“Come on. We’re meeting over there.”
Briefly Leafpaw held her back with a wave of her tail. “Are your elders okay?” she asked in a low voice.
Guilt flooded into Mothwing’s eyes. “Yes, but I’m so sorry, Leafpaw. I should have checked that water more carefully.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” Leafpaw brushed against her comfortingly. “How could you smell the water when you were covered in mouse bile? Everything’s fine now, and it just meant we had to find new supplies of herbs more quickly than we might have done. That’s a good thing.”
Mothwing didn’t look convinced. She led Leafpaw to the brambles where the medicine cats had met before, when they first arrived at the lake. Cinderpelt and Barkface were already crouched on a bed of dead leaves, dry and sheltered by the wind-ruffled branches. Mothwing and Leafpaw crept in to join them, and a moment later Littlecloud appeared.
“If there are any more wandering foxes, they won’t find it easy to get at us here,” he remarked as he ducked underneath a bramble to sit beside Cinderpelt.
Barkface, as the oldest medicine cat among them, began the meeting. “That incident with the foxes made it clear we need a better place to gather. We also have to find somewhere like the Moonstone where we can share tongues with StarClan. Have any of you had a sign?”
All the cats shook their heads.
“The Moonstone is more urgent,” Cinderpelt pointed out.
“Unless Leopardstar changes her mind, we don’t need to worry about a gathering place for another moon, but Onewhisker needs his name and his nine lives now.”
“StarClan knows what we need,” Littlecloud murmured.
“Perhaps they’re trying to tell us, and we’re not recognizing their signs.”
“And perhaps hedgehogs will fly,” Barkface retorted. “Do you think we wouldn’t know if StarClan had sent us a sign about something as important as this?”
“Well, maybe there isn’t a Moonstone place around here,” Mothwing meowed.
Leafpaw winced as Barkface gave her friend a withering look. “If there isn’t, then this is not the place StarClan intends us to stay. Do you want to tell all the Clans they have to move somewhere else?”
Mothwing looked down at her paws.
“All the same,” Cinderpelt meowed, “that might be exactly what we have to do if we don’t have a sign soon. The Clans cannot survive without a place to share tongues with StarClan.”
“Perhaps this isn’t where StarClan means us to be after all,” Littlecloud ventured quietly.
Barkface curled his lip. “If we tell the Clans they have to leave, many cats will refuse. What would we do then?”
Guilt gnawed at Leafpaw. Her sister had been among the cats who had led the Clans through the mountains to this place, and she had been the one to interpret the starlight reflected in the lake as a sign that StarClan was waiting for them. Had they been wrong all along?
“Perhaps StarClan wants us to go and look for signs?” she suggested.
Cinderpelt nodded. “You could be right, Leafpaw. We must keep a careful watch until we meet at the half-moon.”
“And ask patrols to keep a lookout for tunnels like Mothermouth,” Barkface added. “If they find anything, their medicine cat can send a message to the rest of us.”
“Good idea,” mewed Cinderpelt.
“If that’s all, we might as well go home,” Barkface rasped.
“I just want to thank Leafpaw for the help she gave our elders when they were sick. They’re doing fine now.”
Leafpaw dipped her head.
“Were your elders sick?” Littlecloud asked. “A couple of ours were, too. They must have picked up a bellyache while we were all together. Mothwing, have you had any trouble in RiverClan?”
Mothwing flashed a glance at Leafpaw. “Yes.”
“Well, don’t give us any details, will you?” Barkface growled. “Are your elders okay or not? What did you treat them with?”
“Juniper berries. And yes, they’re fine, thanks, Barkface.”
Barkface nodded and got up to leave. When the medicine cats wriggled out of the brambles, Mothwing flicked her tail to draw Leafpaw a little way from the others.
“Thanks for not telling them, Leafpaw,” she mewed.
“That’s okay.” Leafpaw could imagine how Mousefur would react if she found out she had been ill because another cat had fed her tainted water.
Mothwing gave her a long look from troubled blue eyes.
“Leafpaw, we are friends, aren’t we?”
“Of course we are,” Leafpaw answered in surprise.
Mothwing hesitated, flexing her claws into the ground. At last she took a deep breath and mewed, “What Cinderpelt said—about watching for signs from StarClan. You do know I won’t get any, don’t you?”
“What are you talking about? You’re the RiverClan medicine cat! Who else is StarClan going to speak to?”
“Stop pretending, Leafpaw.” Mothwing’s tail twitched impatiently. “To me, StarClan, our warrior ancestors, these signs we’re supposed to interpret—they’re nothing but a bunch of stories to keep the Clans happy.”
Leafpaw stared at her friend in horror. How could you be a medicine cat and not believe in StarClan? “B-but you shared tongues with StarClan at the Moonstone, when you were made a medicine cat!” she stammered.
Mothwing lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I had a dream, that’s all. Don’t look so shocked,” she added. “It’s not the end of the world. I can heal my Clan just as well as any medicine cat. I don’t need StarClan to tell me which herb to use.”
Leafpaw opened her mouth to tell Mothwing about the signs she had received, and her precious encounters with Spottedleaf, the former ThunderClan medicine cat, while she slept. Then she realized that Mothwing would dismiss those as dreams, too.
“Come on, Leafpaw,” Mothwing went on. “You said just now that we have to go out and look for our own signs. Why would we need to do that if StarClan is sending them to us?”
“Well… yes. But that’s not the point. Looking for signs isn’t the same as making them up.”
Mothwing flicked her ears. “It doesn’t sound all that different to me.”
Leafpaw felt the ground sway beneath her paws.
Mothwing was questioning everything she had believed since she was a kit. But it was impossible to defend, when everything she knew about StarClan, all the encounters she had had with them, were inside her own head.
“It’s not the same,” she insisted. “That’s what faith in StarClan means—to go on searching, and believing, even when there aren’t any signs. We won’t know for certain that they are really there and watching over us until it’s our time to go and walk with StarClan.”
Mothwing shook her head. “I’m sorry, Leafpaw. It’s not like that for me. Maybe it’s because my mother was a rogue. I can be a loyal RiverClan cat without believing all the myths about our warrior ancestors.”
“But what about your moth’s-wing sign?” Leafpaw prompted. At first, Mothwing had struggled to be accepted as a medicine cat because her mother had not been Clanborn.
When she was still being considered as an apprentice, Mudfur, the previous RiverClan medicine cat, had found a moth’s wing lying outside his den; he had taken it as a sign from StarClan that Mothwing was the right cat to succeed him, and she had begun her apprenticeship. “You can’t say that didn’t come from StarClan,” Leafpaw insisted.
“The moth’s wing?” There was a flash of something like fear in Mothwing’s eyes. “That was—”
“Leafpaw! Are you coming?” Cinderpelt called.
Leafpaw waved her tail in reply; she wanted to hear what Mothwing was about to tell her.
But the RiverClan cat had turned away. “Cinderpelt wants you,” she meowed. “I’ll see you at the next half-moon.”