A pang of sorrow clawed through Violetshine as she gazed at the kit, who faced them with wide eyes. He’s too young to understand, she thought.

“I had a dream,” Shadowkit went on. “I was playing with my father, in a place not far from here, and I know it was a true dream.”

Violetshine stroked her tail gently down the kit’s side, noticing the dark stripes, so like his father’s. “What makes you think so, little one?” she asked.

“I just do. We were in this big hollow, with boulders and bushes at the top and pine trees all around. Their branches hung down really low. At the bottom of the hollow there were ferns and bramble thickets, and I lived in one of them with Dovewing and Pouncekit and Lightkit. We all played moss-ball with Tigerheart.”

Violetshine exchanged a puzzled look with Berryheart. “That sounds like the ShadowClan camp.”

“But he’s never been there!” Berryheart protested.

A shiver passed through Violetshine as if she had been lapping at icy water. “One of his parents must have told him about it,” she murmured to Berryheart, but all the same, Shadowkit’s words had woken a tiny spark of hope inside her.

Suppose it was a vision?

Time crawled past until the last streaks of sunlight disappeared, far away over ShadowClan territory. Violetshine was finding it harder and harder to keep her spark of hope alive, while the cats huddled together in the gathering shadows. The first warriors of StarClan appeared in the sky, and a pale moon rose above the summit of the hill.

“Whatever happens,” Cloverfoot whispered after a while, “it will be good to go back to the ShadowClan camp. It never stopped being home, no matter what happened.”

“But ShadowClan doesn’t live there anymore,” Violetshine told her miserably. “There were so few of them left, and they didn’t have a leader, so they joined SkyClan in their new camp.”

The returning ShadowClan cats stared at her, horror in their eyes, their ears lying flat as their shoulder fur began to bristle.

“What do you mean?” Sparrowtail demanded. “No leader? What happened to Rowanstar?”

Violetshine swallowed, wishing that she didn’t have to be the bearer of such terrible news. “Rowanstar is dead,” she replied. “But before he died, he . . . he gave his nine lives back to StarClan. He didn’t think he was worthy to be a leader because he had let Darktail destroy his Clan.”

Stunned, the ShadowClan cats gazed at one another. Violetshine could see that they didn’t want to believe what she had told them.

“I didn’t know . . . that a leader could do that,” Berryheart rasped.

“No cat knew, until it happened,” Violetshine meowed. “And since then, StarClan hasn’t sent a sign to say which cat should be ShadowClan leader in Rowanclaw’s place.”