Эрин Хантер - The Ultimate Guide

Feathertail had lost her life in a fall—but this time he knew he could save Leafpool. In that moment, he realized he loved Leafpool just as he had loved Feathertail, however guilt-stricken that made him feel.

The two cats tried to deny their feelings until Crowfeather persuaded Leafpool that they would be happier together, even if that meant leaving their Clans. They had been gone for less than a day when they learned of a badger attack against ThunderClan. Crowfeather realized that Leafpool would never forgive herself if she did not return to help her Clanmates. They arrived at the hollow in time to see Cinderpelt, the other medicine cat, being killed by a badger, just as Sorreltail’s kits came into the world. Crowfeather’s heart broke all over again, knowing that Leafpool would stay with her Clan now.

He went back to WindClan and took Nightcloud as his mate in an attempt to prove to his suspicious Clanmates that he was a loyal warrior once more. Nightcloud gave birth to Breezepelt, but unbeknownst to Crowfeather, Leafpool was expecting his kits too. Lionblaze, Hollyleaf, and Jayfeather were raised by Squirrelflight and Brambleclaw, but when the truth emerged about their true parentage, Crowfeather was horrified and refused to acknowledge them as his own. However much his heart still ached for Leafpool, he could not betray his Clan again. He lived in private torment, unable to connect with his difficult WindClan son, Breezepelt, and resentful toward Nightcloud because she was not the she-cat he truly loved.

In the Great Battle with the Dark Forest, Crowfeather realized the legacy he had created when he found Breezepelt attacking Lionblaze. He pulled his WindClan son from the ThunderClan warrior, vowing that he would never let another cat harm a hair on Lionblaze’s pelt. Breezepelt tried to blame Crowfeather for driving him to find alliances among the Dark Forest cats, but Crowfeather insisted Breezepelt had made his own decisions. Left alone with Leafpool, Crowfeather admitted he regretted nothing—the closest he would ever come to accepting her kits as his own.

NIGHTCLOUD WAS OLDER THAN Crowfeather, and was starting to feel concerned she would never have a chance to bear kits, when he asked her to be his mate. She accepted with the sincere belief that she would be able to make Crowfeather fall in love with her, but she soon realized he had only asked her in order to prove he was loyal to WindClan. Nightcloud was short-tempered, defensive, and far from well suited to being a second-best choice. She stuck by Crowfeather without respecting him or even liking him particularly, but she loved their son, Breezepelt, with a ferocity that came from anger because Crowfeather did not love him equally. Nightcloud coddled her son, encouraged him to believe he was better than the other warriors, and in doing so, never gave him a chance to prove his own worth. Her bitterness toward Crowfeather tainted Breezepelt with its poison—though it’s hard to blame Nightcloud when Crowfeather put her in such a difficult position.

Breezepelt was always desperate for some acknowledgment from his quiet, undemonstrative father. He had heard the whispers about Crowfeather’s past and was determined to prove that he would never be so disloyal. Breezepelt could have been a brave, fierce, and loyal WindClan warrior, but Crowfeather’s disinterest and his mother’s insistence that he had to answer to no one gave Breezepelt a dangerous arrogance that was mixed with fury against his father. On a journey to the mountains with ThunderClan cats when he was an apprentice, Breezepaw watched how Jaypaw and Lionpaw were treated with warmth and easy affection by Brambleclaw, and his fury burned brighter.

His horror when he learned that Jayfeather, Lionblaze, and Hollyleaf were actually Crowfeather’s kits is not hard to imagine.

When cats from the Dark Forest walked in his dreams, offering him a chance to become a better warrior than his Clanmates, Breezepelt accepted. He was one of the few cats who understood the true nature of the Dark Forest’s attack on the Clans—and he relished the thought of punishing those cats who had made his life so difficult. In the depths of the battle, he launched himself on Lionblaze, who seemed to represent everything that was wrong for Breezepelt. But Crowfeather pulled him away and chased him off, blaming Breezepelt for making his own choices and leading himself down the darkest of paths. With tragic irony, Breezepelt failed to get revenge, failed to even out the balance of injustice he struggled with every day, and gave his father a chance to acknowledge his ThunderClan son.

HEATHERPAW WAS A LIVELY , curious, impulsive WindClan apprentice who first encountered Lionpaw when she and her mentor Crowfeather took Jaypaw back to the ThunderClan camp after a mishap at the edge of the lake. She met Lionpaw again when his patrol came to the aid of WindClan after a dog strayed too close to the camp on the hill. The young cats fought side by side, and the invisible, Clan-bound border between them began to fade.

Frustrated by the difficulty of speaking to Lionpaw at Gatherings, Heatherpaw suggested they meet at night on the boundary between their Clans. She saw no challenge to her loyalty by fostering this friendship, no reason it would make her any less of a warrior. When she discovered an entrance to the tunnels that burrowed beneath the woods and the hillside, she realized she had found the perfect hiding place for their blossoming relationship. Together, she and Lionpaw explored the underground world, playing games of DarkClan in the largest cave, neither of them aware of the ancient eyes that watched them from the shadows.

Meanwhile, relations between their Clans deteriorated, with Onestar determined to prove he could be strong without Firestar’s help. Border clashes made Lionpaw reluctantly decide he could no longer meet Heatherpaw in secret. When three WindClan kits went missing, Onestar assumed that ThunderClan had stolen them. Heatherpaw and Lionpaw guessed that the kits had found their way into the tunnels, and went looking for them with Jaypaw and Hollypaw. Torrential rain flooded the underground river, washing the cats out into the lake, and they narrowly escaped with their lives.

Heatherpaw knew her relationship with Lionpaw could never be rekindled. Their Clans were at war, and she had learned that her loyalty had limits, in spite of what her heart felt. The time came, moons later, when she had to face Lionblaze in battle, and her memories of what they had once shared were pushed aside by her duty to WindClan. But she never forgot him entirely and never found his equal among her own Clanmates.

RIVERCLAN CATS HAVE ALWAYS been viewed with suspicion by the other Clans because of our skill at swimming, and our fondness for getting our paws wet. We descend mostly from cats who did not come from the mountains to settle in the forest; those wind-tossed, open-air-loving cats had no wish to live among the close, whispering reeds, or dive underwater to catch fresh-kill. Instead, our first ancestors were those who saw the potential of the river for providing food in every season—food that would be safe from the other Clans because of its watery shelter. Our diet of fish made our pelts grow glossy and thick, better suited to keeping out the chill of the waves, and while other Clans scorned our plain, reed-rattled dens, we made them charming with feathers and moss and other trinkets we could collect along the shore.