — a young Bluefur — with three small kits trailing her flashes through his mind. An impossible choice. Mistyfoot’s image swims in his mind’s eye — a smirk on her face, her head thrown back in a laugh, her visage cracked and devastated by the news of Silverstream’s death, her eyes wide and grateful as he returned two kits to her nest. Then Stonefur finds his way to take her place, the gray tom broad-shouldered and huge but still warm-hearted; the way he protects his former apprentice like his own daughter; an image of him and Mistyfoot moving as one long after they’d been made warriors. A confident smile revealing sharp fangs; his determined face twisting into outrage when Bluestar’s true role in his life had been revealed. Consequences, meted out by StarClan. Decisions made for cats with good intentions.

“I never would have thought,” Fireheart manages to croak.

“You’ve heard of him?” Runningwind asks, eyes narrowed. “Bluestar doesn’t usually like to mention him. And Whitestorm won’t even breathe his name anymore. They were never close,” he adds.

“Before the fire,” Fireheart manages to confirm. His mind is swimming, his body feeling like it had been dunked in icy water. “Her kits.”

“Ah,” Frostfur says. “We were… never sure if Mosskit would make it through the winter,” she begins, “but we—we weren’t expecting to lose Reedkit and Ripplekit.”

“I’m not much older than they would have been,” Runningwind adds. “I think Sunstar gave me to her to try to… distract her, I guess.”

A haunted noise escapes from Fireheart’s mouth. Reedkit and Ripplekit, he thinks. “I never knew their names,” he says, but that’s not true, is it? He’s lying to them even as he asks them to consider treason in his name.

Frostfur sighs; the last of her bristling fades with the sound, ghostlike in the darkness. “Something broke in her when she lost those kits,” she whispers, and there’s a river of understanding in her voice, an undercurrent of deep and abiding pain, and Fireheart feels it itch underneath his pelt, turn every hair to ice. “It never healed.”

There’s a pause. It feels like it stretches on for lifetimes and is over in a single heartbeat all at once. They stare at each other, Bluestar’s three apprentices, and a sort of understanding passes between them.

“I know what you’re going to do,” Frostfur says, “and I support it. We’ll face consequences for this, but by StarClan, I won’t let any more kits die for Tigerstar’s ambitions. Runningwind?”

Runningwind nods, his jaw shifting and his gaze casting aside, toward a particular spot in the clearing Fireheart remembers as well as one might remember to breathe. He can almost see Redtail splayed across the ground, a sheltered kittypet’s first taste of death, and wonders if Sandstorm will ever forgive him this. 

“We’ve lost too much already,” Runningwind murmurs, and that is that.

“No sense in sending three border patrols,” Fireheart says as casually as he can, stretching in the dawn light. “Two patrols can head up to the farthest points of the current territory and swing to the borders—one from Fourtrees and along RiverClan, one from the Thunderpath tunnel and along ShadowClan. Whitestorm, you take Sandstorm, Mousefur, and Thornpaw on the ShadowClan route. Sandstorm, if something goes wrong, you’re fastest. Alert camp. I’ll take Frostfur and Runningwind toward RiverClan. Same instructions, Runningwind.”

“What about Hollypaw?” Whitestorm asks. “Shouldn’t she go with you?”

Very carefully, Fireheart’s tail does not twitch. His mind runs through excuses—too dangerous is out: everywhere is dangerous. Wanting her to train with someone else doesn’t make sense when he’s told the apprentices to keep close to their mentors, and besides, the sandy hollow has been cut off from them. He could hardly be cruel enough to assign her to Cinderpelt after their argument.

He’s run out of time. “With me, obviously,” he says. It comes out almost flippantly. Good, Fireheart thinks. I sound unaffected. Or… wait. Like I don’t care?

Runningwind winces sympathetically in his direction.

His heart sinks; it’s the second one. “Not—I mean, obvious, it’s just that of course I’d want her with me—” he breaks off, wincing at himself.

Sandstorm stares at him. ‘Are you okay?’ she mouths.

Fireheart shoots her a grin that he immediately knows is much, much too wide.

She narrows her eyes.

“Goldenflower, Dustpelt, Ashpaw, hunting patrol around the camp only. Don’t stray. Border patrols, we’re hunting too. Everyone else—do not leave camp. Practice emergency evacuations if you’d like, but conserve your strength. Brackenfur, you’re in charge.”

Brackenfur casts a significant look toward Darkstripe, who’s sitting in front of him. Fireheart nods, subtly this time.

“Brindleface, you’re Brackenfur’s back-up,” Fireheart finishes.

Brindleface makes a face that says she doesn’t think much of that plan. Frankly, Fireheart can’t bring himself to care.

“Move out,” he decides briskly.

The group around Fireheart breaks up, and he leads his planned patrol — plus Hollypaw — out of the gorse tunnel first, swerving immediately toward Fourtrees.

There’s a churning in his gut, a hesitance in his pawsteps, and he looks at Hollypaw guiltily even as she bounds ahead a step. Her lead doesn’t last long — she’s nothing if not obedient when told to be, or when given an official task — and soon he has to school his face as she drops to his side, a pace back. 

“It’s good to get out of camp,” she comments awkwardly.

He looks at her helplessly — it’s the first time they’ve spoken since she yelled at him outside Cinderpelt’s den, and—well, he’s raised apprentices before, he knows what they’re like, and Hollypaw isn’t any worse than Cloudtail had been — or he himself had been, when he’d been an apprentice — but there’s a chasm between them that he doesn’t know how to mend.

Her father had tried to kill him. She wasn’t her father. Her stripes and her coloration were so close to Tigerstar’s that sometimes he startled when she crossed even the corner of his vision, but her green eyes were, though calculating, bright and innocent. Even still, his body wants to betray him — he wants to shy away from her, from her long claws and the fur that bunches around them, from the way her shoulders are growing powerful and even how little tufts are growing at the top of her ears, and on his bad days he doesn’t even register green as green.

(Those nights, he wakes violently in the warriors’ den, screams echoing in his mouth, his bedding shredded and his heart pounding. Those nights, he relieves the cats on watch and takes it over himself, ears pricked for even the slightest noise. Those nights, he swears he sees amber eyes peering at him through the darkness. Those nights, something inside him wonders if it would be easier to just— give Hollypaw and her siblings to Tigerstar, if he’d be persuaded through it to leave them be, content with leading just one Clan.

(He tells himself that he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t stoop to his level, but he knows, even at his worst, that it wouldn't matter if he did or not — Tigerstar would never be content with anything less than ThunderClan’s complete decimation. He will never have to make the choice, and so he wonders — and wonders, his gut churning and bile burning his tongue — if he is just as bad as Tigerstar. After all, Tigerstar hadn’t hesitated to try to kill his apprentice. After all, Fireheart watches for the weaknesses in Hollypaw he could exploit, should he need to, and disguises it as training.)

(And it is training. Or is it? Does he want her protected or dead?)

There’s a jagged ginger patch on her throat, he knows. It almost looks like a wound in the right light. He wonders if, at the end of this, he’ll have to spill her father’s blood. Spill her blood.

He trusts her. His gut churns at her name.

He’d apprenticed her to himself. He is responsible for her safety.

He’s throwing her to the wolves, right this very second.

Fireheart grits his teeth as he forces himself back to the present, where Runningwind is jigging with unreleased energy, where Frostfur is stepping gracefully along, where Hollypaw is following with her ears pricked, her jaws open to catch any scent that didn’t belong. 

He cranes his head.

Hollypaw’s bright, bright green eyes — Goldenflower, not Tigerstar, he reminds himself — are on him, and she tilts her head in response as she watches her mentor come back to the patrol. She closes her mouth, and her jaw works anxiously as the territory slips away. “Are… are you okay?” she asks finally.

Fireheart takes a shuddering inhale. “I set this patrol for a reason,” he starts, and then stops.

Hollypaw’s eyes dart to the side — toward Frostfur, probably — like she’s not entirely sure what she’s heard. “Right,” she says slowly. “The RiverClan border, once we get to Fourtrees.”

“Not exactly,” Fireheart corrects.

“Then—”

“How do you feel about a little casual rule-breaking, Hollypaw?” Runningwind interrupts, scrunching his nose at them with a smile.

“She hates it,” Fireheart says, the words coming at the same time as Hollypaw’s own, identical response.

Hollypaw seems to smile despite herself, shaking her head with some sort of fondness until the question fully registers. “I’m sorry,” she asks, her voice high. “How do I feel about what now?”

Fireheart looks up, ignoring the jaws in his chest. “Beautiful day,” he comments.

Beside him, Hollypaw stumbles over something. He — very carefully — doesn’t look to see exactly what. “You’re serious,” she says. “Oh StarClan, you’re serious. What—what are we doing out here?” she mutters, almost to herself, as the canopies that make Fourtrees so magnificent peek through the autumn-thinned forest.

Runningwind practically prances into the clearing, followed by Frostfur’s experienced lope and Fireheart’s anxious trot.

“Are we setting up a trap?” Hollypaw asks, looking at the Great Rock. She’s never seen it occupied, Fireheart knows — it had been far too dangerous to bring her or her brothers to any Gatherings, and so all three of them have spent each full moon in camp, sequestered not in the apprentices’ den but the warriors’ for their own safety.

Runningwind frowns consideringly. “Not on today’s agenda, but not a bad idea,” he decides. “Frostfur?”

“Unfortunately, I think this is a little more serious than that,” Frostfur says as they pass the first giant oak’s trunk.

There’s an uncomfortable silence.

“Once we cross, we need to stop with any jokes,” Fireheart says finally. “This is a serious situation and it calls for a serious approach. Okay?”

“We’re crossing the border?” Runningwind asks. Had Fireheart not mentioned that?

“What?” Hollypaw almost shrieks.

“What, did you think we had time to just wait around for a patrol?” Frostfur snarks at Runningwind. “If we don’t go in now, we’ll be reported as missing before we can do anything at all!”

“Again, what?” Hollypaw demands.

“Apparently we really should have talked specifics instead of just, ‘go to WindClan’ and ‘talk to Tallstar,’” Runningwind comments as they reach WindClan’s scent line. “Problems with secret middle-of-the-night meetings, I guess.”

“That’s what we’re doing?” Hollypaw asks, aghast. “Seriously? You brought me on a treason patrol? Is this a punishment?”

“Technically Whitestorm brought you on the treason patrol,” Fireheart says, only a tad guiltily. “I would have rather kept you out of it, so—no, not a punishment.” He pauses, thinking back on the explosive end to their conversation only a few nights prior. “I’m not even sure what I’d be punishing you for.”

Hollypaw looks at him incredulously. “Okay, I know we’re fighting right now and I haven’t forgotten it for one second, but I’m willing to put that aside for now because even though a lot of insane things have happened to me in my life, I never imagined that my mentor would — albeit unwillingly,” she corrects as Fireheart glares at her, “bring me along to defect to WindClan!”

“We’re not defecting to WindClan,” Frostfur corrects. “Bluestar plans to start an unnecessary war — StarClan knows why, I was her first apprentice and she was already massively traumatized then — and we’re here to stop it.”

“By breaking into WindClan,” Runningwind adds unnecessarily.

“We’re not breaking anything,” Fireheart sighs, then stops. “Runningwind, we’re not breaking anything.”

“Maybe you’re not,” Runningwind grins back. “Personally I think they have it way too made up here, bordering Highstones. That amount of exposure to StarClan cannot be healthy for their egos.”

“ShadowClan drove them out of their territory last year,” Frostfur points out.

“And ThunderClan brought them back! They owe us one is what I’m saying, kid,” Runningwind says.

“This breaks the warrior code in so many ways,” Hollypaw groans.

Fireheart winces apologetically. “I’d send you back, but I’d rather you not get eaten by a dog.”

“He does care,” Frostfur says dully. “That’s the most heartwarming sentiment towards one’s apprentice that I’ve ever heard.”

“I don’t really remember my siblings,” Fireheart confides in Hollypaw idly, “except for one sister I met later. But I think this kind of teasing is affectionate?”

Hollypaw stares at him, wide-eyed. “I’m still mad at you,” she decides. “But that’s so sad that I almost forgive you. Almost.”

“She does care,” Runningwind jokes. “That’s the most heartwarming—” he breaks off with an oof as Frostfur sticks a paw into his side. As he plays up the injury, the brown tom nearly stumbles across the border; with a gasp, Hollypaw hauls him back from the line, her pupils blown.

Fireheart takes a moment to be deeply confused — they were already planning on crossing the border, so why not at that moment? — and then promptly does not curse.

The good news: they don’t have to trespass after all.

The bad news: Mudclaw does not look happy to see them.

“Of all the StarClan-forsaken cats we could have encountered,” Frostfur curses under her breath.

Hollypaw, who has never seen a WindClan cat, ever, and whose father currently led WindClan’s enemy with claws sharpened and absolutely and delightedly extended, makes a sound not unlike the cry of a dying bird.

Not for the first time, Fireheart regrets quite a few of his life choices.

It takes some negotiating, but finally Mudclaw makes a disgusted noise and gestures for them to follow. With no perceptible signal, Runningbrook fans out toward RiverClan, staying distant but at their side, and Tornear takes up a spot behind the ThunderClan cats, a noticeable squint to his eyes.

“I’ve decided that the dogs can eat me,” Hollypaw whispers to Fireheart.

Fireheart looks at her, blinking. “What?”

“Really,” she says firmly, “they can eat me. This is—this is getting unnerving.”

“More unnerving than daily life in ThunderClan?”

“At least there I know I’m not about to be attacked,” Hollypaw returns. She winces. “Probably. I think.”

Fireheart sighs. “I’m sorry I brought you on this patrol,” he offers. “I should have found a way to—”

“It’s okay,” Hollypaw interrupts. She turns surreptitiously to look at Runningbrook, then ducks her head. “It’s an adventure, right?” she asks. They only make it a few more pawsteps before she takes another shy glance. “And—she’s pretty,” she confesses, quiet as the whisper of a soft breeze through grasses.

Fireheart snorts despite himself. Mudclaw turns back to look at him suspiciously, and the ginger tom ducks his own head. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it?” Fireheart teases lightly. “You only want to get eaten by a dog because you have a crush.”

“At least I’m not as bad as you and Sandstorm,” Hollypaw returns. “Blech.”

“Our love story will be told by the elders for season-cycles to come,” Fireheart manages, though he chokes on his tongue in the process. “It’s not the same.”

Hollypaw scrunches up her face like she’s not sure if she believes a word he’s saying. In all fairness, Fireheart isn’t sure if he believes a word Fireheart is saying. “What I’m trying to say is that I have limited options and Runningbrook isn’t the worst choice I could make.”

Fireheart pushes the familiar lurch at the thought of out-of-Clan relationships aside. They’re joking. He can joke. “You’d have to swim for RiverClan, and you. You’d—ShadowClan,” he finishes dumbly.

Hollypaw’s subsequent glance is so incredulous that Fireheart nearly falls into a dip in the moor he should’ve seen. He certainly does not need to be kept from falling by Frostfur of all cats, who will never let it go.

“Shape up!” the white she-cat hisses in his ear. “Are you trying to ruin our hunt before it even begins?"

Fireheart goes silent, and the rest follow suit, though he isn’t sure if it’s because they’re trying not to give away secrets or because they’re in such obviously poor condition. The other Clan territories lay lower than WindClan's; the gorge running between it and RiverClan is proof enough of that. WindClan cats might look skinny to the untrained eye, but they’re strong and wiry. ThunderClan’s typically large frames weren’t helping them now that prey was as scarce as after a harsh snow.

The climb seems endless. Runningwind’s bony sides heave with exertion, and he sees Runningbrook wince and move to assist Hollypaw as she stumbles before Tornear calls her off. Even Frostfur’s head is held low, her breathing heavy.

Shame washes through Fireheart like floodwater, exhaustion pulling at his bones. He hasn’t realized just how bad the situation was until this moment, seeing tireless Runningwind lag and bright Hollypaw hunch into herself as she moves resolutely onward.

Fresh conviction flows through his veins. This war must be stopped, or not just blood would be shed. He knows, intimately, of the bodies left to rot in WindClan’s camp after ShadowClan drove them out. He remembers how thin Gorsekit had been as he carried him, how defeated Ashfoot had looked as she shepherded her kits onward.

None of Ashfoot’s kits had survived, he knew. He’d tried to keep up with them, had asked after their apprentice ceremonies at the right Gathering — naïve, Sandstorm had said later; optimistic, Graystripe had provided with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

He stares at his apprentice and wonders how he hasn’t noticed how thin she is.

“Doing okay?” he asks her, breathless himself.

She glances at him, breaths rapid and shallow. “Yeah,” she says, and then blinks rapidly. “Yeah,” she repeats, her voice thicker now. “I think I am.”

Mudclaw stalks off as they enter WindClan camp proper. The thorns protecting the camp tug on Frostfur's and Hollypaw’s long fur, but Fireheart and Runningwind are spared, spilling into camp without incident.

Tornear takes a seat beside them, still looking perturbed, but Runningbrook moves away with a friendly wave of her tail, replaced by two senior warriors—Sorrelshine, whom he recognizes by her distinct tortoiseshell patches, and—”Rabbitear!” Runningwind greets enthusiastically, leaping to his paws.

Rabbitear tilts her head at the brown ThunderClan tom good-naturedly, her oversized ears twitching with the motion. “I’m guarding you?” she asks, shaking her head in fond exasperation. “Of course.”

Frostfur looks bored by this, but Hollypaw’s strict adherence to the warrior code and the societal requirements of a rank such as apprentice cannot withstand even the slightest mystery. “How do you know Runningwind?” she asks eagerly.

Frostfur groans.

Rabbitear grins. “Managed to get himself lost in WindClan at his first Gathering after a bet with one of our apprentices,” she confides.

Sorrelshine does not look approving, Fireheart notes.

“And then he fell in an old warren and was in real trouble. I fished him out and — swear on the sweet meadowgrass — Bluestar nearly had his ears! Dragged him back to ThunderClan by his tail, kicking and screaming about how the race wasn’t over! Haven’t seen him on the moor since,” she chuckles.

“I always say hello at Gatherings!” Runningwind protests, as if she’s accused him of some grave crime.

“That he does,” Rabbitear confirms. “Lucky for him, my brother thought it was funny more than anything.”

“Tallstar’s sense of humor is impeccable,” Tornear says precisely, apparently in agreement. It’s the first thing he’s said to them, and Hollypaw starts, nearly falling over.

“No warrens below here,” Rabbitear tells her amiably. “No chance of a repeat performance.”

Hollypaw stares a little warily at the ground anyway, and as such jumps again when Tallstar greets them from across the clearing.

Admittedly, Fireheart is starting to get a bit anxious about how anxious she is.

“Fireheart! I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting to see a ThunderClan patrol today,” Tallstar says as he approaches.

“Tallstar,” Fireheart greets. “It’s good to see you.”

“I would say the same, friend,” the black-and-white leader starts, “but you’re thinner now than you were last Gathering. Should we be worried for ThunderClan’s safety?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Fireheart sees Frostfur bristle.

“It is leaf-fall,” Fireheart says diplomatically.

Tallstar frowns. “By your pelts, I’d guess we’re at the end stages of leaf-bare,” he says.

Now Runningwind is bristling, and he can feel Hollypaw shift beside him.

Fireheart smiles weakly. “Nothing that we can’t handle,” he says softly, hoping that Tallstar will understand where he’s coming from.

It seems that he does. “I’m glad to hear it,” the leader says carefully. “But if not for that, then what brings you to WindClan’s camp? Do you have a warning to pass along?”

Guilt sweeps through him, sudden and unexpected as lightning on a bright greenleaf day. He’d known what he was doing — had roped three other cats into it — and now that he was here, he found himself frozen, unable to speak. What would Bluestar think of what he’s doing? What would the rest of the Clan?

But Tallstar is right. They’re thin, exhausted, worn to the bone. Fireheart knows that if they were to go along with Bluestar’s plot, they would be feeding their lives into the jaws of the other Clan’s. They would be at their mercy.

Fireheart steels himself.

“Bluestar wants to attack WindClan,” he says. A gasp ripples through WindClan’s ranks.

“What?”

“The mauled bodies of rabbits — prey blood — has been found in our territory,” Fireheart says. “Bluestar believes WindClan to blame.”

“We have never hunted on ThunderClan’s land!” a gray cat calls.

“We know,” Frostfur says, stepping forward.

“That’s why we’re here,” Runningwind adds, bolstering Fireheart from the other side.

“To stop a war before it ever starts,” Fireheart agrees. “Will you help us?”

Tallstar stares down at them, his gaze clouded.

Fireheart lifts his chin. “We don’t want to fight.”

“You’d go against your leader’s orders?” Deadfoot asks. “It’s against the warrior code,” he adds, as if any of them have taken this step lightly, as if any of them think that Bluestar will ever look at them the same way again.

“They were all Bluestar’s apprentices!” Hollypaw pipes up. “If you can’t trust them—trust that they wouldn’t go against Bluestar’s orders unless it was for good reason, then who can you trust?”

Tallstar’s gaze flicks to Fireheart’s apprentice, and Fireheart steps forward as if to shield her, as if they aren’t surrounded, good as dead at Tallstar’s word. But something like respect glitters behind the black-and-white tom’s eyes at the move, and he tilts his head consideringly. “I know,” he says at last. “Lest we forget, Bluestar was the cat who ordered WindClan brought back, and Fireheart was one of the cats who fulfilled that quest. We owe ThunderClan much.”

“I would have done it anyway,” Fireheart says, surprising himself.

“I know,” Tallstar repeats. “It’s part of why I’m so willing to trust you now.”

WindClan’s ranks are murmuring, but it’s not a hostile sound. They seem — almost relaxed, almost like they already know what the outcome will be, that Tallstar and Bluestar’s apprentices will fix this, that there will never be any war.

Fireheart wishes he could have that much confidence in himself.

“So, deputy of ThunderClan,” Tallstar says, amusement in his tone, “how do we fix this?”

“I can convince my Clan to protest the war.” Or, at least, he hopes. “If ThunderClan won’t fight, then Bluestar will have to see reason. We know you aren’t to blame. All of our warriors know it.”

Deadfoot’s gaze turns keen. 

Fireheart isn’t sure how much WindClan knows of Bluestar’s ailing health, but this can’t be helped.

“Then who is to blame?” Deadfoot questions.

“Dogs,” Fireheart answers. They’d agreed to the truth, more or less, if pressed — easier to keep up a version of the truth than a straight-out lie. More guilt pulls at his chest.

“Twoleg pets?” Rabbitear asks. “Are you sure—”

Tallstar waves his tail, and his sister subsides, though she doesn’t look happy about it. “I see,” he says, though it’s clear that he doesn’t. “Then we should discuss what to do next. A war is unacceptable — we are allies, not enemies.”

“Agreed,” Fireheart says, relieved. “But… you should know that — as we are doing this without the knowledge of our leader — that I do not have the power to amass debts in my Clan’s name. I will do everything I can to aid you, but… no one knows that we’re even here, and in order for this to be a success…” he trails off.

Tallstar looks at him peculiarly, as if seeing something far away or long ago. “You, of all cats,” he says quietly, “will never be indebted to WindClan. For as long as you and I are alive, Fireheart, you can count on the cats of the moor to aid you.”

Why, Fireheart wants to demand, but there’s something lodged in his throat, sharp and painful, and he bows his head deeply instead, hoping to convey the depth of his thanks through his body alone.

Beside him, Frostfur and Runningwind copy the movement; Hollypaw sinks into a deeper form of the bow, her muzzle touching the ground. She is, after all, an echo of the evil that casts long shadows across the Clans, and she will never be allowed to forget it.

“Rise,” Tallstar says kindly. “You have done a good deed here today.”

“Thank you, Tallstar.”

Tallstar dips his own head. “Now, then,” he says, leading the way to his den. “Let’s hear your plan.”

“That could have gone worse,” Runningwind laughs, incredulous, as they push their way through the thorns protecting WindClan’s camp. The tunnel is much slighter than ThunderClan’s, though taller, and though he’s sure WindClan can get their catches through with practiced ease, ThunderClan doesn’t have much hope in the world.

“We avoided war,” Frostfur says, beaming. “I don’t think it could have gone much better.”

“Almost avoided war,” Hollypaw whispers, her shaky voice cutting into the older cats’ more jubilant reactions. “When Bluestar realizes what we’ve done, she might not put an end to the war at all,” she adds.

Fireheart’s pelt feels like he’s been dunked in the river in the coldest of leaf-bares.

“She might order us to attack anyway,” Hollypaw finishes, just as soft. “And, in the end—”

“Our leader’s word is law,” Fireheart finishes for her.

And who will the Clan listen to — their still-revered leader or their once-kittypet deputy?

Frostfur and Runningwind exchange looks.

“They’re reasonable cats,” Frostfur says.

“They don’t want war, either,” Runningwind points out.

Fireheart gathers himself, looking down the moor to where the sun has nearly hit its zenith. “You’re right,” he says with confidence he doesn’t quite feel. “We’ve done the right thing.”

All three of his companions nod, and some of the levity comes back to them, the rush of adrenaline well-spent. Fireheart joins them as they quiz Hollypaw, as they startle at a group of large ravens, as they see Fourtrees rise in the distance.

This is a victory.

(It sits hollow in his chest.)