Sky leaped onto it and trotted confidently across to the far bank. Firestar and Sandstorm followed more cautiously, Firestar glancing down at the river bubbling underneath and digging his claws in as he crossed.
“This was the edge of SkyClan’s territory,” Sky announced as they joined him on the bank. “And that’s where I was born.”
He waved his tail toward a small cave at the bottom of the cliff, its entrance sheltered by a straggling bush. The sandy floor was littered with sharp little stones; Firestar tried to imagine what it would be like with a warm nest of moss and bracken, and a mother cat caring for her kits.
“What was your mother’s name?” Sandstorm asked.
“Lowbranch,” the old cat replied. “I never knew my father—another rogue, I suppose. I had a littermate called Twig.”
“Does he still live here too?”
Sky stiffened, glaring briefly at Sandstorm. Instead of answering, he muttered, “This way,” and swung around to pad off upstream.
“Sorry,” Sandstorm whispered to Firestar. “I’ve obviously upset him. I wasn’t trying to be nosy.”
“I know.” Firestar touched her ear with his muzzle. “I suppose Twig must be dead.”
Instead of returning to the caves, Sky began to climb the cliff again. This time there were no trails to follow; Firestar and Sandstorm had a hard scramble over tumbled rocks and along narrow ledges before they reached the top, panting and limping on paws scraped by sharp stones.
Sky was waiting for them, his tail tip twitching impatiently. His pale blue gaze raked across them, but he said nothing, only turned to lead the way through the strip of bushes and into the scrubland. Firestar and Sandstorm plunged into the undergrowth after him, and caught up to him a few tail-lengths into the open.
“Are we still in SkyClan territory?” Firestar panted.
Sky angled his ears toward a tree stump that poked up out of a bramble thicket. “That marks the border. My mother said her mother remembered when it was a tree. And that thicket is where I caught my first mouse.” His voice grew softer and he paused, as if he were looking back through long seasons to the young cat he had once been. Then a gleam of amusement appeared in his eyes. “Pricklenose was impressed,” he added. “I never told her that the bramble thorns slowed the mouse down. It was an easy kill.”
“Pricklenose? Who—” Sandstorm broke off, in case this was another painful question. “Didn’t Lowbranch teach you to hunt?”
“Pricklenose was my mother’s friend. It was the custom for a mother cat to give her kits to another to be trained. Pricklenose trained me and Twig, and my mother took her kits.”
Firestar’s ears pricked. “Why did they do that?”
Sky shrugged. “I don’t know. It was the custom. Maybe they thought that a mother would be too soft on her own kits, or that she would be tempted to hunt for them instead of teaching them to do it for themselves.”
Firestar exchanged a glance with Sandstorm. “It’s as if the mother cats were mentors,” he murmured. “They must have remembered something of the way warriors were trained when the cats still lived in SkyClan.”
“Their names are a bit like Clan names, too,” Sandstorm responded. “But somehow they don’t sound quite right.”
“Do the rogue she-cats still train one another’s kits?”
Firestar asked Sky, turning back to the old cat.
“I’ve no idea.” Sky snorted. “I have nothing to do with the cats around here.”
He set off again. Firestar followed, battling frustration that all these echoes of Clan life were nothing more than that—echoes without meaning, if there were no SkyClan cats left.
“This is a waste of time,” he whispered to Sandstorm. “It’s interesting, but we’re not getting anywhere. We might as well go home.”
Sandstorm’s green gaze was calm. “Wait. All sorts of things could happen yet.”
Firestar stared at her. Before he could ask her what she meant, Sky interrupted to show them a dark hole amid the roots of a gorse bush.
“That used to be a fox’s den,” he meowed. His gaze grew somber. “Two kits were killed there once, my mother said.”
Firestar tasted the air, but there was no fox scent there now.
“It’s close to Twolegplace,” Sandstorm commented, gazing toward the fences of the Twoleg nests.
“The nests used to be farther off, but then the Twolegs built more,” Sky told her. His tail lashed. “I can remember that happening when I was a kit. Huge monsters tearing up the ground, frightening off the prey with their noise.”
Firestar shivered. He was used to monsters racing along Thunderpaths; he couldn’t imagine what it would be like if they crashed their way into a Clan’s territory, tearing up trees and destroying the camp…
“Is that why SkyClan left the gorge?” he asked.
Sky narrowed his eyes. “No. Weren’t you listening?
SkyClan was already scattered when the monsters came.”
“Then why—”
Not waiting for Firestar to finish his question, Sky swung around and led them along the Twoleg fences. Firestar’s pelt began to bristle at the thought of being so close to Twolegs; he could see that Sandstorm was uneasy too.
“There are a lot of cats here,” he remarked; the scents were almost overwhelming.
Sky gave a grunt of contempt. “Kittypets! What good are they? They can’t even hunt.”
Firestar could distinguish the scents of Cherry and Boris, but there was no sign of the two young cats. He felt sorry; he wanted them to meet Sky and treat him with respect from now on, especially if Sky was right and the kittypets were his distant kin.
“A dog used to live in that nest,” Sky meowed, waving his tail at the closest fence. “Every cat was scared of it, its bark was so fierce!” A hint of amusement crept into his voice.
“One day Twig dared me to climb up on the fence and look at it. And do you know, the dog was no bigger than me! I snarled at it, and it went yelping back into its nest.”
Sandstorm let out a mrrow of laughter. “I wish I’d seen that!”
“Now, in this nest,” Sky went on, leading them farther along the row, “the Twolegs were friendly. They used to leave out food.” All the amusement vanished from his eyes and voice; a deep sadness swept over him, like the shadow of a cloud on a sunny day.
“What happened here?” Sandstorm asked softly.
“Twig ate the food and decided it was easier than hunting.”
Sky’s voice rasped in his throat. “He went to live with the Twolegs. I never saw him again.”
Sandstorm touched her tail to his shoulder, while Firestar remembered how his kin Cloudtail, back in the forest, had gone back to living the life of a kittypet, only to discover that it wasn’t as good as life in the forest. It must have been hard for Sky to watch his kin scattering, just as his ancestors had done.
Eventually they came to the end of the Twoleg fences.
Now they walked alongside a shiny mesh like silver cobweb that Firestar had seen before in Twolegplaces.
“We can go back now,” Sky announced, stopping abruptly.
Firestar was surprised. The sky was still hazy and the day was not too hot to carry on. “Are we far out of SkyClan territory?” he asked.
“Far enough,” Sky growled. His legs were stiff, his ears pricked, and his neck fur bristling. His pale blue eyes darted swift glances from side to side.
Firestar looked around. Beyond the silver mesh was a broad expanse of white stone, cracked and split with weeds.
It surrounded a huge Twoleg nest that reminded Firestar of the barn where Barley and Ravenpaw lived. But this barn was much bigger, with a shining silver roof and gaping holes in the sides. It didn’t look as if any Twolegs lived here; all that Firestar could smell was Twoleg rubbish, crow-food, and rats.