Leafpool’s eyes were wary as she mewed, “Go on, then.”
She knows we’ve found out about the lie! Hollyleaf guessed, her belly lurching. Squirrelflight must have told her what happened that day on the cliff.
“Well?” Leafpool prompted.
Hollyleaf took a deep breath. “Tell me what you know. All of it. I have to know the truth!”
Leafpool’s amber eyes brimmed with sorrow. She took a pace toward Hollyleaf, sweeping her tail around as if to lay it on the younger cat’s shoulder, but left the gesture unfinished.
“You don’t have to worry,” Leafpool meowed. “I will never tell any cat. But please tell me why you did it.”
Hollyleaf felt as if a massive piece of fresh-kill were stuck in her throat. This wasn’t how she had intended their talk to go. “Did what?” she managed to choke out.
Leafpool let out a long sigh, closing her eyes as if she had to nerve herself for what she was about to say. Then she faced Hollyleaf again.
“Why did you kill Ashfur?”
No! Hollyleaf dug her claws hard into the ground. That wasn’t what she had asked! Leafpool couldn’t know! She opened her jaws to reply, but the words of denial wouldn’t come.
“I know, Hollyleaf,” Leafpool mewed gently. “When I was preparing Ashfur’s body for his vigil, I found a tuft of your fur caught in his claws. But I hid it away where no cat would find it. I think I wanted to hide it from myself.” She paused, swallowed, and repeated, “Why?”
“He had to die!” Fury made Hollyleaf hiss through gritted teeth. “You know why!”
“No, I don’t.”
Leafpool’s eyes were genuinely mystified, and Hollyleaf realized that Squirrelflight had never told her about revealing the terrible secret to Ashfur.
“He had to die because he knew!” Hollyleaf snarled. “That night, on the cliff in the storm, Squirrelflight told him that we weren’t her kits. He was going to tell all the Clans, at the Gathering, and I couldn’t let him do that! They think we’re true Clan cats, forestborn like they are. I couldn’t let them find out the truth—that Firestar’s Clan was even less pure than they thought. Ashfur would have destroyed ThunderClan.”
As she spoke, Leafpool’s eyes had grown wider with dismay. “Oh, StarClan, no!” she whispered. “This is all my fault….”
Hollyleaf’s mind was whirling. She couldn’t think beyond this moment; she only knew that the cat who held the truth in her paws was standing in front of her. “Squirrelflight told you about us, didn’t she? You were there when we first came to the hollow. You must know who our real mother is.”
Leafpool faced her calmly now. “Yes, I know.”
“Then you have to tell me—please!”
For several heartbeats, Leafpool didn’t reply. She stood blinking, her muscles tensed as if she were about to leap over a vast chasm. Then she spoke.
“I am your mother, Hollyleaf. Squirrelflight was trying to protect me.”
For a moment that lasted a heartbeat or a maybe a moon, Hollyleaf stared at her. No, it can’t be! But she knew that Leafpool had spoken the truth.
Whipping around, she bounded away, her paws slipping on the dead leaves so that she slid to the bottom of the rise in a tangle of legs and tail. Scrambling to her paws, she pelted toward the deepest places of the forest, as far from the hollow as she could get. She didn’t know where she was going, only that she wanted to outrun the lies, and the taste of Ashfur’s blood in her mouth.
It was all for nothing! I did it to save us all, but it was no use! Everything has been ruined….
CHAPTER 22
Jayfeather struggled through snow that reached up to his belly fur. Frozen lumps of it stuck between his pads, making every step painful. Just ahead of him was another cat; he recognized her tabby-and-white pelt, and wailed for her to come back and help him, but she never turned her head. Then the snowy ground gave way beneath his paws, and he was falling, falling….
He woke in his own nest, the bedding tossed about by his thrashing limbs. Sitting up, heart still racing from his dream, he heard Leafpool scrabbling about in the depths of the store. A throbbing tide of anguish came from her, so strong that for a heartbeat he thought she was shrieking aloud.
Jayfeather sprang to his paws and padded over to the cave entrance. A flame of desperation burned inside him, to ask the medicine cat if she really was his mother, but he couldn’t ignore such deep distress. “Leafpool?” he meowed. “What’s the matter?”
Leafpool backed out of the store. “I…I told Hollyleaf something I shouldn’t have,” she confessed.
Jayfeather understood at once; now all the secrets were gushing out like water breaking through a dam. He raised his chin in a challenge. “You told her that you’re our mother, didn’t you?”
He heard Leafpool’s gasp of shock. “How long have you known?”
“I didn’t know, until just now. But I’ve been putting things together, and last night everything fell into place. Squirrelflight’s loyalty to the cat who gave birth to us. The vague memories I have of that journey through the snow. The way you behave toward the three of us. And the fact that Mousefur remembers parsley accidentally mixed with her tansy about that time. Parsley is used to stop the milk in nursing mothers. You would have needed to take it to stop your own milk.”
There was a long silence after he had finished speaking, in which Jayfeather almost thought he could hear his own heart beating.
“If you know so much,” Leafpool mewed at last, “then do you know what happens next?”
“No.” Jayfeather felt a strong sensation that there was something else Leafpool wanted to say to him, but she kept silent. He thought about entering her mind to find out what it was, but he didn’t quite dare. He didn’t like the idea of what he might discover.
“You have to help your littermates,” Leafpool told him, her voice sharp and urgent. “You must learn to live with this, for the sake of the Clan.”
You’ve got no right to tell us what we must do. But Jayfeather did not speak the thought aloud. Part of what the medicine cat said was true. Sooner or later, they all had to find a way forward.
“Please,” Leafpool mewed, and there was a note of desperation in her voice. “Find Lionblaze and Hollyleaf, before anything else happens.”
Is there anything else that could go wrong? Jayfeather wondered. But he nodded and backed out of the den. Leafpool was scared for her kits—all three of them—just as she had always been when trouble came to the Clan.
He scanned the clearing until he located Lionblaze approaching the fresh-kill pile with a mouthful of prey. Jayfeather bounded over to him. “Leave that and come with me,” he meowed, jerking his head. “We have to talk.”
Jayfeather could feel Lionblaze’s confusion, but his brother didn’t protest, just dropped his prey on the pile and padded beside him toward the camp entrance.
“Where’s Hollyleaf?” Jayfeather asked. The sense of approaching disaster loomed even closer as he realized that this new knowledge would hurt her hardest of all. The warrior code means so much to her!
“I’ve no idea,” Lionblaze replied. “I think she left camp, but I haven’t seen her since the end of the vigil.”
“We have to find her,” Jayfeather mewed as they emerged from the tunnel into the forest. “She…she’s found out something that could upset her.”