The Fourth Apprentice

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