“However much you think you know, sometimes I’m right, okay?” he growled.
Dovepaw lifted her nose and sniffed. Then she turned and stalked away.
Chapter 5
Dovepaw stretched her aching legs. Her nest rustled as she fidgeted. Her denmates were fast asleep. They’d dozed off by the time the moon had risen above the hollow, tired after their training.
But Dovepaw felt wide-awake. She’d seen Sedgewhisker limping back to camp, supported by her Clanmates. She could smell the blood crusting over Sedgewhisker’s wound, feel the heat pulsing from her swollen leg. She needed to know how badly injured her WindClan friend was!
“Are you okay?” Ivypaw peered over the rim of her nest. Her eyes were round with worry. “Did the fall hurt you?”
“No,” Dovepaw answered honestly. Only her pride had been hurt. Lionblaze was so bossy! And now he was trying to tell her how to use her power. He should respect her, like Jayfeather did, not treat her like some dumb apprentice.
Ivypaw sat up. “You’re not tired at all?”
Dovepaw flicked her tail. “No.”
“Come on.” Ivypaw stepped from her nest. Blossompaw was snoring again. “Let’s go into the forest.”
Dovepaw’s heart gave a jolt as hope flashed through it. She sat up. What was Ivypaw planning?
Briarpaw rolled onto her back, her paws folded in the air like a rabbit’s.
“We haven’t been out at night since you went to find the beavers.” Ivypaw tiptoed to the entrance and slid out. The low branches of the yew den slicked Dovepaw’s fur as she followed eagerly. The starlit clearing glowed like a pool in the center of the shadowy hollow. Dovepaw could smell the forest above, musty with the scent of leaf-fall, damp with night dew.
She cast her senses out past the thorn barrier and scented Rosepetal guarding the camp entrance, her paws shifting on the ground, her breath coming in billows.
“I know a secret way out,” she told Ivypaw.
“Through the dirtplace tunnel?” Ivypaw guessed.
“Better than that.” Dovepaw crept around the edge of the clearing, past the entrance to the medicine den. She squeezed through the tangle of brambles beside it until she reached the rock wall beyond. Stretching up through the twisted stems, she reached for a low ledge and hauled herself up.
“Are you coming?” she hissed down to Ivypaw.
Her sister’s silver-and-white pelt was flashing beneath the bramble. “Coming,” Ivypaw breathed.
Dovepaw jumped up to the next ledge, then the next, until the dens of the camp looked like small clumps of scrub below her. Fizzing with excitement, she scrambled over the lip of the cliff and onto soft grass.
Ivypaw bounded up after her. “How did you find out about that?”
“Lionblaze.” He’d told her in case she ever needed to escape camp without being seen. I bet he didn’t expect me to use it so soon, she thought with a glimmer of satisfaction. I make my own decisions.
A half-moon lit the treetops, filtering through the bare branches and striping the forest floor silver. Breathing the musty scents of the night-damp forest, Dovepaw scampered into the trees.
Ivypaw ran beside her. “I wonder if anyone else is out?”
Dovepaw cast her senses through the trees, feeling for signs of movement. The waves on the lakeshore murmured softly, like the lapping of her mother’s tongue against her fur. Beyond the border, a ShadowClan kit wailed, waking from a bad dream, and across the lake, on the far side of RiverClan territory, Twolegs yowled in their nest.
“Where should we go?” Ivypaw’s question jerked her back. “What about the old Twoleg nest? It’s really spooky. I bet you’re not brave enough!”
No. Dovepaw knew exactly where she wanted to go. She could sense Sedgewhisker stirring in her nest, her eyes flickering as though the pain in her leg wouldn’t let her rest. “Let’s go to the moorland.”
Ivypaw skidded to a halt. “WindClan territory?”
“Right to their camp.” Dovepaw paused beside her. She needed to make a challenge that Ivypaw couldn’t resist.
Her sister stared at her, whiskers quivering as though she’d scented prey. “To their camp?” she echoed breathlessly.
“I haven’t seen Whitetail or Sedgewhisker since I got back from upstream.”
Ivypaw’s tail drooped. “What do you want to see them for?” She sounded puzzled and hurt. “You don’t need friends in WindClan. You’ve got friends here.” She flicked her tail toward the hollow.
“But don’t you want to see if we can make it?” Dovepaw coaxed. She couldn’t explain Sedgewhisker’s injury without giving away her secret. “We can always say we were lost if we get caught. We’re only apprentices. No cat is going to think we’re trying to invade.” She had to see if Sedgewhisker was safe. Just because Lionblaze couldn’t care less doesn’t mean I have to. “Oh, come on,” she pleaded with Ivypaw.
Ivypaw narrowed her eyes, then nodded. “Okay.” She trotted away through the trees, heading toward the WindClan border. “If any WindClan cat catches us”—she ducked under a spreading yew bush—“we can say we were chasing a squirrel and hadn’t realized we’d crossed the border.”
Dovepaw’s belly brushed the ground as she scrabbled under the low branches. “They’d think we’re pretty stupid not to notice we’d run onto moorland,” she pointed out.
“Okay.” Ivypaw skidded down a bank. “We’ll say we were sleepwalking.”
“What, both of us?” Dovepaw wondered if her sister was taking this seriously enough.
“We can’t just tell them we’ve come to visit Whitetail and Sedgewhisker,” Ivypaw mewed.
Why not? They had been on the quest together. “We’ll just have to make sure we don’t get caught,” Dovepaw decided.
They were nearly out of the trees and Dovepaw could smell the moorland. She let her senses reach far out over the peat and heather, relieved that she could detect nothing but the soft breathing of cats tucked up in their nests in the WindClan camp. “I wonder what the camp looks like?” she mewed.
Ivypaw padded from the trees and halted at the top of a steep bank. The wind tugged her whiskers and she shivered. “I’m glad I’m not WindClan.” The border stream gurgled below them. “It must be weird to sleep out in the open.”
“They must have dens.”
“But no trees,” Ivypaw mewed. “Just the open sky.” She slid down the bank, pushing off with her hind legs as she reached the bottom and clearing the narrow waterway in one bound. She looked back at Dovepaw, who had paused on the bank. “Imagine what it must be like when it’s stormy.” She shuddered.
Dovepaw was staring across the moorland rising ahead of them like a giant sleeping cat beneath the pale night sky.
“Hurry up,” Ivypaw urged. “It’s spooky over here.”
Dovepaw bounded down the bank and over the stream. Wind rushed over the grass and heather, buffeting her like a flock of starlings. She shivered, remembering the journey upstream and the exposed territories they’d had to cross to find the beavers. “It was like this when we—” She stopped herself.
“What?”
Dovepaw shook her head. “Nothing.” Ivypaw was still upset that she hadn’t been allowed to go on the quest. No wonder she wasn’t interested in visiting Whitetail and Sedgewhisker.
Ivypaw scanned the moorland, her eyes wide and anxious. The tang of the WindClan scent markers tainted the air. “Do you suppose they have night patrols?”