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The lake was still red when Ashfur got there, and he thought at first that it was the sunset doing it, turning water the color of something that had died in it. Then he got closer and understood the sunset had nothing to do with it.
Hawkfrost's blood was still going into the water in threads, thin as whisker-hairs, unspooling off the rocks where his throat had opened. Nobody had come to move the body yet. Brambleclaw was long gone, back to camp to explain himself, and the patrol that should have collected the corpse for burial hadn't been sent out yet, so it was just Ashfur and a dead cat and a lake that kept eating the evidence one red thread at a time.
He didn't know why he'd come here instead of back to camp with everyone else. He told himself later it was to make sure Hawkfrost was really dead, which was stupid, because Brambleclaw didn't miss, and Hawkfrost's throat had a hole in it you could put two claws through. But that wasn't really why. He'd come because something in his chest had gone cold the second he heard what happened, and he needed somewhere quiet and cold to sit with it.
He had helped Hawkfrost plan this. Nobody knew that yet. Firestar didn't know it, Brambleclaw didn't know it, Squirrelflight definitely didn't know it, and for one clean, guilty moment sitting on the bank with a dead cat six tail-lengths away, Ashfur let himself hope nobody ever would.
He wasn't proud of it. He told himself that a lot that evening, that he hadn't wanted Firestar dead, not really. He'd wanted ThunderClan to hurt the way he'd been hurting, wanted somebody besides him to lose something, and Hawkfrost had come along with a plan and a grudge and made it so incredibly easy to say yes.
If Squirrelflight had said ‘yes’ to him more, maybe it wouldn’t have gotten this far. He’d gotten carried away. Now Hawkfrost was the one who'd lost, permanently, and the plan had died with him, and there was nobody left who knew Ashfur's part in it except him. And Starclan above, he supposed.
He sat with his paws in the cold mud at the edge of the reeds and watched the color bleed out of the water and thought about Squirrelflight, which was its own special kind of stupid, because thinking about Squirrelflight was exactly what had gotten Hawkfrost into his head with an offer in the first place. She'd chosen Brambleclaw! Again! That drift hadn't meant anything at all, apparently! The second Brambleclaw did something she considered noble enough, she'd gone straight back to him like flies to a corpse, and Ashfur had gotten to watch it happen from three tail-lengths away.
He was so busy hating that particular memory that he almost didn't notice the branch.
It surfaced when the reeds shifted, soggy and swollen with lake water, snagged crosswise in the current right where Hawkfrost's blood had gone in. It looked wrong the second he saw it, like spoiled prey, and some old animal part of his brain flagging it before the rest of him caught up. It was like something had grown it and then something else had chewed on it, and it had clearly been down there a long time, longer than the Clans had lived by this lake, for certain.
Holly, his brain supplied him with the information of what kind of branch this was. The red berries attached blended with the red blood surrounding the floating branch. Spiky green leaves disturbed the gently lapping waves as it floated closer to the edge of the water.
His mother used to tell him and Ferncloud a story when they were kits, back before the dogs, before Tigerstar fed her to them like she was prey and not a cat with two kits waiting on her to come home. It wasn't a happy story. Most of Brindleface's stories weren't, looking back, which maybe should have told him something about the kind of Clan he'd been born into. It was about a root that grew where something violent had died, black as a crow's eye, and if you broke it clean in half while you said what you wanted most in the world, you got it.
"And what's the price," young Ashpaw had asked, because even as a kit he'd understood that nothing in this forest came free.
"The same thing it took to grow it," Brindleface had said, and wouldn't say more, and swatted him gently on the ear for asking twice.
He picked the branch up out of the reeds. It was heavier than it looked, slick with what wasn't only lake water.
He thought about Squirrelflight curled up against Brambleclaw's side tonight, safe and warm and done with him, completely and finally done with him, and a burning feeling in his chest appeared.
"I want her to love me," he said out loud to no one, to the lake, to the dead cat six tail-lengths away who couldn't hear him anymore. "More than she loves anything."
He broke the branch between his teeth, making sure to avoid the berries. Nothing good came from any red berries in this forest or the last. It didn't snap clean, it came apart wet and stringy in the middle, and the whole lake went silent, no frogs, no crickets, no wind moving the reeds, just Ashfur and the sound of his own heart thumping.
Then a night bird called somewhere behind him and the world started up again like nothing had happened, and he sat there holding two dripping halves of a broken branch and felt, for the first time since Squirrelflight walked away from him, something that felt almost like hope.
---
Three sunrises later, Squirrelflight found him at the fresh-kill pile and pressed her flank against his so hard he nearly lost his footing.
"I've been thinking about you," she said, which was a strange thing to say out loud, in front of Thornclaw and Sorreltail and half the Clan, and stranger still because of how she said it, flat and urgent at the same time, like she was reciting something she'd only just learned the words to.
"Squirrelflight" he started, and didn't know how to finish it, because three days ago she'd looked at him like he was a bush and now she was looking at him like he was the only warm thing left in the world.
"Brambleclaw hit me," she said.
That stopped every cat within earshot cold. Sorreltail's ears went flat. Thornclaw actually turned around.
"He didn't," Ashfur said, before he could stop himself, because he'd been at that fox trap too, or near enough, and he knew what Brambleclaw had done there and it wasn't hitting anybody, it was saving Firestar's life at the cost of his own brother.
"He didn't mean to," Squirrelflight said smoothly, adjusting, the way you'd adjust a hunting crouch when the prey moved wrong. "But I don't feel safe with him tonight. I want to sleep near you instead."
Later, much later, Ashfur would understand this had been a lie built for him specifically, the way the fox trap had been a lie built for Brambleclaw, something with just enough truth in its bones to make you want to believe it. Brambleclaw hadn't touched her. But Brambleclaw had, in fact, done something Squirrelflight would have been furious about, if her original self had been the one steering. He'd killed his own brother in front of her father and come home covered in blood he didn't ask for, and something underneath the fresh new devotion in Squirrelflight's eyes had reached for the nearest half-truth that would get her near Ashfur and away from her own den, and used it, and hadn't cared at all that it wasn't fair to Brambleclaw.
Ashfur didn't think about any of that yet. He just felt Squirrelflight's fur against his, warm and real and finally, finally choosing him, and told himself he'd sort out the rest of it later.
That night she slept curled against his side in the warriors' den, and every cat who saw it went quiet in a way that wasn't quite comfortable, and Ashfur lay awake in the dark with her heartbeat against his ribs and thought: I did this, she chose me.
She started going to the lake alone, always to the same stretch of reeds where Hawkfrost had bled out and where Ashfur had broken the holly branch, and she started bringing things there. Moss at first. Then feathers. Then, on the fourth day, she brought a whole shrew she'd caught and didn't eat it and didn't bring it to the fresh-kill pile, just laid it down carefully on the flattened moss like she was setting a table for someone who wasn't coming.
"What is this?" Ashfur asked her, the first time he found the little shrine, moss packed down in a perfect oval, feathers arranged in a line like a border, the shrew laid out with its paws tucked under it as neat as sleep.
"For you," Squirrelflight said. "So you'll always have somewhere that's just ours."
He didn't like the way she said ours. He didn't examine why he didn't like it.
She started sitting very still sometimes, mid-conversation, mid-groom, staring at nothing for long enough that Sandstorm asked her twice if she'd heard a word her mother had said, and Squirrelflight blinked and came back and smiled like nothing had happened.
Once he woke before dawn and found her crouched at the edge of camp, dead still, facing the warriors' den, facing him sleeping in it. Dew had soaked all the way through her fur by the time she noticed him watching her back, and that told him everything he needed to know about how long she'd been sitting there. Most of the night, maybe longer. She got up without a sound when she caught him looking.
"You looked cold," she said. "I was making sure you were warm enough."
---
Three sunrises after that, Brambleclaw called dawn patrol from the clearing and found Squirrelflight already waiting by the entrance, groomed and alert and ready for nothing at all.
"I'm coming," she said, before he'd even finished naming names.
"You're not on the list."
"I'm coming with Ashfur." Not a question, just a fact she was informing him of, the way you'd tell a cat which way the wind was blowing.
Brambleclaw looked at Ashfur, who said nothing, because there wasn't a way to say please don't let her come that wouldn't turn into a bigger conversation than either of them wanted at the fresh-kill pile at dawn. So she came.
During the patrol, Sorreltail stepped in Ashfur’s direction to mention something, but Squirrelflight let out a low hiss at her, until she moved away.
She caught a vole an hour along the WindClan border, quick and clean, the kind of catch Ashfur had watched her make a hundred times as apprentices. She didn't eat it. She didn't call out that she'd caught something for the pile, either, the way you were supposed to. She carried it the rest of the patrol in her jaws and dropped it at his paws when they stopped to rest on the ridge, already broken open at the throat.
"I checked it," she said. "Before I brought it. In case."
"In case of what?"
She looked at him the way you'd look at a kit who'd asked why the sky was up instead of down, like the question didn't deserve an answer, and went back to grooming one foreleg, slow and methodical, and didn't look at him again the whole way home.
Cloudtail made a joke about it later, the kind of joke cats make when something's wrong and they don't know what else to do with the wrongness except try to laugh about it. "Careful," he told Ashfur, low enough that only the returning patrol could hear, "she'll be chewing your meat for you next, save your teeth the bother." Brackenfur laughed. Ashfur didn't.
“What’s wrong with helping my mate?” Squirrelflight appeared beside them, her eyes were narrowed, and her ears flattened.
Cloudtail stuttered, and slowly walked away to speak with Brightheart.
That evening he woke from a doze in the warriors' den to find every gap in the bramble wall behind his nest stuffed tight with fresh moss, packed into every place a draft might have gotten through, done so completely that no moonlight filtered through. Nobody had heard it happen. Nobody had heard anything at all.
"Did you do this?" Ashfur asked her, and she looked up from where she'd already curled into the nest beside his, half-asleep, or close enough to it to fake the rest.
"You kept saying you were cold," she said, muffled into her own paws.
"I said that once. Six days ago."
"I remembered," She closed her eyes. "I remembered."
For a few heartbeats nothing happened, her breathing gone slow and even the way sleep sounds from the outside. Then it caught, and her eyes came open again too fast, too wide, pupils blown huge in the dark.
"Ashfur," His name cracked coming out of her, nothing like the flat, pleasant voice from a moment before. "Ashfur, I don't, I don't remember leaving camp. I don't remember eating. I don't remember doing any of it, I just keep finding myself somewhere with no moon in between, and I'm so tired, and I can't," Her claws found the moss and dug in like she was trying to hold onto the ground itself. "Something's wrong with me. Something's been wrong with me for days. Please, you have to help me,"
Her whole body went slack mid-word, and when her eyes found his again they'd gone soft and slow and calm, all the terror folded neatly away underneath, like a leaf settling on the ground after falling from the tree.
"Sorry," she murmured, already sinking back into the nest. "Bad dream. I'm fine now. Lie down."
Ashfur didn't move for a long time.
---
Ferncloud noticed his silent panic before anyone else did. Ferncloud noticed everything; she always had, ever since they were kits sharing a nest with two littermates who never made it past their first quarter-moon, ever since their mother taught them both to watch each other's backs because nobody else was guaranteed to.
"You look terrible," she told him, six days into it, finding him alone in the warriors’ den with his fur unkempt and his eyes red-rimmed from a night he hadn't slept through.
"I got what I wanted," Ashfur said, which wasn't an answer, and Ferncloud, being his sister who’s been by his side their whole life, sat down next to him and put her tail over his paws the way their mother used to.
"Did you?" she said.
He didn't tell her about the branch. He wanted to. He got as far as opening his mouth twice and both times something closed his throat before the words could get out.
"I love you," Ferncloud said instead, simple as breathing, the way she'd say the sky was grey or the fresh-kill pile was low. "Whatever's wrong, I love you, and Cloudtail loves you, and if she's hurting you I'll claw her ears off myself, Firestar’s daughter or not."
He put his head against her shoulder and, for one moment, felt something in his chest loosen that had been wound tight for six days.
Fifty tail-lengths away, at the edge of the hollow where the light didn't quite reach, Squirrelflight watched them, eyes glinting in the shadows, face stuck in one smiling expression.
---
She waited until dusk, when the sky goes the color of a bruise and everything in the forest starts sounding quieter than it is.
Ashfur found Ferncloud by the sound first, and by the time he got through the bracken it was already most of the way finished. Squirrelflight had his sister pinned against the old fallen beech by the stream, one forepaw on Ferncloud's throat, and she was slamming her own weight into a large stick in Ferncloud's skull against the bark of the tree, over and over, with a rhythm to it, like a heartbeat, like something that had been done enough times somewhere else that the body remembered the pattern even when the mind wasn't the one doing it.
"Squirrelflight," His voice came out smaller than he wanted.
She didn't stop. She didn't even look at him. Her eyes, when they finally did flick toward him, weren't blank the way he'd have expected. They were wet. There were tears standing in them, flowing from her eyes, and her mouth was moving around words that never made it past her teeth, and for one terrible second he understood that some other Squirrelflight was in there behind her own eyes, watching this happen from somewhere she couldn't get out of, and she couldn't stop her own paws.
Ferncloud didn't move on the ground where she'd fallen, not even a little.
"She was in your den," Squirrelflight said, very quietly, very reasonably, like she was explaining something to a slow apprentice. "She had her paws on you. I saw it from the hollow."
"She's my sister."
"I know," Squirrelflight said, and something moved behind her eyes that might have been confusion, might have been the first crack of something understanding it had done wrong, and then it smoothed back over into that same terrible calm. "I know she is. It didn't matter. It never matters who loves you. It only matters that they do."
He didn't decide to lie. That was the part he'd turn over in his head for the rest of his life. His body simply started moving before his mind caught up.
He hauled Squirrelflight to the stream and roughlyshoved her under, scrubbing at her jaw and chest until the water ran pink and then clear, and she let him do it, docile now. "Go back to camp," he told her. "Say nothing to anyone."
"Anything you want," she said, and went.
Then he went back to Ferncloud’s mangled face.
There'd been a fox at this exact stretch of stream not two moons past, the same one that had put Squirrelflight and him both on their backs before Brambleclaw drove it off. He found the old tracks, half-filled with rain, dragged his own claws through the mud beside them until they looked fresh enough, then raked three long marks down Ferncloud's side to hide the shape of what had really been done to her.
He made faces at himself in the stream’s reflection until he had a convincing enough facade of shock and innocence and grief,
When it was done he howled for help exactly the way a cat should howl who'd stumbled onto this by accident, and some cold part of him noted how easy it was, how convincing his own innocence sounded even to himself. He did grieve for his sister, but making sure he wasn’t implicated in Squirrelflight’s crime was first and foremost. Ferncloud wouldn’t want him to be caught up in her murderous claws.
Dustpelt reached him first, then half the Clan, and every cat who heard about the fox nodded along, because a fox had gotten Squirrelflight and him both not two moons ago at this very stream.
“Did you see anything?” Dustpelt pleaded with him.
Leafpool knelt over the body longer than the others, frowning at something in the wounds that didn't sit quite right with her training. She didn't say anything. There was too much grief in that clearing for a good question to stand a chance against it.
Firestar called the funeral vigil at moonhigh, and Dustpelt didn't leave his mate's side even to eat, and Ashfur sat three tail-lengths back from the body with Squirrelflight pressed against him, mourning his sister's death with the cat who'd caused it curled against his ribs like nothing in the world was wrong, and understood, somewhere around the deepest part of that night, that he had done something that could not be undone by wanting it undone. He'd learned that as a kit and forgotten it as a grown cat with a wound in his chest shaped like Squirrelflight, and now his sister was dead on the cold ground with her skull caved in on one side and there wasn't a story in the world that ended well from here.
He went back to the lake before dawn, alone, and looked for the two halves of the holly branch he'd thrown into the reeds after he'd broken it, some half-formed idea of unbreaking it, of somehow giving it back.
He couldn't find them. The lake had already taken them the way it took everything eventually, and the water at that stretch of shore had gone from red to black to its ordinary color, and there was nothing left to prove any of it had happened except a dead cat in the ground and a live one asleep in his den with a mind that wasn't fully hers anymore.
Told him I wasn't finished, the voice said, and it had Hawkfrost's shape to it, Hawkfrost's cold amusement, coming from everywhere in the water at once instead of from one throat. This forest owed me something. I only needed someone stupid enough with a grudge to come collect it for me.
"Undo it," Ashfur said to the water, to the dark, to whatever was left of a dead cat that hated him for reasons that had nothing to do with fairness. "Please. Undo it."
Can't undo a wish once it's paid for, the voice said, sounding almost bored, the way Hawkfrost had always sounded bored right before he said something that would ruin somebody's whole life. Only one way that kind of hunger stops feeding. You know the way already. Your mother told you when you were small enough to still listen.
The water went still. Whatever had been in it left the way heat leaves a body, all at once and then completely, and Ashfur was alone on the shore with the first grey light coming up over the hills and a sister to bury and no idea, yet, what he was going to do about any of it.
The full-moon Gathering came four nights later, and Firestar decided, against Sandstorm's quiet advice and against every instinct Ashfur had been operating on for a moon-quarter, that ThunderClan would attend as though nothing at all had happened. Grief doesn't stop the Clans’ seeking out weakness from the others, he said, which was true, and also the kind of truth that gets cats killed.
Squirrelflight walked to the island pressed against Ashfur's side the entire way, tail overlapping his, and Brambleclaw walked six tail-lengths behind them both with his ears flat and his eyes on the ground, saying nothing, because there was nothing left to say that hadn't already been said in the six increasingly desperate conversations he'd tried to have with her since Ferncloud's death, conversations that all ended the same way, with Squirrelflight looking at him like he was a stranger asking her to remember a dream.
Firestar and Sandstorm crossed the tree-bridge first. All four Clans were already gathering under the big oak when ThunderClan arrived, WindClan and RiverClan and ShadowClan cats mingling in loose knots the way they always did, catching up on kits and prey-counts and the ordinary gossip of Clan life, and for a little while it almost looked like it might go the way Firestar had wanted, ordinary, forgettable, safe.
Then Onestar, trying to be kind, trying to do what any cat would do for a grieving Clanmate, dipped his head to Firestar and said, "I heard about your warrior. I'm sorry for ThunderClan's loss."
Something happened to Squirrelflight's face that Ashfur had no time to react to. It went loose, all at once, like the muscles under her fur had simply stopped agreeing to hold a shape, and when she opened her mouth what came out was just a high thin sound that carried across the clearing and stopped every conversation under that oak dead in its tracks.
"Blood will spill blood," she said, when the sound resolved into speech, too loud, pitched wrong, carrying to every Clan at once. "And the lake will run red. It already has. Ask him." She turned, slow and terrible, and pointed her muzzle at Ashfur in front of all the clans and both her parents.
The clearing went so quiet Ashfur could hear his own blood in his ears.
"Squirrelflight." Firestar's voice, low, urgent, already moving toward his daughter. "Squirrelflight, what's wrong,"
"Nothing's wrong," she said, and her voice had gone flat and pleasant again, that terribly reasonable calm from the night Ferncloud died. "I only meant the prophecy came true. That's all. That's good news, isn't it? Prophecies are supposed to come true."
Brambleclaw stepped between her and the watching Clans, low and urgent, his voice pitched only for her. "Squirrelflight, come away from here, come with me,"
She looked at him the way you'd look at something you'd stepped in.
"DON’T TOUCH ME!" she shrieked, and the loose, terrifying thing came back into her face, and before Brambleclaw could get a paw up she raked her own claws down her cheek, once, twice, deep enough to open the skin, and Sandstorm screamed her daughter's name across the clearing and every cat from every Clan was on their feet at once.
“IT’S NOT ME, IT’S NOT ME!” Squirrelflight looked out at her horrified mother and father and said, in a small child's voice that didn't match anything else about that night, "Make it stop. Please. Somebody make it stop," before the loose wrongness closed back over her like water over a dropped stone.
Blackstar called the Gathering ended early. Nobody argued.
They carried her home between Firestar and Brambleclaw, blood running down her jaw from three long claw-marks, and every cat who'd been on that island would tell the story for the rest of their lives, and not one of them, not even her own father, understood yet what they were actually looking at.
Leafpool wouldn't leave her sister's side for three days, and on the third night, sitting vigil in the medicine den with Squirrelflight sedated on poppy seeds and finally, finally quiet, she reached for the old thread between them, the one that had run under their skins since they were kits sharing the same nest, thin as a spider's web and just as easy to miss until you needed it.
She'd used it before. To find Squirrelflight in the dark when they were apprentices playing games they weren't supposed to. When she was gone on the journey to the sundrown place. To know, once, without being told, that her sister was hurting far away. She reached for it now the way you'd reach into water you already knew was too cold, hoping this once it wouldn't be, and found her sister's mind on the other end of it.
Leafpool. Squirrelflight's true voice, small and exhausted, folded up somewhere far under her own skin like a kit hiding from a storm. Leafpool, I can hear you, please, I'm still here, I'm still,
Something answered that wasn't Squirrelflight at all.
It came down the thread like cold water finding a crack in stone, and Leafpool's whole body arched off the moss before she understood what was happening, claws she didn't control raking three long furrows down her own foreleg, and then lightning struck her from the inside of her own skull hard enough that the den went white and then black and she didn't feel herself hit the ground.
She woke at sunhigh the next day, half-blind in one eye where blood had burst behind it, her paw wrapped in cobwebs by an apprentice too frightened to explain what had happened, unable to remember anything past the moment her sister's true voice had called her name.
She never tried the thread again. She told Firestar, haltingly, days later, that whatever was wearing Squirrelflight's face wasn't something StarClan had put there, and that trying to reach past it had cost her the sight in one eye and very nearly more than that, and Firestar, who had already buried one clanmate and nearly lost his daughter to something he couldn't name, believed her completely and had no idea at all what to do about it.
Brambleclaw found Ashfur alone at the training hollow two sunrises later, and there was nothing gentle left in the way he approached.
"I know what you did," Brambleclaw said. No greeting. No warning. "Hawkfrost said, before he died, that he'd had help. I thought about who. I kept thinking about it, moon after moon, and every time I did, you were the only cat it made sense to be."
Ashfur didn't answer, which was its own kind of answer, and Brambleclaw's ears went flat with something that wasn't quite fury and wasn't quite grief either, some third thing that lived in the space where both of those feelings overlapped.
"And now this," Brambleclaw said, gesturing with his tail toward camp, toward the medicine den where Squirrelflight lay sedated, toward the whole wrecked shape of the last half-moon. "You did something. I don't know what. I don't care what it was called. But she wasn't like this before you started sniffing around her again, and Ferncloud is dead, and my mate claws her own face open in front of four Clans, and I am done, Ashfur, I am done waiting for you to tell me the truth on your own."
"Leave it alone," Ashfur said, and his own voice sounded like a stranger's to him. "Brambleclaw. For once in your life, leave something alone."
"No." Brambleclaw's voice cracked on the word, and underneath the fury for one unguarded second there was just a cat who'd lost his mate to something he couldn't fight, couldn't see, couldn't even properly explain to his own Clan leader. "I'm going to Firestar. Tonight. I'm going to tell him everything I think I know, about Hawkfrost, about you, about whatever's happened to Squirrelflight, and I don't care anymore what happens to either of us once I do."
He turned to go. Ashfur stepped after Brambleclaw. He didn't take three steps.
She came out of the bracken so insanely fast Ashfur barely registered movement before impact, and Brambleclaw went down under her and this time Squirrelflight didn't cry while she did it, didn't fight herself the way she had with Ferncloud, didn't leave any crack at all for the real cat underneath to surface through. She fought like a feral animal that had stopped resisting its own hunger, fast and utterly without mercy, claws tearing at his stomach again and again, and by the time Ashfur got his paws under him to move, it was already over, and Brambleclaw lay still in the churned leaf-litter with his underside open the same way his father’s had been opened, back at the forest. How ironic, that Brambleclaw tried so hard to not be like his father, just to die in the same violent manner. At least he only had one life to lose.
Squirrelflight looked up from the body, breathing hard, blood on her paws, and her eyes when they found Ashfur's were calm. Terribly, evenly calm.
"He was going to take you away from me," she said. "I couldn't let him."
Ashfur stood in the hollow with his sister four days buried and his clanmate’s throat open on the ground in front of him and understood, all the way down, past denial, past hope, past every excuse he'd built for himself over the last half-moon, exactly what he had made.
He didn't go back to camp that night. He went to the lake instead, to the reeds, to the flattened moss shrine his sister had died beside without ever knowing it was there, and he sat with the water lapping cold against his paws and thought about a story his mother used to tell him and Ferncloud when they were small enough to still believe every word of it.
The same thing it took to grow it, Brindleface had said.
There was a patch of deathberries growing at the base of the old dead oak past the border with WindClan, the same berries every medicine cat in ThunderClan's memory had warned every kit and apprentice away from since before Ashfur was born.
He didn't cry on the way there, which surprised him a little. He'd expected to. Instead he found himself thinking, absurdly, about Ferncloud grooming his ears when they were kits and their mother wasn't looking, about the way Brambleclaw used to make him laugh so hard as apprentices that Longtail had to swat them both quiet during dawn patrol, about Squirrelflight's laugh, the real one, the one from before any of this, sharp and quick and unguarded.
He ate the berries under the dead oak with the moon coming up thin and cold through the bare branches, and it didn't hurt the way he'd expected it to, not at first, just a heaviness spreading slowly through his chest and legs like wading into cold water one step at a time. He thought about the lake. He thought, oddly, about the sound the branch had made when it broke, wet and wrong and not clean at all, and understood, as his legs gave out under him and the cold ground came up to meet his shoulder, that nothing about any of this had ever been clean, not from the first moment he'd picked that dark holly branch up out of the reeds and decided a wish was worth more than a warning.
The same thing it took to grow it, he thought, and the thought didn't have any words left attached to it by the time it finished, just the shape of an ending, and then there wasn't any thought at all.
---
Squirrelflight woke up on the cold ground beside the dead oak with no memory of walking there.
The last clear thing she could find, reaching back through her own mind like feeling along a wall in the dark, was Brambleclaw's face across the training hollow, furious and frightened and alive, and then nothing, then a long grey stretch with almost-memories caught in it like burrs in fur, Ferncloud's name, the color red, a sound she didn't want to remember making, and then this. Cold ground. Moonlight. Ashfur lying very still beside her with foam dried at the corner of his mouth and his eyes open and fixed on nothing at all.
She didn't understand yet what had happened. She wouldn't fully understand it for moons, not until Leafpool, half-blind and careful with her words, pieced together enough of it from what little the thread between them had carried through before it broke. What Squirrelflight understood in that first terrible moment, kneeling over a dead cat under a dead tree with blood dried into her own claws that she had no memory of shedding, was only that something enormous and wrong had happened to her, around her, through her, and that whatever it had been, it was gone now, and Ashfur wasn't.
She screamed. It didn't feel like enough, but it was the only thing her body knew how to do.
The patrol that found her, hours later, found a cat gone hoarse from crying out and covered in blood that wasn't hers and no explanation at all for a dead warrior curled at her paws with deathberry pulp still caught in his teeth. Firestar, when they carried her home, looked at his daughter's face, one still-healing claw wound, eyes hollow, and made the only decision that made any sense to a Clan that was torn with fear.
"Dark Forest," he said, quietly, to Sandstorm, to Leafpool, to the small worried knot of cats who'd gathered to hear it. "Or something like it. Something got into her, where nobody could see it happening until it was too far gone to stop."
Nobody argued, nobody wanted to. It was easier, and truer than anyone quite realized, to believe that Squirrelflight had been a den for something else to live in rather than believe she had ever, for one single moment, chosen any of it herself.
She grieved for Ashfur, uncertainly, at first, whether her sorrow belonged to her or to whatever had used her mouth to say his name so many times. It took a long while, moons, seasons, longer than anyone around her had patience for, except Leafpool, who understood better than most what it cost to carry a wound nobody else could see, before she stopped flinching every time some cat mentioned the lake, before she could walk past that stretch of reeds without her legs locking under her.
The Clan buried Ferncloud with full honors and told the kits, gently, that Brambleclaw and Ashfur had died fighting something dark that had come up out of the old dead places by the water, which was, in its own way, closer to the truth than anyone who told it ever knew.
The branch never surfaced again. The lake kept it, the way the lake kept everything eventually, folded down deep in the cold and the dark with all the other things the Clans had lost to it and never quite understood, and if some other grieving cat ever finds it again someday, tangled in the reeds where the water still runs a little redder than it should, there won't be anyone left alive who remembers enough of the story to warn them what it costs.