The ball of green and gold passed through the air, scorching rays of sunlight following its path. It travelled back and forth, back and forth, pushed into the air by tiny paws. Shrieks of amusement rang, the ball never once touching the ground.

    Then, it changed its course, and the little she-cat's eyes widened as it became larger, coming straight for her. She gave a yelp of surprise before rising up, sharp kitten claws piercing the moss and grass. She tumbled backwards with the force of the mossball's flight but her quick reaction time had saved her from being nailed right in the face.

    "Rosekit, stop hogging the mossball!" cried a voice, doing its best to sound genuinely upset.

    Rosekit jumped to her paws, mossball tumbling away from her. Shaking out her soft ginger fur, she found the source of the voice.

    "That's the first time you've let me touch it since we started playing, Spiderkit!" she argued. Above them, the sun was just past its zenith, and they had been playing since just after dawn.

    "Liar!" Spiderkit puffed out her black chest, attempting to look larger.

    "Am not!" Rosekit yelled back.

    "What's going on here?" The two she-cats froze and Rosekit felt a tinge of fear filling her. A tortoiseshell stopped before them, gazing down at her kits strictly.

    "Are you stealing the mossball again, Rosekit?" the she-cat asked.

    "No, Dapplefrost," Rosekit replied. And I wasn't stealing it last time either...

    "Stonekit and I were playing and she just came up and grabbed it," Spiderkit cut in.

    "Did not!" Rosekit said indignantly. "It came straight towards me. What was I supposed to do, sit there and wait for it to hit me?"

    Spiderkit rolled her eyes, but Dapplefrost was no longer listening. The tortoiseshell queen has fixed her eyes on Stonekit.

    "Stonekit, what happened?"

    The grey tom shuffled his paws, mumbling a story that was not a story at all. Rosekit sheathed and unsheathed her claws angrily; Stonekit never picked a side.

    "Rosekit, come with me," Dapplefrost said finally. The ginger she-cat hung her head, though she had fully been expecting this outcome. She plodded after the queen into the nearest burrow entrance, wondering how long she would be confined to the nursery for this time.

    They entered the underground tunnels, weaving through their maze until they reached the nursery. Dapplefrost halted abruptly, rounding on Rosekit.

    "This is the third time this moon!" she hissed. "When will you learn to get along with your siblings?"

    Rosekit blinked twice, anger stirring in her belly. "I'm not doing anything wrong, Spiderkit's the liar!"

    "Don't talk about your littermate that way," the queen said sternly.

    "Why don't you ever tell Spiderkit that?" Rosekit huffed.

    Dapplefrost bared her fangs. "Another two days in the tunnels. Don't bother coming outside."

    The urge to wail rose up in the kit's throat, but she swallowed it down. She would not give her mother the satisfaction. Instead, she plopped herself into a nest, the golden grasses woven into it dry and prickly.

    Dapplefrost left without another word to go tend to her other two kits – Stonekit, the irritatingly neutral tom, and Spiderkit, the precious, pristine, perfect she-cat.

    "Why is it always me?" Rosekit asked the dirt walls of the nursery. As usual, she received no response. She could not remember a time when she wasn't the troublesome kit to be ashamed of. Luckily, this meant she knew very well how to occupy her time. Best of all, she only had a moon to go before her mother no longer controlled her and she was apprenticed to a worthy mentor.

    But, for now, all she could do was dream...

    //

    She had no way of knowing how much time had passed when she woke. Being confined to the burrows meant Rosekit could not see the sun and, therefore, could not possibly know whether it was night or day.

    The patter of feet past the nursery entrance caught her attention and she rushed to the corridor, almost taking the medicine cat's paws out from underneath him.

    "Careful!" Crowleaf said, voice muffled by the sweet-smelling herbs in his jaws. Then, he gave her a concerned look, noting the moss still stuck in her fur and the otherwise empty nursery. With a flick of his tail he ordered her to follow.

    They wound through the underground halls expertly, passing only Creamfoot on her way up to the surface for a hunting patrol. She, too, gave Rosekit a pitying look as she walked by. The longer the kit spent in the tunnels, the more she hated the injustice of it.

    Finally, they arrived in another larger burrow. Rosekit glanced around, noticing the side room that held Crowleaf's herb stock looked fuller than ever.

    "Why do we need so many herbs?" she asked, wrinkling her nose. The scents were mixing together in the air around her – sharp, sweet, and bitter all at the same time.

    Crowleaf dropped the leaves and flowers he held in his jaws and purred. "It's greenleaf now. Before long, leaffall will be upon us and then leafbare. We wouldn't want to be caught without herbs when illnesses begin to spring up, now would we?"

    "What's leafbare?" Rosekit asked, cocking her head.

    Crowleaf looked up briefly from sorting his herbs. "It's when all of the greenery disappears and a white, sparkling powder falls to the earth. It gets cold and dark and, sometimes, many cats get sick."

    "That doesn't sound too bad," the she-cat replied.

    The medicine cat fixed her with a blank stare.

    "Other than the cats getting sick part," she hastily added, somewhat unsettled by his golden gaze.

    He nodded, picking up a pile of purple stalks and placing them gingerly in the almost overflowing herb stock pile. Rosekit leaned forward, mouth hanging open slightly in awe at the care Crowleaf took with the Clan's herbs. Each had its own place – flowers on one side, in shades of violet, daffodil, and crimson, and leaves on the other, some flat and thin, others large and broad.

    "Now," Crowleaf said, settling back down in front of her. "Why don't you tell me what happened this time."

    Rosekit paused for a moment, replaying the events of earlier that day in her mind. It was just a stupid mossball, why did Spiderkit have to blame her for everything?

    "I was watching Spiderkit and Stonekit play with a mossball," she began, wrapping her fluffy ginger tail over her paws. "Suddenly, it came at me and I batted it away. Then, Spiderkit accused me of hogging it and Dapplefrost came running over. And then..."

    She paused, seeing Crowleaf's eyes narrow. "Well, you know the rest. Same as always."

    The medicine cat sat still, only his whiskers twitching. Then, he sighed.

    "I'll bring it up with Tallstar again," he promised. "As for your littermates... Maybe they do care about you, but they just have a funny way of showing it. Or maybe they don't know how to show it properly."

    Rosekit picked at the burrow floor with her claws. "They always push me away. They don't like me at all."

    Crowleaf shook his head. "Webclaw ignores me most of the time, but she's still my littermate. Yes, she can be mean and a little self-obsessed, but when I needed her most she was there for me. I wouldn't even be here if she hadn't once defended me from an enemy warrior."

    Rosekit mulled his words over, wondering if Spiderkit would truly ever defend her if necessary. Since the earliest days she could remember, the black she-cat had been the favourite, and allowed to do anything she wanted.

    Crowleaf, noticing her silence, flicked his tail over her ear. "No use overthinking it. Just take it one day at a time. She'll come around eventually, you'll see."

    Though Rosekit highly doubted it, she shook the though out of her head. As she did so, her eyes caught sight of a peculiar orange and yellow flower in the herb storage.

    "What's that?" she asked curiously.

    The medicine cat's whiskers twitched in amusement. "You know I can talk about herbs from dawn till dusk, right? Are you really sure you want that question answered?"

    The kit gave an energetic nod of her head, pawing at the strange flower.

    The tom sighed. "Let's get started then..."