Erin Hunter - Sunset

“Mousebrain!” he snapped. “Didn’t your mentor ever tell you not to stick your nose in before you know what you’re dealing with?”

“Sure, Mousefur taught me everything,” Spiderleg retorted, glaring at the older warrior.

“Remember it, then.”

Squirrelflight stood beside Brambleclaw while they both studied the loop and stick closely.

“What happens if we touch it?” Squirrelflight asked, cautiously advancing a paw.

Brambleclaw’s tail struck her paw aside. “We don’t want to find out the hard way,” he warned her.

“But we have to do something ,” Squirrelflight protested.

“Hang on, let’s try this.” She grabbed a long stick in her jaws.

“Careful,” Brambleclaw warned.

Squirrelflight flicked her ears at him, then crept cautiously up to the Twoleg thing and poked the stick into the shining loop. At once, the loop snapped tight, gripping the end of the stick. Spiderleg let out a squeak of alarm and leaped back-ward, his pelt bristling and his ears flattened.

Brambleclaw stood his ground, but a shudder went through him from ears to tail-tip. He closed his eyes, imagining a cat loping along the track, unaware of any danger, until it thrust its head into the loop and… “That could snap a cat’s neck,” he meowed.

“Or choke it to death,” Dustpelt agreed grimly.

Squirrelflight dropped the stick. “This isn’t meant for us,” she pointed out. “The Twolegs put it on a fox track. They must mean to trap foxes with it.”

“But why ?” meowed Spiderleg.

Dustpelt shrugged. “They’re crazy. All Twolegs are crazy.”

Brambleclaw looked again at the length of shiny stuff, thinner than an ivy tendril, wrapped so tightly around the stick that it had crushed the pale green bark. “It’s harmless now,” he mewed, “but there might be more of them. We’ll have to report it, and make sure every cat knows what to watch out for.”

“At least we know what to do with them.” Dustpelt dipped his head to his former apprentice. “Good thinking, Squirrelflight.”

Squirrelflight’s green eyes gleamed; Dustpelt didn’t give praise lightly.

“Spiderleg, too. That was well spotted,” Brambleclaw added.

But his belly clenched at the thought of how easily the young warrior could have run straight into the trap. “We’d better finish the patrol,” he ordered. “And let’s all be careful where we put our paws. The forest could be full of these things.”

As they made their way along the ShadowClan border, Brambleclaw let Dustpelt take the lead. He and Squirrelflight padded along, side by side, at the rear of the patrol.

Brambleclaw tried not to let her closeness distract him from tasting the air and keeping his eyes open for any more of the sinister shining loops.

“Do you think we ought to warn the other Clans about these fox traps?” he asked her.

Squirrelflight glanced at him, her green eyes wary. “You’re thinking of Hawkfrost, aren’t you?”

“No, not just RiverClan,” Brambleclaw meowed, trying not to let his neck fur bristle. “WindClan probably haven’t much to worry about, except for that patch of woodland on the other side of the stream. But there must be traps on ShadowClan territory; the one we found was right on the border.”

“Firestar will have to decide whether we tell them or not,” Squirrelflight pointed out. “He’ll probably announce it at the next Gathering.”

Brambleclaw halted and faced her. “Squirrelflight, can we talk this through without clawing at each other? Did you really think I just wanted to warn RiverClan because of Hawkfrost?” Hawkfrost—his half brother, Tigerstar’s son, the cat Squirrelflight refused to trust. If he and Squirrelflight were to be together now, they had to sort this problem out once and for all.

“Yes, I did think that.” To his relief Squirrelflight was direct, but didn’t sound angry. “You know how I feel about Hawkfrost.”

“But he’s my brother,” Brambleclaw reminded her. “I can’t ignore that, any more than I can ignore that Tawnypelt’s my sister, even though she is a ShadowClan warrior.”

He wondered if he was being entirely honest. He had never walked in dreams with Tawnypelt, as he did with Hawkfrost, following twisting paths to their meetings with their father, Tigerstar. Tawnypelt had never joined in these meetings, where he and Hawkfrost were taught to lead their Clans. He knew he could never tell Squirrelflight, or any other cat in ThunderClan, about that dark forest and the dark warrior who waited for him.

But there’s no need , he argued with himself. They’d never understand. There might be things Tigerstar can teach me, but that doesn’t mean I’d do what he did to gain power .

“Tawnypelt’s different,” Squirrelflight persisted. “She journeyed with us, for one thing. And she’s half ThunderClan.”

Brambleclaw bit back a protest. He wanted to settle the quarrel, not start it up again. “Think of it like this,” he began.

“If Leafpool had gone to WindClan with Crowfeather, would you care for her any less?”

“Of course not!” Squirrelflight’s eyes stretched wide. “She could go off with the whole of WindClan, and she’d still be my sister.”

“And Hawkfrost is still my brother. Like Tawnypelt’s still my sister. We’ll always be kin, even though we are in different Clans. You’re lucky that you have your sister in the same Clan. I’d give anything to have my kin with me.”

Squirrelflight searched his face with a penetrating green gaze. “Okay,” she mewed. “I guess I can understand that. I just don’t like to feel that Hawkfrost is as important to you as your Clanmates.”

“He’s not,” Brambleclaw replied at once. “My first loyalty will always be to my Clan.”

“Brambleclaw!” Dustpelt’s voice interrupted them.

Brambleclaw whipped around to see the brown tabby warrior shouldering his way through a clump of bracken; Spiderleg peered out of the ferns just behind him. “Are we on a patrol, or aren’t we? Do you plan to stand there all day gossiping?”

“Sorry,” Brambleclaw meowed, bounding toward Dustpelt and taking the lead to head farther along the border.

As Dustpelt, Spiderleg, and Squirrelflight padded hard on his paws, he hoped that his arguments about Hawkfrost had convinced Squirrelflight more thoroughly than they had convinced him. He hoped that if he ever had to choose, he really would put his Clan before his brother.

“Let all cats old enough to catch their own prey join here beneath the Highledge!”

Firestar’s yowl halted Leafpool on her way back from the elders’ den, where she had been checking Mousefur’s wound.

The brown-furred elder was still complaining of stiffness, but the claw marks had begun to heal, and there was no sign of infection.

Leafpool made her way toward the edge of the clearing, stopping beneath the ledge where Firestar stood looking down at his Clan. Sandstorm and Thornclaw got up from the fresh-kill pile and padded over, while Cloudtail and Rainwhisker left their work on the thorn barrier. Uneasiness gnawed in Leafpool’s belly. The dawn patrol had just returned and gone straight to Firestar; had they discovered more badgers, or maybe signs that ShadowClan were trying to take over part of the territory?

Trying to stifle her anxiety, Leafpool sat down beside Ferncloud, who mewed a greeting and asked anxiously, “How’s Birchpaw?”

“He’ll be fine,” Leafpool replied. Birchpaw was Ferncloud’s kit, the only one of his litter to survive the famine in the old forest; she could understand how worried his mother must be about his injuries. “The swelling around his eye is going down. But I’ll keep him with me for a few more days until I’m sure there’s no infection.”