The Fourth Apprentice

Chapter 21

Lionblaze and Toadfoot lowered Rippletail’s body into the hole they had scraped out under an oak tree. Beyond the undergrowth, Dovepaw could just make out the pool behind the dam, glittering in the morning sunlight. She hoped that Rippletail’s spirit was down there now, swimming and fishing just as he had wanted to.

Rage burned like a slow fire in her belly. Rippletail shouldn’t have died on this journey! She wanted revenge on the beavers now, wanted it like a starving cat longed for a bite of fresh-kill. We have to destroy the dam! The water belongs to the Clans!

As she stepped up to the edge of the grave and began to push soil and leaf mulch down onto Rippletail’s body, she paused to listen to the beavers. They were moving around quietly inside the lodge, and she imagined them smug and gleeful because they’d chased off the cats in such an easy victory.

Lionblaze’s voice distracted her from her thoughts. “We can’t fight the beavers again.”

“I told you so,” Woody muttered from where he sat on one of the oak tree’s gnarled roots.

Lionblaze flicked an ear to show the loner he had heard, but he didn’t reply. “We need to find a different way to free the water,” he went on.

Petalfur looked up from covering her Clanmate’s body. Her eyes were still stunned with grief, but her voice was hard and determined. “We could try luring the beavers away.”

“And then what?” Toadfoot asked.

“Then we destroy the dam,” Petalfur replied.

“But it’s huge!” Tigerheart objected. “It would take days. We can’t keep the beavers away for that long.”

“We don’t have to destroy it all.” Petalfur sounded confident. “If we can move enough of the top branches that the water spills over, the force of the stream will wash the rest of the logs away.”

Dovepaw nodded. “I see,” she mewed. She supposed that a RiverClan cat would know what she was talking about when it came to water. She cast her senses as far as the dam, feeling for the way the trunks and branches were woven together, and she realized that Petalfur’s idea might work.

“We must do it quickly,” Whitetail put in, with a glance up at the sky. “The weather is going to break soon, and besides”—her gaze flickered to Petalfur—“we need to get back to our Clans to tell them what’s happened.”

“That’s true,” Lionblaze agreed.

“I know what we can do!” Tigerheart was looking around the clearing. “Let’s practice moving these fallen branches. If we figure how to do that without losing our balance, we’ll be able to dismantle the dam much quicker.”

Toadfoot gave his Clanmate a nod of approval. “Good idea.”

Dovepaw was impressed, too. Tigerheart could be annoying sometimes, but she had to admit he wasn’t stupid.

When they had finished filling in Rippletail’s grave, the Clan cats scattered through the clearing and began trying to lift the branches. To Dovepaw’s surprise, Woody went to help Petalfur. “I shouldn’t have let you attack the beavers,” he muttered as he stood beside her and helped her roll a moss-covered log. “I should have known they were too strong for you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Woody,” Whitetail called to him. Petalfur said nothing, just concentrated on rocking the heavy branch onto its side.

Dovepaw followed Lionblaze across the clearing to a lightning-split tree trunk lying on the ground. Shock slashed through her when she saw that he was limping. “Are you okay?” she asked.

Lionblaze nodded. “I don’t get hurt in battles, remember?” he hissed. “But I can’t let the others know that.”

Dovepaw sighed. “I wish we didn’t have to keep everything a secret.”

“It’s for their own good.” Lionblaze turned to face her, pinning her with his compelling amber eyes. “They have to let us help them, and they might not do that if they think we’re different.”

Dovepaw glanced over her shoulder at the other cats, who were spread out over the clearing, struggling with logs. Would they really be afraid of me if they knew what I can do? Probably, she decided sadly. After all, if I hadn’t sensed the beavers, we would never have come, and Rippletail would still be alive.

She and Lionblaze began to roll the log; it was heavy, and the grass growing up around it made it hard to shift.

“Let’s try flipping it over,” Lionblaze suggested. “You go to that end, and I’ll lift it up from here.”

“Okay.” Dovepaw gave the log a doubtful glance. It’s so big! And some of the logs on the dam are even bigger!

She watched as Lionblaze thrust his paws under one end of the log and started to heave it upward. “I’m going to push it up from this end,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “You keep it steady, then push from your end and it should go over.”

Dovepaw tried to get a grip on the log, but as soon as it started to move, her paws slipped; the log banged her chin as it dropped to the ground again. “Sorry,” she puffed. “Let’s try again.”

But the second attempt was no better. This time the log rolled over toward Dovepaw, and she barely saved her paws from being crushed as she sprang backward.

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.”

Dovepaw flung herself back into the swirling chaos of the Twolegplace. This time she slowed down, listening at each corner, letting the images fill her mind until she could see the smallest details: the shadows of leaves on the dark green bushes, the wide pink faces of Twoleg kits, the gleam of sleeping monsters.

Cats. You’re looking for cats… There’s one!

Dovepaw picked up the whisk of a tail, the sound of paw steps scrabbling up a wall and down onto some grass. Carefully focusing, she let her senses follow it and tasted the scent.

No, it’s not one of the kittypets we met. Too young and skittish.

As her senses reached out again, a meow a little farther away caught her attention. That sounds familiar… Tracing the sound, she spotted Seville, the big ginger tom, calling out to Jigsaw as he basked in the sun. And Jigsaw is…Dovepaw heard the scrape of claws on wood, and she knew the fat black-and-brown tom was balancing on a fence above Seville.

“I’ve found them!” she exclaimed joyfully. Opening her eyes wide, she gazed at Lionblaze. “Come on!”

Taking the lead, she padded along the edge of the stream, past the place with the rabbits, until they reached a narrow path leading between two of the Twoleg nests. Dovepaw’s fur bristled as she emerged onto a Thunderpath; the reek of monsters and the noise of Twolegs in their dens flooded over her until all she wanted to do was turn tail and run back to the forest to stuff leaves into her ears and nose.

The growl of a monster sounded from farther down the Thunderpath. Dovepaw leaped back, crashing into Lionblaze. “Sorry!” she gasped as the sleek, brightly colored monster swept past. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“Yes, you can.” Lionblaze pushed his nose into her shoulder fur. “You can do it for the Clans. Now, do we have to cross this Thunderpath?”

Dovepaw nodded. Her heart was thumping so hard she thought it would burst out of her chest as her mentor nudged her gently to the edge of the hard black strip.

“When I say run, run,” he instructed her. He looked carefully both ways, his ears pricked for the sound of monsters, then raised his tail. “Run!”

Biting back a yowl of terror, Dovepaw launched herself forward. Her pads skimmed the surface of the Thunderpath; then she was safely across, shivering as she pressed herself into the shelter of a hedge.

“Well done!” Lionblaze purred. “Now where do we go?”

Pull yourself together! Dovepaw told herself fiercely. “This way.” She led Lionblaze along the edge of the Thunderpath, slipping behind a tree to hide as a slow-moving monster prowled past. “Do you think it’s looking for us?” she whispered.

Lionblaze shrugged. “I doubt it. But no cat knows what monsters are thinking.”

Turning away from the Thunderpath, following her sense of Seville’s and Jigsaw’s presence, Dovepaw found herself in a maze of narrow paths between walls of red stone and high wooden fences. As she rounded a corner, she almost stepped on a sleeping kittypet; the black tom sprang up, hissing, and leaped onto a fence before vanishing into the next garden.

Dovepaw let out a gusty breath of relief, then jumped, startled by the sound of a dog barking behind the fence on the other side.

“It’s okay,” Lionblaze mewed, though Dovepaw saw that his neck fur was bristling. “It can’t get at us.”

“I hope you’re right,” Dovepaw muttered.

The crisscrossing paths didn’t seem to lead anywhere. Have I gotten us lost? Dovepaw wondered. Then, where two paths crossed, she scented the sharp tang of chopped grass and spotted a bush with strong-smelling red flowers. Yes! I’ve scented those before…and I remember that pattern of shadows the bush is casting on the path.

“We need to go around this corner,” she explained to Lionblaze over her shoulder as she quickened her pace. “Now over this wall…”

She leaped up, with her mentor beside her, and down onto a square of smooth green grass. Seville was basking at the foot of the fence on the other side.

“Hi, Seville!” Dovepaw called, racing across the grass to touch noses with the big orange tom.

Seville’s green eyes widened with surprise. “It’s the journeying cats!” he meowed. “What are you doing here? Did you find the animals you were looking for? Did you free the water?”

“We found the animals,” Lionblaze told him. “But we can’t free the water. We…we need help.”

“Do you mean our help?” a voice called from above. “Wow!”

Dovepaw looked up to see Jigsaw perched on top of the fence, his black-and-brown tabby pelt almost hidden in the shade of a holly tree. He jumped down, his fur fluffing up as he touched noses with Dovepaw and then Lionblaze.

Seville blinked, his eyes wary as he looked from Lionblaze to Dovepaw and then back again. “What exactly do you mean?” he rumbled.

“Do you know where Snowdrop is?” Lionblaze asked, avoiding the question. “We looked for you at the place with the rabbits, but we couldn’t find any of you.”

“I’m the only one who lives there,” Jigsaw explained. “Snowdrop’s housefolk live on the other side of that birch tree.” He pointed with his tail at a tall tree over a wooden fence. “How did you find us?” he added, narrowing his eyes.

“Oh, it was easy,” Lionblaze replied. “We’re Clan cats, remember.” He shot an amused glance at Dovepaw.

“Wow!” Jigsaw’s eyes gleamed. “I’ll go get Snowdrop for you,” he offered. “She’ll kill us if she misses a chance to help real wild cats.” Without waiting for a reply, he scrambled up to the top of the fence and disappeared.

Seville stretched, gesturing with his tail to the patch of sun-warmed grass beside him. “Lie down and rest,” he invited the Clan cats. “It’s lovely and sunny here.”

“We’ve had enough sun lately, thanks,” Lionblaze replied.

He turned to gaze out over the garden, clearly keeping watch for dogs and Twolegs, while Dovepaw tore at the grass with her front claws. Several moons seemed to pass before Jigsaw plopped down beside them, with Snowdrop following.

“Hi there!” the white she-cat greeted them, running up to Lionblaze to touch his ear with her nose. “It’s great to see you again.” Suddenly she backed off a pace, her lip curling as if she’d scented something foul. “You’re not going to make me eat fur and bones, are you?”

“No,” Lionblaze mewed. “We’ve come to ask for your help.”

“Great!” Snowdrop purred. “What do you want us to do?”

“We can fight, watch!” Jigsaw added. He leaped at Snowdrop, trying to wrap his forepaws around her neck. Snowdrop reared up on her hind paws and lost her balance as she aimed a blow at Jigsaw’s ear. Both cats toppled over onto the grass in a heap of fur.

Seville rolled his eyes.

“Er…that’s great,” Lionblaze meowed. “But we don’t need you to fight, actually. We need you to dismantle a dam.”

Snowdrop sat up, shaking scraps of grass off her pelt. “What’s a dam?”

Lionblaze described the huge mound of logs blocking the stream. “We fought the beavers, but they were too strong for us,” he explained. “So some of us are going to lure them away while the rest take the dam apart and free the water.”

Jigsaw blinked. “Will it be dangerous?”

Lionblaze nodded. “Yes,” he mewed.

The black-and-brown tabby’s eyes gleamed brighter still. “Good! We’re awfully bored, lying around here all day.”

Dovepaw’s conscience pricked her like a thorn in her pad. “This isn’t going to be fun,” she warned the kittypets. “A—a cat died.”

Snowdrop gasped and Jigsaw’s neck fur stood on end.

“But we won’t be fighting the beavers again,” Lionblaze reassured them, with a glare at his apprentice.

Dovepaw met his gaze. “We can’t ask them to come with us unless they know what might happen.” But what if they don’t come? she asked herself anxiously. What will we do then?

“We’ll come, won’t we, Jigsaw?” Snowdrop meowed.

Jigsaw nodded, though he looked less certain.

Seville let out a grunt and rose to his paws, arching his back in a long stretch. “I can’t let you young ’uns go off on your own,” he growled. “Who knows what you might get up to? I’ll come, too.”

“Thank you,” Dovepaw mewed. “Our Clans thank you.”

“Follow us.” Jigsaw bounced on his paws. “We know a quick way back to the stream.”

Dovepaw was amazed at how confident the kittypets were as they traveled through the Twolegplace. When they came to a Thunderpath, Jigsaw jumped right over a sleeping monster, leaving dusty pad marks on its gleaming snout. Seville and Snowdrop followed, then turned to wait for the Clan cats on the other side of the Thunderpath.

“Come on!” Seville called. “I thought you were in a hurry!”

Lionblaze gave Dovepaw a sidelong look. “Are we going to let those kittypets think we’re scared of monsters?”

“No way,” Dovepaw replied. Even if we are!

Lionblaze bunched his muscles and leaped up onto the monster’s hindquarters. Dovepaw followed, trying not to flinch as her pads struck the smooth, hot surface. She jumped onto its back, then down onto its snout. In a heartbeat, she was on the ground, panting with relief. Glancing back once she reached the other side of the Thunderpath, she realized that the monster hadn’t woken up, even after five cats had leaped over it.

Maybe monsters are stupid.

By now Dovepaw was completely lost, but she didn’t have time to stop and sense the direction they should be going. Then she spotted a line of trees, and through them the streambed. They emerged from the maze of the Twolegplace a few fox-lengths upstream from the place with the rabbits.

“Which way now?” Seville asked.

“Just keep following the stream,” Lionblaze replied. He took the lead, picking up the pace until he was racing up the channel.

“Hey, take it easy,” Jigsaw protested, wincing as he held up a paw. “These stones are sharp.”

“Okay, sorry.” Lionblaze slowed to a steady trot.

Dovepaw brought up the rear to make sure that none of the kittypets was falling behind. She could feel the tension rising as they drew closer to the dam—not just from the kittypets, from the air itself, as if something huge was about to happen. Above them, clouds were piling up in the sky, covering the sun, and a claw scratch of lightning flickered on the horizon. As they padded through the copse, Dovepaw could see how spooked the kittypets were, jumping whenever the branches rattled in the rising wind.

Putting on a spurt, she caught up to Jigsaw and fell into step beside him. “Are you okay?”

The tom’s only reply was a tense nod.

I hope that’s true, Dovepaw thought. Guilt and fear squirmed beneath her fur.

Oh, StarClan, am I taking more cats into a battle from which they’ll never return?