Skyclan’s Destiny

Chapter 10

Leafstar reached the top of the gorge and crept into the undergrowth, flinching as thorns scraped along her pelt. The moon had already set, but the stars shed enough light to show her, as she glanced back, the dark outlines of her Clanmates slipping onto the cliff top. The first glimmer of dawn had yet to show itself above the rocks.

Five sunrises had passed since Patchfoot’s patrol had found the mound of Twoleg waste in the forest. Every cat had practiced Stick’s battle moves until they could do them in their sleep.

And I have. Each night Leafstar’s dreams had been full of thin faces and glittering, malignant eyes, the squeaking of rats and the stench of blood. Now is the time to end it.

A cool night breeze rustled the leaves above her head as Leafstar headed toward the rat heap. Sharpclaw and Stick had pressed up beside her, the other warriors following. Every cat kept low, gliding along the ground, their paw steps making no more noise than raindrops dripping from branches after a shower.

Suddenly a sharp snapping noise broke the silence. Leafstar jumped, her heart beginning to pound.

Sharpclaw whipped around. “What was that?” he hissed.

Every cat had halted, their neck fur bristling, their gazes flicking warily to the shadows. Shrewtooth looked frozen with fright.

“Sorry.” Bouncefire’s voice came from the darkness at the back of the patrol, sounding embarrassed. “I stepped on a twig.”

“Great!” Sparrowpelt grunted. “Now the rats know we’re coming!”

“It doesn’t matter,” Stick assured him. “All the rats will do is hide deeper inside their nest. And they’ll soon find out there’s nowhere safe in there.”

As Leafstar’s heartbeat slowed, she waved her tail as a signal for the patrol to move on. She could feel the tension in the air now, like the sparks before a storm broke.

This is the first time I’ve led my Clan into battle. StarClan, please give us strength and bring all our warriors home safe.

The first faint light of dawn was filtering down into the forest. Leafstar’s nose twitched as the breeze carried a foul stench toward her. A few fox-lengths ahead, the waste pile was just visible through the trees, pale in the half-light. Even if the rats had heard the patrol approaching, there was no time to change their plans.

This is it.

Leafstar signaled with her tail for the patrol to halt and turned to face her Clanmates. Sharpclaw turned with her; his eyes blazed with a green light and his dark ginger fur bristled. Leafstar could almost taste his desire to avenge the death of Rainfur.

“You’re sure you remember the plan?” he demanded, his gaze raking over the patrol. “We block most of the holes, then frighten the rats so they try to escape through the holes we’ve left open. And then…” He bared his teeth, giving Stick a glance to make sure he had repeated the loner’s plan accurately.

Stick replied with a curt nod. “They won’t know what hit them.”

Leafstar began to feel more confident as she listened to her deputy and saw the determination in his eyes. We can win this battle!

She could see tension mounting even higher in the listening cats, in their twitching tails and flexing claws. Fear-scent came from the senior warriors, those who had battled the rats before, in spite of their struggles to hide it. The younger warriors picked it up, too; Shrewtooth was visibly trembling.

It’s time to get on with this, Leafstar decided. Before some cat starts to panic.

“Sparrowpelt, you led a patrol here yesterday,” she mewed softly. “Did you locate the exits from the heap?”

The young tabby tom nodded. “We didn’t want to get too close,” he explained, “in case the rats spotted us. But we think there are three gaps on the far side from where we are now, one on each side, and two in front—one up high where that piece of wood is poking out, and the other low down, underneath the Twoleg sofa.”

Peering through the trees, Leafstar could make out the two front holes Sparrowpelt had mentioned: dark cracks leading into the center of the dump. She forced herself to stay calm as she thought of rats pouring out of them.

“We’ll leave these two exits open,” she meowed, relieved that her voice stayed steady. “Patchfoot, Tinycloud, and Petalnose, you go around the back and block the exits there. Cherrytail, you deal with the one on that side”—Leafstar gestured with her tail—“and Bouncefire, you take the one over there. When the holes are blocked, stay beside them, in case any rats try to force their way out.”

She paused briefly, letting her gaze travel across the cats standing in front of her. “Sharpclaw, you’re in charge of catching the rats as they come out of the front.”

Her deputy didn’t speak, but his eyes glittered and he gave a single lash of his tail.

“Waspwhisker, Sparrowpelt, Rockshade, Stick, Coal, and Shorty, go with Sharpclaw.”

“And what about the rest of us?” Mintpaw asked, fluffing up her fur as if she wanted to make herself look twice her size. “We want to fight rats, too!”

“In a moment you’ll have all the rats you want,” Leafstar promised. “You and Cora and Shrewtooth will come with me, once the exits are blocked. We’ll prowl over the heap and chase the rats out so Sharpclaw’s patrol can deal with them.”

Mintpaw’s eyes glowed. “I’ll terrify them,” she hissed, extending her claws.

Dawn light was strengthening as Leafstar padded around to the back of the heap, following Tinycloud, Petalnose, and Patchfoot. On the way they passed Bouncefire, who was struggling to push a chunk of wood up the side of the heap, toward a gap between two shiny black pelts. Leafstar gave him a nod of approval as she crept past, silently thanking Stick for all the practice in the gorge. Her confidence grew with every paw step as she saw how focused and determined her warriors were. Pride stabbed through her as she watched her Clan working together.

Then she remembered the fight with the rats in the barn, and her confidence ebbed as she pictured the hordes of evil creatures who had poured out from their hiding places with only one thought in their narrow skulls: Kill cats! Her breath choked in her throat as she recalled the horror of being overwhelmed in a tide of brown bodies, drowning in their reek and their stifling fur. She had barely fought her way out then.

Are there enough of us here? Maybe I should have brought the daylight-warriors, too.

She hadn’t included them, because the attack had started too early for them to arrive from their Twoleg nests. Now she wondered whether it would have been better to wait.

But Sharpclaw didn’t include them in the practices, so maybe he didn’t think they’d have the strength to tackle the rats.

Shaking her head to clear it, Leafstar told herself that it was far too late to call up reinforcements. She halted and gazed up at the mound.

Great StarClan, it’s big!

She had checked out the waste pile several times before, but she had never come as close as this. The towering heap seemed to fill the whole sky, and its reek was all around her. It looked far more difficult to climb than the pile of sticks they had used for practice in the gorge. Rustling and scraping and the high-pitched squeaks of rats came from deep inside it, and Leafstar suppressed a shudder.

Beside her, Petalnose, Patchfoot, and Tinycloud were collecting sticks and lumps of wood and stone to block the three exits on this side. Cora padded up to her.

“Should we be climbing up now?” she murmured. “We need to be ready.”

Leafstar nodded. She beckoned to Mintpaw and Shrewtooth, who were waiting a few tail-lengths away, and began to claw her way up the pile.

The stench grew stronger and flies buzzed around Leafstar’s head as she climbed. Every hair on her pelt stood on end. Sometimes the heap felt sticky underpaw, and she tried not to imagine what might be clinging to her fur. I don’t look forward to licking that off, whatever it is! Sometimes the pile gave under her weight, and she imagined it collapsing altogether, pitching her down into the rat-filled darkness. She could still hear the tiny rat noises; to her relief their enemies hadn’t yet realized that they were under attack.

Leafstar had nearly reached the top of the pile when she heard the beginning of a yowl of alarm, quickly cut off. Glancing over her shoulder, she spotted Mintpaw a tail-length below her, clinging by her forepaws to a jutting piece of wood while her hind paws dangled in the air, her tail waving wildly.

“Sorry!” the apprentice squeaked, meeting Leafstar’s gaze. “I slipped.”

Scrabbling with her hind paws, she managed to haul herself up again. Leafstar tensed, all her senses alert for the rats to start pouring out before they were ready, but there was no change in the busy scratching and squeaking just beneath her paws.

“It’s okay,” she murmured, with a nod to Mintpaw. “They didn’t hear you. Try to be more careful.”

A fox-length below Mintpaw, Shrewtooth had frozen with his paws splayed out across one of the squashy Twoleg pelts and his eyes glazed with terror. Before Leafstar could speak, Cora scrambled up beside him.

“Come on,” she whispered. “You’re doing fine.”

As Shrewtooth managed to put one quivering paw in front of the next, Leafstar felt grateful for the Twolegplace cat’s level head and steady courage. This would be a lot harder without Cora and her friends, she admitted to herself.

At last Leafstar found a firm paw hold on a squared-off piece of stone, and let her gaze travel around the clearing. At the bottom of the pile, just below her, she could see Patchfoot, Tinycloud, and Petalnose, each braced against the blocked exits. Farther around, Bouncefire was in position; she couldn’t see Cherrytail on the far side. The curve of the mound cut off her view of Sharpclaw and his patrol, but she had to assume that they were ready.

The SkyClan leader let her gaze sweep around one last time. Then she threw back her head and yowled, “SkyClan, attack!”

Her voice echoed through the forest, and the mound came alive beneath her paws. The rats’ voices rose in squeals of mingled panic and fury. Leafstar could hear their frantic scrambling underneath her paws, and felt the stone she was standing on shift.

A rat’s head popped out of the hole that Tinycloud had blocked, trying to force its way past the barrier of sticks and brambles. The small white warrior slashed it twice across its nose with one forepaw, and the rat vanished again.

“Well done!” Leafstar called out as Tinycloud shoved the sticks back into place. “Force them back! Sharpclaw and his cats will do the killing.”

Petalnose was hissing furiously at two rats who were trying to escape through her exit, and Patchfoot darted across to help her. The sight of two enraged cats terrified the rats, who slid back into the mound without a blow being struck.

Reassured that her warriors knew what to do, Leafstar scrambled up to the very top of the heap, digging in her claws and yowling to frighten the rats out of the mound and into the claws of the waiting fighters. She caught glimpses of Cora and Mintpaw doing the same, while Shrewtooth perched on a spiky and battered Twoleg object with his pelt bristling and his jaws gaping in a spine-chilling shriek. The mound lurched under Leafstar’s paws; new gaps were starting to open up. A wiry rat body broke into the open a couple of mouse-lengths from her nose, fleeing down the side of the heap before she could swipe at it. A sharp squeal from below, abruptly cut off, told her that another cat had been waiting for it.

Mintpaw appeared, clawing her way over the top of a Twoleg chair, her lips drawn back in a threatening snarl. Suddenly the chair gave way, sinking deeper into the waste, carrying the apprentice down with it into a gaping hole. Mintpaw let out a terrified screech, scrabbling vainly at loose debris as she sank into the depths of the mound.

Leafstar leaped forward and grabbed the she-cat’s scruff before she disappeared altogether. Digging in her hind claws, she hauled Mintpaw upward. Two or three rats followed; one of them snapped at Mintpaw’s tail. Leafstar, with her teeth still sunk in the apprentice’s scruff, had no way of attacking, but the apprentice kicked out with her hind paws and caught the rat across the side of its head. It toppled off the mound in a flurry of waving paws and tail and vanished.

“Thanks,” Mintpaw gasped as her Clan leader set her down on a more solid part of the heap.

“You did well with that rat,” Leafstar panted.

From where she stood now, Leafstar could look down and see the battle at the front of the mound where the exits had been left open. Horror cramped her belly when she saw Sharpclaw and his patrol surrounded by a surging mass of rats. Every cat was spattered with blood.

StarClan, please let it be the rats’ blood and not their own!

Stick’s plan had been for two warriors to attack each rat, but the rats were too many, and too fast, for that. They squealed and scrabbled as the SkyClan warriors pounced on them, but there were always more to replace them. Leafstar spotted Rockshade just below her, struggling with a massive rat. His paws slashed at the rat’s flanks, but the creature had its teeth fastened in his shoulder, and Rockshade couldn’t throw it off.

With a yowl of rage, Leafstar launched herself down the heap, her paws barely touching the side. With one swipe of her paw she tore the rat’s throat open and it sagged to the ground, releasing its grip on Rockshade.

Leafstar flinched as blood came welling out of the wound she had made. This is wrong; we should kill only to eat. But she knew too well that if she and her Clan didn’t succeed in wiping out the rats, they would become prey themselves.

“Thanks!” Rockshade grunted, whirling to block another rat as it fled from the heap toward the safety of the trees.

Leafstar reared up on her hind paws as she felt tiny claws fastening in her back fur. The rat fell off and scrambled away, squealing in terror, only to run straight into Sparrowpelt’s paws.

A huge female rat crashed into Leafstar’s haunches, with Shorty hard on its tail. The two cats battled side by side; still reluctant to kill, Leafstar found herself sheathing her claws as she gave the rat a blow on the side of the head.

“No!” a furious voice yowled from behind her.

Glancing back, Leafstar saw Sharpclaw; her deputy’s dark ginger fur was soaked with blood, and there was a wild light in his eyes.

“Show no mercy!” he snarled. “Kill or be killed!”

He’s right, Leafstar thought. Her claws slid out again, and she snatched at the she-rat’s throat, while Shorty bit down on its neck from the other side. The rat squeaked and died, while Leafstar shared a brief glance of satisfaction with the Twolegplace cat.

The battle surged around her in a wave of fur and teeth. She winced with disgust as her paws slipped on blood-soaked grass. The air was filled with the reek of blood and the shrieking of cats and rats. Leafstar leaped and twisted and struck out instinctively, fighting to escape from her nightmare of glittering eyes and sharp fangs. She wasn’t aware of her Clanmates any longer, only the wiry brown bodies that fell beneath her claws.

The rat under her paws stopped struggling. Leafstar spun around to face the next enemy and saw Cora standing in front of her. The Twolegplace cat’s ear was ripped and there were toothmarks along her jaw; she stood still, her chest heaving. Beyond her, more cats were standing like islands in a lake of dead rats.

“It’s over,” Cora panted.

“No more rats.” Sharpclaw made his way to Leafstar’s side, his paws shoving aside rat bodies as he approached.

Leafstar looked around. Heaps of dead rats lay around her, and blood-smeared trails through the bracken and long grass at the edge of the clearing showed where a few of the rats had dragged themselves into the trees to die. The waste heap was torn apart into smaller piles, with separate bits of debris scattered all over the clearing.

The rats won’t be able to use that as a refuge anymore.

The shrieking had given way to heavy silence, broken only by the wheezing breath of Waspwhisker, who lay on his side a few fox-lengths away. Mintpaw was heading toward him, scrambling over the bodies of rats to reach her mentor’s side.

“He’s hurt!” she wailed.

Leafstar picked her way through the dead rats to reach her injured Clanmate. Waspwhisker was bleeding from a deep scratch down his flank; the wound stretched under his belly almost to his tail.

The gray-and-white tom lifted his head and blinked pain-filled eyes. “I’m fine,” he rasped. “Just give me a couple of heartbeats to rest.”

“You need more than that,” Leafstar meowed, dipping her head to give Waspwhisker’s ear a lick. “We’ll help you back to camp and let Echosong take a look at you.”

“I finished off the rat that did it,” Waspwhisker murmured, lying down again and closing his eyes.

The rest of the cats gathered around him. All of them had some sort of injury—scratches, torn claws, nicked ears—though none as bad as Waspwhisker’s or Cora’s. Leafstar felt the sting of a scratch on her shoulder; she had never even noticed the rat who gave it to her.

“We won,” she announced.

None of the cats responded; Leafstar met Sharpclaw’s gaze, both cats acknowledging silently that this was not the time for celebration.

“Let’s go back to camp,” she meowed.