The Fourth Apprentice

but she couldn’t get the picture clear enough to count them all. “Fewer than our patrol, I think.”

Lionblaze touched her shoulder with the tip of his tail. “It’ll be okay,” he reassured her.

Dovepaw couldn’t share his confidence. What she hadn’t told her mentor was that these animals wouldn’t be easy to fight. They were much heavier than cats, dense and low to the ground, so it would be hard to flip them onto their bellies. They had long, sharp teeth and powerful clawed feet; she shivered at the thought of the wounds they could inflict. The fear that she could be leading the patrol into a battle they couldn’t win weighed in her belly like a stone.

Lionblaze crept out of the hollow tree to relieve Petalfur on her watch. Dovepaw had already done her shift, so she settled down to sleep, but she couldn’t block out the sounds from further upstream. She jerked back into wakefulness every time a tree crashed down, or a branch grated harshly as it was dragged across another. She was still trying to rest when pale dawn light filtered into the hollow tree and the other cats began to stir around her.

“Great StarClan!” Tigerheart exclaimed, sitting up and shaking dead leaves from his pelt. “Dovepaw, you’re wrigglier than a pile of worms!”

“Sorry,” Dovepaw muttered.

Tigerheart pushed his nose briefly into her fur to show that he hadn’t meant to be unkind, before squeezing through the cleft and out into the open. Dovepaw and the other cats followed him out, and they finished off the rest of the fresh-kill pile. Dovepaw noticed that Rippletail and Petalfur didn’t look so hollow and frail anymore.

They must be really starving in RiverClan if they’re fattening up on what we’ve managed to catch out here!

Above the trees, the sky was milky-pale. A cold wind drove gray clouds across the sky, ruffling the cats’ fur the wrong way.

“It’s moons since it’s been as cold as this,” Petalfur meowed, shivering. “Maybe the weather is changing at last.”

“We can deal with it,” Toadfoot grunted.

When the cats had finished eating, Lionblaze took the lead, waving his tail for the others to follow him. “It’s not far now,” he encouraged them. “We’re really close to the brown animals.”

“How do you know?” Toadfoot demanded, his eyes narrowing in suspicion.

“The dream from StarClan said that they were just beyond the Twolegplace,” Lionblaze explained, with a discreet nod to Dovepaw.

Even though she was worried about what other cats would say if they knew about her abilities, Dovepaw found she was annoyed by her mentor’s secrecy. He’s willing enough to use my power, so why is he treating it like it’s some sort of embarrassment for ThunderClan?

“Don’t forget to watch out for falling trees,” she warned them. “And when we get to the place, the water will be really deep, so be careful not to fall in.”

“All this was in your dream?” Toadfoot asked, sounding as if he didn’t believe her.

“That’s right.” Lionblaze paused to give his chest fur a couple of licks, as if he was thinking fast. “She saw the brown animals pushing trees over, and-and StarClan warned her about the water, isn’t that right, Dovepaw?”

Reluctantly Dovepaw nodded.

“That was some dream!” Rippletail exclaimed. “Firestar never said anything about that at the Gathering.”

“Yeah, well, he didn’t need to,” Lionblaze mewed uncomfortably, with a glare at Dovepaw.

Dovepaw met his glare innocently. You got yourself into this mess, so get yourself out of it!

As the patrol made its way along the streambed, up the gently sloping valley, the rush of the rising wind in the trees made it hard for Dovepaw to hear what was up ahead. She strained to make out the sounds of the brown animals, and she jumped when she heard Tigerheart’s voice close beside her.

“Isn’t this cool?” he mewed. “We’re going to find these animals, and then-pow! Give us back our water! They won’t refuse. If they do-well…” He crouched down, then sprang into the air, swiping his forepaws in a strong clawing move.

Dovepaw didn’t think it would be as easy as that, and she wished that the chatty young warrior would just shut up. She stifled a sigh as Sedgewhisker came bounding up on her other side.

“Boasting-just like ShadowClan!” she meowed. “Watch this.” Turning to face Tigerheart so the young warrior nearly tripped over her, she launched herself into the air with a terrifying shriek, twisting as she leaped and landing just behind him.

“Ha-missed!” Tigerheart exclaimed.

“I wasn’t trying to grab you,” Sedgewhisker retorted. “You’d know about it if I was.”

“Oh, would I? Try it, then, and see!”

Dovepaw dodged aside as Tigerheart launched himself at the WindClan she-cat and cuffed her around the head, with his claws sheathed. Sedgewhisker let herself fall on one side, hooking Tigerheart’s paws out from under him so that he lost his balance. The two young cats rolled over and over in the narrow streambed; Petalfur had to scramble up the bank so she wouldn’t be squashed.

“Stop that right now!” Lionblaze growled, wading into the middle of the fight. “Mouse-brains! Do you want to get hurt before we even arrive?”

The two young cats broke apart and sat up; their fur was sticking out all over the place and coated with dust.

“I’d have won with the next move,” Tigerheart muttered.

“In your dreams!” Sedgewhisker gave him a parting flick over the ear with her tail before drawing back.

Dovepaw spotted Lionblaze giving Sedgewhisker a worried look; she seemed to be moving awkwardly, as if she’d wrenched her shoulder again. Then his gaze swiveled back to Tigerheart; the look he gave the younger warrior was unreadable.

Now what’s on his mind? Dovepaw wondered.

At the top of the valley, the land opened out into flatter, sparser woodland. The wind had dropped, and Dovepaw could hear the scraping and gnawing of the brown animals even more clearly than before. Her sense of urgency seemed to spread to the others, and Toadfoot, who was in the lead, picked up the pace until the cats were almost running along the stream bottom.

Lionblaze jumped onto the bank of the stream to look ahead and halted, his tail flicking up in surprise. “Look at that!”

“What?” Whitetail called up to him.

Lionblaze didn’t reply; he just signaled with his tail for the rest of the patrol to join him on the bank.

As she scrambled up beside him and looked, Dovepaw felt her heart start to pound. She had known from the beginning of their journey what they would find, and yet it was all so much clearer and more frightening now that she was faced with it.

Ahead of them, the stream led through a stretch of patchy woodland. Several of the trees had been lopped off neatly about two tail-lengths from the ground, the top of the stump rising to a sharp, splintered point. It looked as if an enormous animal had crashed along the streambed, flattening the trees on either side.

But that wouldn’t look so…so deliberate.

Stretching across the stream, clearly visible above the fallen trees, was an enormous barrier of logs. It rose in a curve like a hill, almost as big as a Twoleg nest.

Dovepaw shrank down, closing her eyes and pressing herself to the ground. The noise that surged through her was deafening: grunts and scratches, gnawing and scraping, the thump of heavy paws on wood. It took all the strength she had to control the sounds until she could cope with them and still stay aware of what was going on around her.

“So that’s what’s blocking the stream,” Rippletail whispered.

A moment of shocked quiet followed his words; it was broken by Petalfur. “We’ll have to push the logs away.”

“No, better drag them out of the stream,” Toadfoot argued. “Otherwise who knows where they’ll end up?”

“Whatever, as long as we let the water out,” meowed Lionblaze.

“And we’ll need to keep well back when the logs give way,” Whitetail pointed out.