The Fourth Apprentice

Lionblaze lashed his tail in frustration. “I can’t move it on my own,” he snarled, though Dovepaw knew that he was more angry with himself than he was with her. “It’s too heavy.”

“This isn’t going to work, is it?” Dovepaw jumped, startled to see that Toadfoot had padded over to them. “We’ll need at least three cats to lure the beavers away,” he went on, flopping down beside the log with a tired sigh. “That leaves just five to dismantle the dam, even if Woody helps. We’ll never do it.”

Dovepaw glanced across the clearing to see that all the others had given up trying to shift the logs and branches. They looked exhausted, especially Petalfur, whose eyes were still dark with grief for her Clanmate.

This is hopeless! What are we going to do?

Lionblaze rose to his paws. “We can’t give up now,” he growled. “We need help.”

“But that’s mouse-brained,” Whitetail protested. “We can’t go all the way back to the lake to fetch more cats. It’s too far. We need water now!”

“There are cats who can help us much closer than that,” Lionblaze reminded them with a flick of his tail.

Toadfoot’s eyes stretched wide with astonishment. “You mean the kittypets?”

Lionblaze nodded. “It’s worth a try. We only need to go downstream as far as that Twoleg nest with the rabbits.”

“Yeah, but…they’re kittypets,” Tigerheart pointed out.

Whitetail murmured in agreement. “If you go looking for them and they won’t come, then we’ve wasted time.”

“That’s the risk we take,” Lionblaze responded.

Dovepaw’s belly churned. If the rest of the patrol won’t agree, what can Lionblaze do?

After a few heartbeats, Sedgewhisker broke the silence. “I think we have to try,” she mewed. “We owe it to Rippletail.”

Petalfur nodded. “I don’t want to think that he died for nothing.”

The cats looked at one another, and Dovepaw knew that all of them were grieving for Rippletail, regardless of their Clan.

“Then go for it,” Toadfoot meowed. “I can’t think of anything better.”

“Right.” Lionblaze pricked his ears. “Dovepaw, you can come with me. The rest of you, keep practicing. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”

Dovepaw followed her mentor as he raced down the slope to the pool and leaped down into the streambed below the dam. As she followed him along the pebbly channel, she realized that her pads had grown tough and hard from their long journey. She didn’t even feel any pain when she trod on a sharp-edged stone.

The day was approaching sunhigh by the time they reached the copse where they had stopped to hunt. Lionblaze slowed his pace. “Snowdrop followed us here,” he mewed. “Maybe she comes here often. Dovepaw, can you sense her?”

Dovepaw was already feeling confused by the sounds of the Twolegplace: monsters, Twolegs yowling, and the strange, harsh clatter of their lives. She longed to block it out as she had done before, concentrating just on the ground in front of her paws and the leaves rustling closest to her, but this time she knew she couldn’t. She had to listen to everything, take in all the information that was filtering through her ears and her nose and her paws, until they found the cats. She cast out her senses, searching in particular for Snowdrop, but she couldn’t pick up any trace of the white kittypet.

“Never mind,” Lionblaze told her. “She’s probably by those rabbits, or inside the Twoleg nest.”

As they trotted downstream, Dovepaw soon picked up the scent of rabbit, and the two cats climbed out of the stream at the end of the Twoleg territory. The rabbits were still nibbling the grass behind their shiny fence, but there was no sign of the kittypets. Dovepaw couldn’t pick up anything except a fading scrap of Jigsaw’s scent.

“Where have they gone?” she wailed. “I thought they lived here.”

Lionblaze’s eyes reflected her own anxiety. “I thought this part would be easy,” he muttered. He hesitated, then added, “They probably see the whole of this Twolegplace as their territory. Do you think you can find where they are?”

Dovepaw’s belly lurched. Three kittypets? In a place as big and noisy as this? But she had found the beavers—and now she realized that she could do this, too. She had to use her senses again to make their journey worth Rippletail’s loss. “I’ll try.”

Crouching down, she closed her eyes and let her senses range out through the Twolegplace. This territory was so unlike anything she’d seen before that at first she had only a very fuzzy idea of what lay between the Twoleg nests. Gradually she began to build up a picture of rows and rows of nests, with Thunderpaths between them, the roar of monsters echoing off the hard red walls. Twolegs were running and shouting and carrying things around…

“The kittypets!” Lionblaze hissed urgently into her ear. “You’re looking for the kittypets.”