Erin Hunter - Sign of the Moon

“Mouse dung!”

Stoneteller stood watching the to-bes and kits romping together for a few heartbeats before he headed back toward his tunnel. As he approached it, a gray-brown she-cat rose to her paws and padded up to him.

“Stoneteller, I must talk to you.”

The old tabby glared at her. “I’ve said all I have to say. You know that, Bird.”

Bird did not reply, merely stood there waiting, until the old cat let out a long sigh. “Come, then. But don’t expect any different answers.”

Stoneteller led the way into the second tunnel, and Bird followed. The sounds of the young cats died away behind them, replaced by the steady drip of water.

The tunnel led into a cave much smaller than the one the cats had left. Pointed stones rose up from the floor and hung down from the roof. Some of them had joined in the middle, as if the cats were threading their way through a stone forest. Water trickled down the stones and the cave walls to make pools on the floor; their surface reflected a faint gray light from a jagged crack in the roof. All was silent except for the drip of water and the distant roaring of the falls, now sunk to a whisper.

Stoneteller turned to face Bird. “Well?”

“We’ve spoken about this before. You know you should have chosen your successor long ago.”

The old cat let out a snort of disgust. “There’s time yet.”

“Don’t tell that to me,” Bird retorted. “My mother was your littermate. I know exactly how old you are. You were chosen from that litter by the Tribe’s previous Healer, the last Teller of the Pointed Stones. You have served the Tribe well, but you can’t expect to stay here forever. Sooner or later you will be summoned to the Tribe of Endless Hunting. You must choose the next Stoneteller!”

“Why?” Bird flinched at the harshness of the old cat’s retort but Stoneteller continued. “So that the Tribe can go on, generation after generation, scrabbling their lives from these uncaring stones?”

Bird’s voice quivered with shock when she replied. “This is our home! We have earned the right to live here many times over! We fought off the trespassers, remember?” She padded closer to Stoneteller and held out one paw appealingly. “How can you think of betraying our ancestors by not preserving what they began?”

Stoneteller turned his head away; there was a flash of something in his eyes that warned Bird he was not telling her everything.

At that moment a thin claw-scratch of new moon appeared from behind a cloud; its light sliced down through the hole in the cave roof and struck one of the pools of water, turning its surface to silver. Stoneteller gazed at it.

“It is the night of the new moon,” he murmured. “The night when the Tribe of Endless Hunting speaks to me from the sky, through reflections in the water. Very well, Bird That Rides the Wind. I promise you I will look for signs tonight.”

“Thank you,” Bird whispered. Touching Stoneteller affectionately on the shoulder with her tail-tip, she padded quietly out of the cave. “Good luck,” she mewed as she disappeared into the tunnel.

When she had gone, Stoneteller approached the edge of the pool and looked into the water. Then he raised one paw and brought it down with force on the surface, shattering the reflection into shards of light that flickered and died.

“I will never listen to you again!” Each word was forced out through bared teeth. “We trusted the Tribe of Endless Hunting, but you deserted us when we most needed your help.”

Turning his back on the pool, he paced among the pointed stones, his claws scraping against the rough cave floor. “I hate what the Tribe has become!” he snarled. “I hate how we have taken on Clan ways. Why could we not survive alone?” Halting beneath the rift in the roof, he raised his head with a burning gaze that challenged the moon. “Why did you bring us here if we were doomed to fail?”

Dovepaw slid out through the thorn tunnel and stood waiting in the forest for her sister, Ivypaw, and their mentors to join her. A hard frost had turned every blade of grass into a sharp spike under her paws, and from the bare branches of the trees, icicles glimmered in the gray dawn light. Dovepaw shivered as claws of cold probed deeply into her fur. Newleaf was still a long way off.

Dovepaw’s belly was churning with anxiety, and her tail drooped.

This is your warrior assessment, she told herself. It’s the best thing that can happen to an apprentice. So why don’t you feel excited?

She knew the answer to her question. Too much had happened during the moons of her apprenticeship: important events beside which even the thrill of becoming a warrior paled into insignificance. Taking a deep breath, Dovepaw lifted her tail as she heard the paw steps of cats coming through the tunnel. She couldn’t let the cats who were assessing her see how uneasy she was. She needed to do her best to show them that she was ready to be a warrior.

Dovepaw’s mentor, Lionblaze, was the first cat to emerge, fluffing his golden tabby pelt against the early morning chill. Spiderleg followed him closely; Dovepaw gave the skinny black warrior a dubious glance, wondering what it would be like to have him assessing her as well as Lionblaze. Spiderleg looked very stern.

I wish it were just Lionblaze, Dovepaw thought. Too bad Firestar decided that we should have two judges.

Cinderheart appeared next, followed closely by her apprentice, Ivypaw, and last of all Millie, who was to be Ivypaw’s second assessor. Dovepaw’s whiskers quivered as she looked at her sister. Ivypaw looked small and scared, and her dark blue eyes were shadowed with exhaustion.

Padding closer, Dovepaw gave Ivypaw’s ear an affectionate lick. “Hey, you’ll be fine,” she murmured.

Ivypaw turned her head away.

She doesn’t even talk to me anymore, Dovepaw thought wretchedly. She’s always busy somewhere else when I try to get close to her. And she cries out in her dreams. Dovepaw pictured how her sister twitched and batted her paws when they were sleeping side by side in the apprentices’ den. She knew that Ivypaw was visiting the Dark Forest, spying on behalf of ThunderClan because Jayfeather and Lionblaze had asked her to, but when she tried to ask her sister what happened there, Ivypaw replied only that there was nothing new to report.

“I suggest we head for the abandoned Twoleg nest,” Spiderleg announced. “It’s sheltered, so there’s a good chance of prey.”

Lionblaze blinked as if he was surprised that Spiderleg was trying to take over the assessment, but then nodded and led the way through the trees in the direction of the old Twoleg path. Dovepaw quickened her pace to pad beside him, and the other cats followed.

“Are you ready?” Lionblaze asked.

Dovepaw jumped, startled out of her worries about her sister. “Sorry,” she mewed. “I was thinking about Ivypaw. She looks so tired.”

Lionblaze glanced back at the silver-and-white she-cat, then at Dovepaw, shock and anxiety mingling in his amber eyes. “I guess the Dark Forest training is taking its toll,” he muttered.

“And whose fault is that?” Dovepaw flashed back at him. However urgent it was to find out what the cats of the Dark Forest were plotting, it wasn’t fair of Lionblaze and Jayfeather to put the whole burden on her sister’s shoulders.

Ivypaw isn’t even a warrior yet!

Lionblaze let out a sigh that told Dovepaw he agreed with her privately, but wasn’t prepared to say so. “I’m not going to talk about that now,” he meowed. “It’s time for you to concentrate on your assessment.”