Alderpaw gently set her down in the rough grass.
“We’re almost home!” he breathed out.
After they’d left the tunnel, he and Needlepaw had journeyed on until night fell, when they’d made a temporary den near the place where they had seen the Twolegs and eaten their food. Needlepaw had caught a couple of mice, and they had fed the kits again.
Now the woods and moorland around the lake stretched in front of them, and before sunhigh they would be back in their own camps.
Needlepaw toiled up to the ridge and stood beside him, letting Violetkit down into the grass next to her sister. “Made it!” she panted.
“I guess we ought to say good-bye,” Alderpaw began, feeling slightly awkward.
“You’ll want to go through RiverClan to get back to your territory—it’s the quickest way.”
“Yeah, I suppose so,” Needlepaw agreed.
“Uh… Needlepaw…” Feeling even more awkward, Alderpaw turned to face her. “Maybe you could keep quiet about what happened in the gorge, at least until I’ve had the chance to talk to Bramblestar. I told you, the whole
SkyClan thing is kind of a secret.”
He cringed inwardly as he spoke, knowing how unlikely it was that Needlepaw would keep a secret to oblige a ThunderClan cat. He expected her to hiss at him in anger, but she simply stared at him, her mouth clamped shut.
“Okay, then.” Alderpaw realized the best he could hope for was a quick getaway. “If you could just help me get Violetkit onto my back…”
Needlepaw’s jaws gaped open at that. “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “I’m not leaving the shadow kits here. I helped find them! And which cat says that they’re going to ThunderClan?”
Alderpaw could hardly believe what he was hearing. She has got bees in her brain! “If it weren’t for my dream, and what Sandstorm told me, we never would have found the kits!”
Needlepaw’s neck fur began to rise and she flattened her ears. “If it weren’t for me,” she pointed out, “and my idea to go through the tunnel, you would still be standing in front of that stupid Thunderpath trying to figure out what different way of thinking Sandstorm was meowing about. Are you kidding me?”
Alderpaw felt his own pelt bristling as anger swelled up inside him. “Are you kidding me?” he hissed. Part of him knew that he was wrong to let his fury out on Needlepaw, but he felt so frustrated that he couldn’t help it. “This was my quest in the first place! Besides, do you really think I’d let you take the kits back to ShadowClan, where there aren’t any rules, and apprentices run around thinking up new ways to break the warrior code? I might as well just take them back to the rogues in the gorge.”
“Coward!” Needlepaw spat, her face full of disgust. “We never would have made it back here if we hadn’t broken the warrior code a few times at least. Alderpaw, you’re so blinded by rules that you can’t see what’s in front of your own nose!”
Alderpaw couldn’t reply; the mewling of the kits was all that broke the silence. He and Needlepaw looked down at the squirming bundles of fur, and Alderpaw found his concern for them overpowering his anger at Needlepaw.
He could see the same feeling in her green eyes.
“There’s one fair way to resolve this,” she mewed after a few moments. “We divide the kits up, and each take one back to our own
Clan.”
Alderpaw looked down at the kits, snuggled up together and mewling. An ache tugged at his heart. “We can’t do that,” he responded. “It would be wrong. Don’t you see, Needlepaw?
These kits only have each other now. It’s like me and Sparkpaw: I don’t always agree with her, but I can’t imagine life without her.”
Needlepaw was silent, gazing down at the kits. I wonder if she has any cat she cares about as much as Sparkpaw and I care for each other, Alderpaw thought.
Then, as Alderpaw kept watching Needlepaw and the kits, he was distracted by the yowling of a cat from farther down the slope. Instinctively he and Needlepaw moved in front of the kits to guard them. But when Alderpaw looked down and spotted the cat, he let out a yelp of delight.
“Molewhisker!”
His former mentor was bounding up the slope, with three other ThunderClan cats close behind him: Birchfall, Poppyfrost, and Berrynose. Alderpaw dashed down to meet them beside the horseplace fence.
Molewhisker’s eyes were wide with shock and delight. “Oh, thank StarClan you’re alive!” he exclaimed.
“So are you!” Alderpaw felt so light with relief that he could almost imagine floating away. “Are Cherryfall and Sparkpaw okay?”
“Yes, everyone’s fine,” Molewhisker assured him. “We got back to camp yesterday and told the others what happened. Every cat was devastated to think that you had drowned.
We looked for you and Needlepaw back beside the river, but we couldn’t find you.”
“So this morning,” Birchfall meowed, coming to stand beside Alderpaw, “Bramblestar sent us out as a search party, with Molewhisker to guide us back to the place where you went missing.”
“However did you survive?” Poppyfrost asked, gazing at Alderpaw as if she couldn’t quite believe he was there.
“Needlepaw helped me out of the river,” Alderpaw replied. “She’s here too, just a bit farther up the hill.”
He began to retrace his paw steps, leading the other cats back to the ridge where he had left Needlepaw.
“Hi,” the ShadowClan she-cat mewed as the ThunderClan patrol came up to her. “As you see, we’ve brought company.” With one paw she swept the grasses aside to reveal the two kits, now dozing in a mound of fur.
Molewhisker and the others, murmuring in surprise, surrounded the kits and gazed down at them.
“They’re adorable!” Poppyfrost exclaimed.
“Who are they?” Berrynose asked, giving them a suspicious sniff. “Where did you find them?”
“I can tell you all that later,” Alderpaw replied, “but right now the kits need care.
They’re not well, so we were going to take them back to the ThunderClan camp to nurse them back to health.”
Needlepaw glared at him. “Actually—”
“That’s a good idea.” Birchfall spoke with authority; clearly he was the leader of the search party. “Alderpaw, you’re a medicine cat yourself, so you can help watch over them.”
“But I found the kits too,” Needlepaw objected, her shoulder fur beginning to rise again. “That is, we found them together. We think maybe the kits are… well, they’re what StarClan wanted us to find.”
The ThunderClan patrol exchanged surprised glances. “Do you believe that?”
Birchfall asked Alderpaw.
“I think they could be,” Alderpaw replied, “but I’m not sure yet.”
“Then this is what we’ll do,” Birchfall decided. “We’ll take the kits back to ThunderClan now, so that they can be cared for, and then—”
“They can be cared for just as well in ShadowClan,” Needlepaw interrupted.
Can they?
Alderpaw wondered.
ThunderClan has two medicine cats—three if you count me—while ShadowClan only has Littlecloud, and he’s growing old.
Birchfall gave Needlepaw a quelling look, as if he wasn’t used to apprentices who argued all the time. “Let me finish,” he meowed. “The next Gathering is in a few days, and we can bring the kits there to decide what will be done with them. Is that okay, Needlepaw? After all, we can all agree that what’s most important is to get the kits well again.”