She begins to forget why she wanders.
After a long time, the act of walking just seems to become her – she's done a lot, hasn't she? Khia has come far since she left that crowded house, that lined and mundane street. She walks, because that's what she does.
Not because, possibly, she has something to leave far behind.
Even as her paws ache and stumble, as her limbs turn stiff as the trees she passes between, and the tiredness thrums against her eyelids like the wingbeats of a bird, a bitter taste lingers on her tongue. The memory pulsates in her, demanding to be revisiting, wishing so dearly to be unpacked. Walking until her feet bleed might push it away completely, she reasons. Khia is resolving to try.
Not sure of the direction she's travelling in, and unwilling, for a while, to engage in the unwelcome act of thinking, Khia passes from the shade of one tree to the next. Still in the forest – that much she knows. It must be a very large forest. She is only hoping she hasn't been going in circles; hoping, in the sort of way that burns through every single hope, wish, or optimistic thought she's had for the last few moons. It goes against all of those. It feels sordid to have them anyway.
Now that he's– he's gone and become one–
The thought is too wrong, too strange to hold in her head, so she lets it go, lets her gaze unfocus as she crosses from one shadow to the next, everything around her soft and blurred, a smear a colours simple enough for her to understand. A small world.
Here she fits.
Here everything does.
But… here comes something that does not. She smells it, sharp enough to drag her out of this haze. The smell of something feral and living; the sort of thing she's learned to fear. Khia thinks about hiding, scans the forest around her for somewhere small and secret to enclose herself within. She stares right through him, twice, before realising she has even seen someone.
Hardly her fault; he seems almost a part of the furniture, a thing cut away from the forest floor, covered as he is in dirt and leaves and other unsavoury detritus. It's only his eyes that stand out – one green, one blue. It comes as a shock, to find them familiar.
Khia squints, deciphering this. There's the faintest patch of white gleaming between his leg and chest, and it's just enough to remind her. To send her back into Tillman memories.
Skah.
Yes, she should be afraid.
He blinks his eyes – one at a time, like the sinuous and disjointed movements of a snake. She resists a shudder, if only not to look quite so much like the easy prey she is.
"Huh," he huffs. Is that recognition? Will he remember her? But all he says is, "I'm guessing you're not one of them."
Skah lays a very special reverence on the word them. Awe and fear. Desire and resignation.
"Who?" Khia asks. She can't help but guess.
Skah shakes himself as he tosses his head. "PureClan!" he exclaims, impatiently. "PureClan of course."
"Oh. Well… no."
Not that that she doesn't have her connections, her family ties.
He's squinting at her, now, though there's nothing that warrants a second look. He was right the first time around. She waits under his scrutiny, wondering if she should choose to run, would he give chase?
"You're awfully close to their territory, you know," he says. Conversational. She'd never known him to be.
"I hadn't realised," she replies, smiling cordially.
What is he now, their bouncer?
"You ought to stay away. Don't you know what they do to rogues?" He doesn't sound concerned, exactly, but the fact he's warning her away is enough. She could almost relax.
"I've heard," Khia concedes. "I'll stay away. Which direction should I go?"
Skah considers. His turns his face left and right. He tilts his head up to stare through the leaves, as though that's any indication. Khia has to conclude he's as clueless as she is; the prospect of north, south, or west a myth. They could very well already be in PureClan territory, Cariad about to come across them any moment. One tree is the same as any other. If they belong to someone, they are none the wiser.
"You're lost," Khia says, unhelpfully.
Skah's muddy ears flatten against his head.
"It doesn't matter. I'm staying close and hidden. But you – just pick a direction and go. You should get out of here before everything implodes."
"Implodes?" she asks, alarmed. "What's going to implode?"
That word implies consequences.
The formerly white tom sits with a thump. Puffs of brown dust rise up around him, making for an odd and misshapen halo. "That's a long story," he says. "You know what the city is?"
"Yes…" Khia wonders if this is too telling.
He's tapping his foot, as though sifting through which facts to tell her. "Okay. Well. A particular group of city cats are fed up with PureClan, and I have it on good authority they're on their way here. To disrupt the order of things." He sneers. "The natural order."
The city. She doesn't gasp, but comes close. Thaddeus. Elettra. Gideon.
She could go back, she could help… only she knows what she'd be fighting against, and it's a face more familiar to her than her own. On either side, she's not sure she could face that.
Besides. She is not a fighter; that is very well established.
"You think they'll win?' she asks. It's more than hoping against hope; it is praying for murder. It's wishing her brother dead. She can't say he deserves it, but now, with that river of distance and perfidy between them, she can't say that he does not, either.
Skah snorts. "Win?" he asks. "They're scooping water back into a flooding sink."
She thinks, for a moment, to remember what a sink is. The allegory doesn't instil hope.
Skah tilts his head. At first she thinks he's considering her, proposing to himself what he's to do with her. But that's not it at all; Khia's dropped off his radar, a small thing anyway. He's listening to the strange noises on the breeze. A shouting, or a roar.
Khia shivers. "Is that–"
"Yes!" Skah exclaims, scrambling to his feet. He hoots a laugh. His sympathy, if any such thing exists, does not lie with the sacrificial army. Khia wonders why he's here, if not to watch the old terror fall.
But Skah has always liked danger, the unsavoury, the punishing. She quits her thoughts.
Leaving her now, racing off to see it in action as no one has before, Skah goes. No word of goodbye, but she needs none from him. Even seeing a face from Tillman's is unwelcome; it reminds her where Ru is, how very far from Tillman's they both are. In a few moments he's all but gone, his camouflage binding him to the forest like a secret. Perhaps in the chaos of the coming fight, he won't even remember her. He could even see Cariad, and recognise him no more than her.
She wishes to go with him. Only for a moment, and by then he's gone – but to be guided through the forest, have another body between her and Clan while it all unfolds? She could mourn Cariad, then; if he dies or not, repents or ruins himself. Khia would at least know this one thing.
But she can't bring herself to see him kill. Better she remembers him clean.
So she goes on. Shadow to shadow. Trees springing out of dark shapes. Passages of light, warming for a moment, as she passes under them.
The aches return, the promise of bleeding feet. She raises one to her nose, sniffs it. Its pad is cracked, the leaves sharp underfoot, but below it the mud is cooling and soft; a balm. The thought of afterwards presses on her more closely than the shadows or low branches above her. After this, she'll have to go somewhere. Do something. Walking is diverting: it is not forever. While she's here, losing herself in the labyrinth of her choosing, the sounds are growing louder. Khia can pick screams out of the roar, and the low hush of the forest seems to be listening. Waiting for something to end.
"I don't know," she whispers to herself, the medley, the forest. "I don't know what to do."
But the answer dawns before her; resplendent, shining, golden. Moving. Striding for a step, staggering for another, as though something is very wrong within her.
Just feet away, Khia's answer moves past.
For once she knows something without being taught.
"Morningstar," she breathes.
One of Oakpaw's offhand, flippant comments is coming back to her. Well, it was a warning, but a snide one. You won't even see her, he'd said. Possibly didn't think she'd recognise the fabled monster, almost mythic in her fame. The next thing, unimportant, had been a remark on vengeance and probably her size.
That's the thing, now, taking root.
This beast, who loomed so tall, walks hunched. She moves as though vertical, clawing her way through leaf-litter, the tendons in her legs crawling under skin thick and hard, the harshness of an ill-fought battle in her breath. There is blood – mixed with gold it is sickly. It looks wrong.
No, Khia decides. There is nothing exactly right about her. Even the air is pungent, sallow with some decay. Mortality.
It's hard to feel pity, when all Khia sees is opportunity. All she sees are the pieces taken from her, and broken. She's enchanted; she could do it. What else is left? This thing would fall if you breathed on it. She would melt in the rain. If Khia tried, she would fall.
The list is long and the prey is easy; her stolen warped brother; her mother, her father; Ru; the dead, who have marched all this way; even herself.
Careful, softly. Khia moves.
Careful.
Softly.
She knows how. She practiced long ago. The leaves are limp, quiet; the wind is soft and masks her.
Khia flies close to the sun.
She rockets from the bushes; goes airbound; hits Morningstar's shoulder, like a wad of wet moss, and bounces off. Morningstar is unmoved. Khia blinks and readies for the next move – grabbing for the throat, or going for the eyes, perhaps, like a vengeful crow – but the she-cat has already placed one paw, muddy with dirt and blood, on her tail. She had not been slow to move, but the implications scrolling across her face go glacially. The considerations. The wondering.
It turns to frowning.
"You look familiar, little mouse," says Morningstar. "Have I thought to have you for my dinner before?"
Khia stares up. She was wrong, very wrong to think she could do this: but with that realisation comes boldness. She spits up at the Clanner's face and is pleased to see it land.
Morningstar flinches, the looming way she holds herself shattering apart for just a moment. Even as she puts the ensemble together again, she looks confused. She settles slowly on the right face; the growl, splitting apart the corners of her lips, the darkness shuttering her eyes like nightfall, the creases of her muzzle and forehead settling into deep spiteful lines.
"Too familiar by half," Morningstar muses. With her free paw she tips Khia onto her back; unresistant, not expecting it, Khia finds herself rolling. Finds a heavy weight settle onto her stomach and dig down. The weight has teeth; it has sharpness. "Why have you come for me?"
"I didn't," Khia says. She squirms, but the grip is immense, the weight implacable. "Not everything revolves around you, you vile f–"
"Please," she drawls. "Everyone wants me dead. Don't think you're special."
She gives Khia a little shake with the claws embedded in her stomach. "How did I ruin your life? Kill your boyfriend? Your mother? Your daddy?"
"Yes," Khia gasps. She doesn't specify. "You knew them, too."
The leader leans in closer. She is a thing of many smells but her breath is worse.
Khia goes on. Every moment of distraction is a second of her life, redeemed. "Brother too. Only I wish he were dead, instead of what you did to him."
A sour wave rolls across her face as Morningstar huffs a laugh. "I should have known. This is all far too convenient. You both look too much like her."
"Convenient?" Khia spits. "You murdered my mother. How long would Cariad stay your loyal servant if he knew that?"
Morningstar is drumming her claws into the earth. She's reliving something, so clearly, but it's too far away to touch. "Servant?" she asks mildly, hardly straying from the reverie. "He doesn't have a choice, if he wants his children to live. I've just decided it now. They won't."
Khia doesn't recognise the new edges in her expression when she looks down again. So much sharper, much too lucent.
"Hmm."
It's not a purr, not as she's ever heard one. It's a buzz under her skin, stoking her fear.
"I always regretted the blow that killed her wasn't mine. Sablefrost. Conniving little bitch. Making my son do it was a piece of beautiful irony… but you always want your own hands in it. Delivering it. If I could have it done again, it would be me. It would be hours. It would be enough blood to stain my son red for all his years.
"But now…"
Her smile is hideous.
"I get to do it twice."
Khia is no longer pinned; she is air-bound now, again, as though something gentle and divine has lifted her away to promise no more. For a moment she really believes it. But Morningstar has only scooped her into the air, a leaf kicked up with too little effort. Above her the branches spin, the sky is grey, and no one is waiting to catch her there. She lands.
Little mouse. A small, winded plaything, she feels like one.
Khia lifts a shuddering, weightless and arbitrary leg, her claws out – seeking to fend off the blow that doesn't come, batter away the beast that's not in front of her.
Before the teeth come down on her scruff there's no warning. Not even a sound. The thing that clawed its way across the ground is reborn with passion. A new purpose that, perhaps, it's long searched for. That it has not held since her mother died, executed, and with her a feud. But Morningstar has one again, seems to know what to do with it. She is picking Khia up, motherly, and sending her flying into a tree. Khia hears a snap; pities the tree. She knows it was not the tree.
"I've known for a while, now," the gold-faced monster says, watching Khia slide again to the ground. "Something about Cariad was too…" Morningstar shudders.
"Did I let him in for that – did I already know? Really, it was easier to let him die. I like easy. It serves me well."
She draws back a filthy paw and swats Khia across the ground. There's blood on the leaves behind her; already, it is a scene. The kind one pieces together later, when they wonder just how one body part separated from the other.
"I've thought he might try to kill me. I did not think it would be the one they all left behind in the city – mother, brother, sister. Aunt or uncle – whoever the hell went. Your whole family left you there, did they not?"
Khia croaks. Morningstar's claws tiptoe up her spine, find purchase, drag ice and fire back down. Her eyes go black, and she does not have to watch herself vomit.
"They all came home. You were born to be a warrior, little mouse," she croons. "They never let you try that, did they. Pitiful. You could not even stick me with your claws. Well, that's okay. You would've enraged me, you would already be dead."
Morningstar punctuates dead with a hard little thrust; the black space between her ribs feels smaller, now, but it's filled with more. Nothing more than pain. A claw traces the soft shell of her eyelid, flits across her nose. Each touch feels like a moulding. Morningstar is searching for something and shaping it. She likes her sculptures broken in. Either her heart is afraid to beat, or it thrums at a rhythm too fast to feel.
The Clanner picks her up with a claw under her chin. All her weight, resting on one claw. She has never felt smaller. She cannot look Morningstar in her burning, burning eyes.
"But you could still try."
And Khia is soaring again.
She is so small, perhaps she could go on forever. Maybe gravity will forget her.
A roaring, a rush is in her ears. It pushes through the blood. In hard and rapid succession something hits her back, her stomach, her ribs, her stomach, her back, her shoulder. A coolness comes to touch her paws. The movement stops.
Nothing in her gaze is clear; she sees triple, sees an army. Morningstar moves into focus far above her, shining as her twins shine, blurring into only the vaguest of shapes. Khia has fallen far; down a long slope, or perhaps a ravine. Now she gets to watch death saunter all the way down.
The earth here is cool and slippery. If she could just… sink…
What was nothing more than a tumble of wind in her ears is coalescing. No, this roar is familiar. She remembers Skah running off to see the army die. Well, now she is hearing it, in tandem with her own. To feel something, even solidarity, is hopeful. She is alone. But she is not alone.
She listens to the screams. And here she is, dying without a sound. It seems somehow brave to wail as you die; as though you are accepting it, conceding. Khia can't quite bring herself to voice a single damning sound.
Morningstar has not reached her. Khia rolls her eyes up, but the she-cat hasn't even moved. The distant shouts are pulling strange strings on her face.
"They're fighting for me!" she gasps.
Before she goes, she says, "Stay put. I did mention hours, did I not?"
Maybe she really does go. Khia hardly knows. She presses her face back to the mud and pictures sinking down, through the layers. It is nice. Nothing else comes to touch her and no final bow, just yet, is swung.
The cool thing at her feet is water. A river. She doesn't like rivers anymore, not since the storm. Somehow, still, it calms her.
Khia lies there a long time; not dying, lodged halfway in-between. Certainly, she feels death. It's crept close and presses kisses to her skin, to this wound, to that one, judging hungrily the pulse beating against their split edges. She does not feel herself crying. Just hears it, a pitiful wavering noise thin on the air. Perhaps the nerves in her chest are all crushed, just blood now, as if she needed anymore to spare. Perhaps she imagines the noise because to lie here, silent and just waiting, feels all too hollow and lacking. There was supposed to be more; even if all she can conjure are these sad weak sounds.
She'll just have to live with it – but not for very long.
Because her ears are not broken – perhaps the only thing intact, now – she hears Morningstar's return. It is very loud, all crashing and scuffling in the undergrowth. She wants Khia to hear it. She wants it drawn out, wants Khia's terror to herald her. But Khia's emotions are stamped safely down, muffled mute under layers of pain and disconnection.
She doesn't move. If Morningstar wants her running, wants her quaking, she'll have to animate her limbs herself.
But the crying pipes up again, once, like a cry for help. She hates it. Khia wants to crush her lungs herself before Morningstar hears that involuntary little sound. She gloats, though – she could chance to not hear it over the sound of her own proud voice. So Khia presses her face to the mud, her mouth to dirt. The next best way.
She thinks she might even blend with the riverbank, before she remembers the blood. There's slim chance of camouflage now.
The thrashing of small branches stops.
Morningstar has emerged from the tree-line and presses on down the steep slope, her paws sliding on damp leaves. She is hurrying, after all; Khia hears each rapid thumping step, all the way down.
Her mind takes her very far away. The warehouse: she tried to be happy there. A soft and welcome voice is calling for her, bidding her back. She can hardly remember why she left, and she knows why she should've stayed. Just for one face. For one stupid, kinked tail. Khia hides her face and just thinks of the voice; her recall is better than she thought, something about this state giving it new clarity.
It even layers nicely above the distant, river-carried screams.
"Khia!" it calls. "Khia, oh shit, no, Khia, Khia."
She'd never known him to swear. Not even when Etch died.
His voice is clear, louder than ever, but she can't picture his face. She knows it must have changed – though it's only been weeks. Khia fails to bring all his features into focus, though she wants to die with them in mind.
The coolness is rising up her legs, splashing up onto her chest. Her head lolls and water splashes into her mouth. Tastes like drowning. Khia coughs and her eyes go wide.
She is in the river now; just the edge, too shallow for real danger. Dirt and blood wing their way through the water around her.
It's not Morningstar in front of her.
Just someone with a pale face, harrowed eyes, and a tail trying to point in two directions at once. Even smelling of fear, reeking of it to match hers, he's smiling. Khia leans – she must be standing, but she doesn't recognise her own weight – until she can rest her head on his chest. Feeling his trembling; hearing his breath rush out all at once. She's breathing too, though she thinks it might soon stop. This is too good to be real, a feeling too close to safety.
"You're alive," he says, smoothing his muzzle against her head. "I knew you had to be alive."
"What else would I be?" she asks, trying for lightness, but her voice is hoarseness and rasp.
He shivers and blows air hard out of his nose. He doesn't dignify that with a remark, but his breath rattles against her skin and with it, she feels the disapproval. The months of worry, the days of uneasy wondering.
They don't speak again for several long minutes, as Gideon washes the blood and dirt from her with chilled water from the river's edge. His tongue soothes the worst of her cuts; she feels a nostalgic sort of comfort, a sense of safety that's not belonged to her for a long time. There's nothing he can do for the bones; the ribs hanging cracked beneath her skin, the cheek that throbs, the paw that hangs useless and trembling. Though there's pain, there's something above it too, a thing in her body she remembers from Thaddeus – a low electricity that seems to hum, like a streetlight burning too bright and blinking from the strength of it.
"What happened?" he asks finally, withdrawing, stained with her blood. "If you… want to tell me."
She doesn't. That's too close to admitting all the faults were hers, all her agonies derived from her own, foolish choices. Khia left Tillman's; Khia forged out into the city and killed Etch; Khia trusted Oakpaw and left the warehouse; Khia let Ru take her into the wild, left him to drown, led him into PureClan's traps. Khia thought Morningstar was broken, and she was not.
She just whispers, "We have to go. Morningstar was here."
There is the crying again. Just the name seems to trigger it. For the first time, she realises it's not her own.
Gideon looks surprised, too. Perhaps from her he expected the pitiful, the wretched.
"We know that sound," he says, instead of anything else, for which she is grateful.
They do know that sound; prenatally, instinctively, that which painted the canvas they were born upon. It's close, they look for it; Khia moves poorly, and leans against Gideon, their heads turning like bloodhounds. Up the slope they move; she is thinking, relieved, it was not me. I did not cry for Morningstar. It's not a victory, just one more kind of defeat she did not concede. She's not, instead, thinking of the thing making the sounds, and coming to it, seeing it, is almost more jarring than the events of the past hour.
Gideon leads her up the hill, stops. To see for herself she must push on, though her bones have grown roots and plant themselves into the ground.
Cradled in the hollow, a relic from another place, lie the old pale bones of a structure. It's a house, or it was – bricks are melting back into the ground, clay again, and there is no roof, no walls to hold one. All the floor is soil, and, in the fading impression left by a chimney, he sits and cries.
Blind and bloody.
Alone, and left that way. Newborn and helpless, unable to conceal that very damning thing; that, under the blood, his pelt is a rich gold. That Morningstar came this way, from here.
"A kit," Gideon says, wonderingly.
"Morningstar's," she replies, cold.
He looks at her then. "Why would she have it here – and leave it?"
Khia softens a little towards the lonely, wailing thing. To think that as she lay beaten, he cried for both of them. "Morningstar is no mother," Khia says. "I can only imagine she lacked the time to smother him."
"She's not coming back for him?" Gideon asks, venturing closer.
She shakes her head. "She's gone to fight. She said she'd come back to kill me. I don't think she's concerned with it."
"You know we can't leave it here," he says to her, noting her stiffness. Her reluctance. Knowing despite that, she feels as he does. Another kit can't be left in the dark.
"He still has a home," Gideon goes on. "Others of his kind."
Khia closes her eyes. "I don't want to go there," she says. She's avoided that very thing, after coming so far for it.
"We'll drop him and go. No one's there anyway. He'll at least have a chance."
"More chance in a den of vipers?" Khia scoffs. "A chance of what – growing up bloody and hateful?"
But it's where he belongs, they know; even if Morningstar left him to the forest, the forest is PureClan's home, and everything in it theirs. And they are not all so bad. Oakpaw wasn't, in the time she knew him.
Khia nods.
They go.
It does feel wrong to leave a baby on the edge of a battlefield; close enough to hear the thuds of bodies on the ground, even through the screams of those who look on. Closer, Khia and Gideon think. Just a bit closer. So no one will tread on him, running back this way with blood in their eyes, deafened to any wails they might hear, real or perceived.
They are brave enough to goad each other to the edge of camp. They do it without words, because Gideon's jaws are heavy with the kit's weight and words are clumsy.
Under it all, too, Khia wants to know. Is this where Cariad lived, where he learned to become one of them? There are no bones hanging from trees. The leaves are not stained with blood. Perhaps he only forgot what PureClan stood for.
This place could be any home.
Khia tells Gideon, her words dying away piece by piece as they creep closer, what she found. She debates glossing over Ru, leaving him and finding him again, but doesn't; she mentions Arrah, and Miss, feeling happy they are far from here. She has to admit that Cariad has become a warrior. Gideon doesn't seem to judge, just sympathise, because he sees the horror it wrings in her. She stops at Morningstar. She doesn't have to explain what he can see.
The kit has gone quiet. Perhaps he is cold now or afraid, so afraid, that his throat has seized with silence. Or the swaying of movement has lulled him, and he's as clueless as Khia always feels.
Gideon lays him down at the edge of a great clearing. This must be it, the fabled ancestral home, though all it looks to be is a wide, calm spot of grass in the towering forest. It's blank and absolutely deserted. Khia wonders where her mother liked to sit, where her first memory of her father was made. And maybe if she stares hard enough, she can conjure them – her mother with her own delicate shape, the short and slender legs, her father with Cariad's steady shoulders and perhaps the deep burnished colour of his pelt. But the image is thin as smoke and she has no energy to give it, to make it more solid or pretend it's even half-shy of real.
Despite her straining eyes, the camp remains empty. All that dwell here have gone to fight a war they did not expect to wage.
"Perhaps…we lie him on that hill, there," Gideon proposes, still gently hushed; as though some spectral unseen thing guards this unseeming spot of land, a metaphysical body of PureClan's own legend.
"Yes," Khia snaps, uncaring to lower to voice to quite to his level, "right where all the hawks and owls can swoop down to grab him and eat him for all our troubles."
Gideon flicks his tail, as well as he can manage it. He's willing, she thinks, to put up with her nonsense while she's in this state. But he always was, she knows, a thing she never credited him for. She feels immediately bad and softens.
"It's not the worst idea," she says: reconciliation. "We hide him with some grass, some leaves, the hawks will never know he's here."
An eerie disembodied noise rolls out over the clearing – Khia and Gideon scramble back, suddenly afraid. She pictures Morningstar clawing her way into camp, each step as hard-fought as a vertical climb. But there's no movement still, and the thought of a spectral guardian suddenly seems more likely.
Gideon swears a soldier's oath. Khia's face goes hot at the sound.
The kit at their feet starts and makes a cry, a little echo of his own. The pair hush him but, short of suffocation, there's nothing to be done to quiet him. Exchanging a glance, Khia and Gideon just back further into the underbrush, bellies to the ground, and wait.
The shadow is the first thing they see; long and swollen, uneasily jolting across the ground. They raise their eyes to her legs, her belly, her face; their first warrior, they realise. It's clear why she's not taking part in the battle, though it would not surprise Khia if she had gone anyway; the she-cat is heavily pregnant, despite the muscles under her fur that suggest she may be fit for battle. A small ginger tom darts out behind her, hissing "Sunfeather!" and glancing, uncertainly, around the unoccupied space of their camp.
The warrior, Sunfeather, is not listening to the pleas of the small tom. She covers the camp slowly, gingerly; though she's not afraid, it's clear in the brightness of her eyes.
"I know what I'm hearing," she snaps over her shoulder, and the tom all but stumbles over her words. "City soldiers aside. It's fine, I know one. Quite well."
She moves unerringly to the small corner of forest where Gideon has set down his unwitting offering.
"A kit," she says, frowning as she looks down. A convulsion ripples beneath her ribs; Sunfeather's face twists, but she makes no more noise. The tom reaches her side and looks down too, more confused than anything.
"Who would leave a kit here… for us?" he asks, reaching out a paw to touch his head. He seems to be making a short assessment – a healing warrior, Khia thinks.
Sunfeather raises her head and stares deeply into the shadows there. Her fur is all gold, shining in the light, and Khia is struck by immovable dread; it may as well be Morningstar's face staring there, and maybe it is. Hearts are supposed to beat fast in panic, Khia knows this well, but feels hers slowing as though with death. Her heart will stop itself, she thinks, before she goes through that again.
The warrior says, "Smells like blood."
Her eyes find Khia's and stay there.
"You're welcome here," is all she says. "You are hurt. We can help you, so long as the others stay fighting."
Khia bares her teeth and feels herself standing. "Like I'd ever trust such kind words from the mouth of a Clanner."
Gideon, at her side, tries to shush her.
"I understand," she says. "If you cannot trust me, perhaps trust someone you may know. He's fighting now, but if he makes it back, perhaps you three can leave here together."
"I don't know anyone of your kind-" she is starting to say, vehement and hot, but Sunfeather goes on.
"His name was Cariad. He goes by something else now."
Goddamn her, making him think of her, picturing him in this place, lulling her with the sense of safety she has always known with her brother. Making her know he had a place here.
That he was known.
"My pair," she says, gesturing to her belly. "For what it is worth."
That others – these others – knew him better than she ever did, and he them.
The indignity is rising up, dizzyingly hot, and she can no longer stand; she is folding to the ground, sealed blood cracking apart and bleeding anew, Cariad a curse and a prayer in her mouth. Khia is not conscious of falling unconscious. She only knows that, where she is going, there is darkness the colour of Cariad's fur.
Khia feels sticky. It must be the discomfort that wakes her, because there's no pain anymore, only the fuzzy, future promise of it. There had been quiet talking, but as she comes to, staring down at the strangeness of her body, it stops. Gideon is suddenly there.
"Cobwebs," he says, taking in her disjointed confusion. "And some herb mix. For infection."
"But why is it wet?" Khia asks, unable to fathom why this is the most important thing on her mind, why it confuses her so.
"I chewed it," he says, looking happy: did I help, do you feel so much better?
"They gave you some poppy seeds," he adds. "For the pain."
He steps back, and Khia groggily peers at her surrounds; a warm den, a hollow carved into some bush, smelling of milk and blood, with Sunfeather perched at the entrance. She has two friends.
Khia almost backpedals, about to dive through sticks and leaves to escape, no matter the platitudes Gideon might tempt her with, but she stops; there is the small tom, still looking ill at ease, and a bigger ginger male, rubbing one paw soothingly along the back of Morningstar's kit.
"What's going on?" Khia asks, the sound of her words long and deep. As Etch had sounded, when she came back, rat-bitten leg bandaged, from that dread thing named 'the vet'.
"Sunfeather and the medicine cats are giving us shelter," Gideon says, "until we know what's happened. If Cariad comes back."
She croaks, "Morningstar-"
Gideon touches his nose to her forehead, soft and assuring. "Morningstar thinks you're dead in a creek, Khia. If she goes looking for you it won't be in here."
Warm, and drugged, Khia says, "Do that again."
He does. Lingers.
"I promise you, you're safe," he says, into her.
Not a grandiose promise; it's simple to believe him. As if something light, ever hopeful, is rubbing off on her every time they touch. If she has to wait for hell to unfurl, out there with everyone else, it seems only right he's here with her.
"With you," she says: she always has been. And she sleeps again.
see you again in three months
