"How can you not be excited?" Exulting as if she hadn't been made an apprentice four sunrises ago, Elderpaw jumped around. "We're finally going to get Twilightwing's kits back."

With a disgruntled snort, Reedpaw shifted her paws under her body. "Unless MoonClan refuses to give them up," the light brown tabby she-cat remarked. A cutting undertone resonated in her voice.

Elderpaw stopped prancing around and glared indignantly at her littermate. "They won't," she clarified, her cream-grey tabby and white fur bristling slightly. "It was a foregone conclusion from the start that they'd come back before they reached their sixth moon. Hailstar will surely be able to stick to this simple agreement!"

Meanwhile, Lakepaw sat next to them. The heated conversation between his two younger littermates passed him by like unimportant background noise. He was no less interested in these two kits. Especially since they were born at an extremely inopportune time.

He, Reedpaw and Elderpaw, as well as the three kits of Patternleaf, were four moons old when there was an attack on the camp. Rogues invaded in the middle of the night, and Rainsplash, Patternleaf and the kits were escorted out of the camp to a safe place.

Actually, Lakepaw would have thought that Twilightwing should have come along too. She was about to give birth to her kits and was therefore particularly at risk in the camp. But she never followed.

When the rogue disappeared before dawn, defeated, Lakepaw knew why. Twilightwing was dead. Weakness, too much blood loss were the reasons he had picked up.

As if they had been protected by StarClan, her kits had miraculously survived and without further ado, Rainsplash and Patternleaf were given the task of taking them to MoonClan as quickly as possible.

It all happened so quickly that Lakepaw was only able to take a quick glance at the two kits. He hadn't memorised what they looked like, what sex they were or what their names were. To be honest, he didn't even care.

He was far too busy trying to come to terms with the death of his father. Many other cats had died or disappeared that night, including the former deputy Tendrilbranch and the old medicine cat Waterhaze, but none of these losses hit Lakepaw as hard as that of Cherryfang.

Cherryfang was different from Rainsplash. When she was around her kits, Rainsplash's face was contorted with loathing. She hated her kits — her own kits — so much that Patternleaf had to partially nurse them. It had taken a long time to persuade Rainsplash to take care of her own kits, as a single queen couldn't possibly provide six kits with enough milk.

Since his birth, Lakepaw hadn't once experienced the love of a mother, even though at least Patternleaf was doing her best. Therefore, it wasn't Rainsplash who had named her kits, as was usually the case, but Cherryfang. Lakepaw wasn't particularly upset about this, though. He was given the name 'Lake' because his dark grey, almost black tabby fur was reminiscent of the surface of a lake on a gloomy, tempestuous day. He was quite happy with this name. Surely Rainsplash would have given him a worse one.

Now Lakepaw was finally out of the nursery and no longer had to share a den with Rainsplash. At least only until he would become a warrior, but then he would make sure to have a nest far away from her.

"I wonder what they'll be like?" Elderpaw's thoughtful meow brought Lakepaw back to reality from his thoughts. "Do you think they knew they were from RoseClan beforepaw?"

Lakepaw had nothing but a snide scoff at that. "The first thing they saw in their lives was the MoonClan camp, so they're MoonClan cats. At least until they prove they're different from them."

It was true, he was interested in meeting these kits. However, that didn't mean that he would necessarily like them. For one thing, MoonClan was highly peculiar with its almost exaggerated belief in StarClan. Who was to say that the kits hadn't adopted their views?

For another, the number one topic of conversation for the last two moons had been none other than Twilightwing's kits. No matter where Lakepaw had turned his ears, the cats had only ever talked about them as if they were famous. After a while, he found this so incredibly annoying that he had begun to develop a hatred for these kits. They weren't even anything special, so there was no reason to praise them so highly.

At that moment, Reedpaw's ears twitched and she turned her head towards the Birchtunnel. "I think they're coming back!" she realised and hurried to sit down properly.

Quite late, Lakepaw wanted to say because sunset had long since passed, but refrained from doing so. The distance between the two camps was incredibly long, and walking it with two moons old kits was undoubtedly double the challenge.

Palestar appeared first. She didn't look the least bit exhausted, for which Lakepaw secretly admired her. But maybe she was just pretending.

Then the two kits followed, swaying, eyes half-closed, as if they weren't really aware of their surroundings.

"They look like they're about to fall asleep standing up," Reedpaw whispered, amused.

"Hmm." Lakepaw didn't bother to give a proper answer. Instead, he was busy taking a closer look at the kits. They were both she-kits. One of them, the slightly larger one, had tabby fur that had a colour like a mixture of red and golden. A boring look that couldn't even be improved by any spots or other features.

The other kit looked neither ordinary nor monochrome. Lakepaw had to look away and back several times to make sure the light wasn't playing tricks on him. For she truly had the strangest fur pattern he had ever seen. Even Fruittail, with her perfectly separated black and ginger tabby face, suddenly looked completely normal next to her.

Lakepaw didn't even know what term to use to describe the kit. In any case, she had white paws and a white chest pelt — like himself — and a white muzzle and blaze. All legs, apart from the left black foreleg, were light ginger tabby. The half of the face seen from the kit's left was black, the other half was also light ginger striped, although the two colours were not perfectly separated in the middle. The red part was rather larger.

Up to this point, she looked like a normal calico cat, until looking at the rest of her body. Her flank and back were mottled black, red and cream, just like it was typical for tortoiseshell cats. There were no large spots on the left flank, but there were on the right. Here, a large, light ginger tabby patch covered almost the entire front half of the flank. It was connected to the tabby front leg and extended over the right half of the back of the head to the ginger part of the face.

In short, she looked as if she consisted of several cats put together.

Palestar was babbling something, but it went in one ear and out the other. Only when someone poked him in the flank did Lakepaw whirl around, snarling. "What's—"

Mottlepaw's amber eyes glowed at him. "Palestar wants us to show Amberkit and Larkkit around the camp tomorrow," the dark reddish-brown mottled she-cat explained with her typical snooty undertone.

So those are their names. Lakepaw leaned past Mottlepaw and caught another glimpse of the two kits who had returned.

Then Palestar ended the meeting and the cats finally flocked to their dens. Without turning round again, Lakepaw padded straight to his nest, where he curled up in the fern and put his tail over his muzzle.

One by one, his sisters and the other three apprentices — Mottlepaw, Mushroompaw and Birchpaw — followed. Soft, excited meows sounded, whereupon Lakepaw flattened his ears with a muffled growl. Be quiet!

As if his thoughts had been telepathically transmitted to the other cats, they soon fell into silence.

"Are you still awake?" Reedpaw whispered after a few moments.

At first, Lakepaw tried to pretend he hadn't heard her, but when Reedpaw began to shake him, he jerked his head up in annoyance. "What do you want?" he snapped. "Don't you realise that I want to sleep?"

Reedpaw was not intimidated by his biting, direct tone. She moved even closer to Lakepaw and let her front paws hang down into his hollow. "Tell me, have you noticed Larkkit's eyes?"

"No, which of the two is that supposed to be?"

"That weird speckled one," Reedpaw replied.

Lakepaw listened up. So Reedpaw also thought that she looked very strange. "Right, and what's so exciting about Larkkit's eyes?" he enquired.

It rustled. "Go to sleep," Elderpaw grumbled, lying with her back to them.

Reedpaw flinched briefly and secretly gave her an annoyed look. "One of her eyes is still completely blue, although the other one already seems to be turning green!" she explained eagerly, her voice almost seeming to crack. "That can't be normal!"

"Maybe Larkkit isn't developing properly," Lakepaw pondered as he curled up again. "And maybe she won't be able to go through any real training as a result. That's fine by me. I'm not particularly keen on sharing the camp with MoonClan cats now."

A soft crunching of moss sounded as Reedpaw retreated to her own nest. "So you agree that they're not real RoseClan kits?" She sounded satisfied. "Good, because true RoseClan cats are only those who dedicate their entire lives to this Clan."