#of course i already knew brokenstars birth season because yellowfangs secret was like my only other warriors book as a 9 year old

[skeptycats]

Vicky Archives #8

LEAFPOOL’S WISH - Secrets and promises

Vicky Holmes, the former editor of the Warriors series, has been doing short extract readings on Facebook since the start of the UK lockdown back in March. There’s some really cool anecdotes hidden within some of these videos, so I decided to begin penning them down for posterity and easy reference.

I won’t be transcribing filler, hedging and false starts but I’m including some amount of preamble just to be comprehensive.

#1 Into the Wild | #2 Forest of Secrets | #3 The Darkest Hour | #4 Code of the Clans | #5 Firestars’ Quest | #6 Twilight | #7 Long Shadows | #8 Leafpool’s Wish

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Do days even exist? It’s still lockdown.

Right, after my very self-indulgent and dramatic reading of the [unintelligible] Ashfur and the three kits, I’ve decided that I will catch up with some of the background to it. Leafpool’s Wish is one of the novellas that I wrote, and inevitably, when I knew that I had the chance to write these stories that filled in the gaps, I wanted to show what happened between Leafpool and Squirrelflight when Leafpool gave birth to the kits and Squirrelflight agreed to raise them as her own. 

They leave the Clan together, ThunderClan, and they go off on this little secret mission. And the kits are born, and obviously Leafpool adores them with all of her heart. She has a visitor, and the visitor is Feathertail’s ghost. Feathertail was a RiverClan cat who was Crowfeather’s first love, and she died in the Tribe of Rushing Water on the journey to find the lake.

“Feathertail!” she gasped. She scrambled to her paws and tried to press herself against the starlitshape, her tail curled over her back in delight. “I never thought I’d see you here! Have you come to see Leafpool’s kits? Aren’t they amazing?” Squirrelflight broke away and leaned down over Leafpool. Very gently, she moved the kits into view one by one. “A black she-cat and two toms, this golden tabby and this gray. I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my life.” Her voice cracked.

Feathertail’s blue eyes brimmed with love. “They are perfect. Crowfeather would be so proud.”

With a jolt, Leafpool remembered that Feathertail had been Crowfeather’s mate first. Had she come all the way from the Tribe of Endless Hunting to tell Leafpool that Crowfeather deserved to know he had become a father? As if she could tell what Leafpool was thinking, Feathertail shook her head.

“These kits are more precious than you could possibly know,” she mewed softly. “Cats will speak of them for many seasons to come. They must stay in ThunderClan, for all the Clans’ sakes, with a mother and father who can be proud of them, who can share them with their Clanmates to be raised as strong, loyal warriors.”

Leafpool opened her mouth to protest that this was impossible, her Clanmates would never accept Crowfeather as their father, and might reject her too, knowing that their medicine cat had destroyed the code. But Feathertail was looking at Squirrelflight.

“I know how much Leafpool loves these kits,” she murmured. “But you must be their mother and raise them in ThunderClan with your head held high.”

Squirrelflight stared at the starlit she-cat. “How can you do this?” she whispered. “You are asking me to lie to every cat I love.”

Feathertail ran her paw very lightly over the backs of the sleeping kits. “Because I love these kits as much as you do. They are Crowfeather’s: How could I not? I want them to have the best life, not one lived outside the Clans, in shame and exile.”

“Do you wish they were yours?” Squirrelflight whispered.

The silver cat blinked without looking up. “That was never meant to be. The destiny of these kits begins now, and you have the power to change everything, Squirrelflight. Please believe me when I say that Leafpool’s kits must stay in ThunderClan.”

She began to fade until the bark of the hollow tree could be seen behind her. Squirrelflight gazed at Leafpool, and the medicine cat saw water glistening in her sister’s eyes. “Feathertail was right,” Squirrelflight whispered. “I do love these kits, and I want them to have the best life they can— whatever lies ahead for them.” She took a deep breath. “I will raise them as mine and Brambleclaw’s, as true cats of ThunderClan.”

Leafpool closed her eyes. It is the best for my babies, she told herself. “Thank you,” she murmured.

At that moment the golden tabby wriggled and started mewling. Leafpool nudged him toward her belly but he didn’t seem interested in feeding; he just wanted to test his voice. His sister burrowed deeper into Leafpool’s fur with a squeak, while the pale gray tom raised his head, eyes still tightly shut, as if he was trying to figure out where the noise was coming from.

“I need to give them names,” Leafpool purred, marveling at the way these tiny cats already seemed so different, so strong and full of life. She studied the golden tom. His neck was ringed with thick fluff, and his mouth opened wide to reveal thorn-prick white teeth. “He looks like a lion!” she commented. “I think I’ll call him Lionkit.”

Squirrelflight nodded. “The she-cat is as dark as holly bark. Maybe Hollykit for her?”

Leafpool hesitated. My daughter is the image of Crowfeather. Shouldn’t she be named after her father, even if he never knows the truth?

Her sister was watching her closely. “Leafpool,” she mewed, as gently as the snow falling outside. “I am going to raise these kits as my own. Surely I should have a say in their names?”

Leafpool felt a pain inside her belly that was sharper than birth pangs. My precious kits! A few snowflakes drifted down through the hollow tree and settled on Lionkit’s fur. Leafpool battled the urge to cover the kits with her body, protect them from snow, rain, hail, badgers, foxes, anything that might harm one hair on their pelts. Then the scent of Feathertail drifted around her, and she knew their path had already been chosen. Whatever she felt, however many regrets the future held, the only thing that mattered was creating the best life for these three perfect babies.

Squirrelflight pressed her muzzle against Leafpool’s shoulder. “ThunderClan needs you to be their medicine cat,” she mewed. “I will love these kits as if they were my own. I already do! I will never take them from the Clan, you will see them all the time, and they will know you are my kin so they will always be close to you. Remember what Feathertail said: These kits deserve parents who can be proud of them, who can raise them among their Clanmates as fine warriors. Brambleclaw and I can do that. And the secret of their birth will die with me, I promise.”

But I am their mother! Leafpool wailed silently. In her heart, she knew Squirrelflight was right. She could not raise these kits, their mother a medicine cat, their father a WindClan warrior who seemed to have found a new mate already.

“Hollykit is a good name,” she mewed numbly.

UNDERSTANDING A MOTHER’S LOVE

Oh, I do enjoy revisiting those scenes and reading them to you. This one was obviously a critical scene because I had to make it convincing that Leafpool would let Squirrelflight raise her kits. We’d sown the scenes, I think, already for Leafpool’s absolute loyalty to being a medicine cat. After all, she’d been eloping, basically, with Crowfeather a few books ago, and had received word that badgers were coming to attack the Clan. And so she decided to come back, she said to Crowfeather ‘we can’t do this, I am the medicine cat’. And of course she arrived back just as Cinderpelt, the other medicine cat, was being killed by a badger.

So Leafpool had to live with that guilt, she almost deserted her Clan in its time of need. All the way up, during her pregnancy and in Leafpool’s Wish, we see how much the Clan needs her as the medicine cat. She doesn’t have an apprentice, she asks Brightheart to be her apprentice and Brightheart says ‘no, I’m a mother and a warrior’ and ‘I may only have half a face, but I still have a role to play’. And that’s always been a very important part of Brightheart’s identity for me.

Leafpool knows that the entire health of ThunderClan rests on her shoulders and hers alone. She also knows that she’s broken the code - medicine cats are not supposed to have mates, they’re not supposed to have children, precisely because it divides their loyalties like this. And it always leads to trouble, we only have to look as far as Yellowfang and Brokenstar to know how much danger ther is in a medicine cat that has children. Maybe this is a very unfair rule, but I didn’t design the warrior code to be fair, I designed it as far as possible to reflect the “real” life in the Clans. And the fact is that you need a medicine cat to treat all cats equally, and if they have children, inevitably their hearts will lie more with protecting their children over their Clanmates.

I decided to bring Feathertail in to convince Squirrelflight, because I felt that if Leafpool alone had said to Squirrelflight, ‘they’re Crowfeather’s kits, oops! They’re Crowfeather’s, could you raise them?’, I think Squirrelflight would have felt that she was better able to support her sister in raising them. Squirrelflight is a very generous cat, she’s very impulsive, and I’ve always tried to show that she’s not afraid to challenge the warrior code much like her father, Firestar. I made her very much in his image. So I think she would have said ‘pish to the warrior code, pish to the fact that they’ve got a WindClan father’.

Also in Leafpool’s Wish, very critically, I didn’t have time to read this as well, Leafpool and Squirrelflight visit the Moonpool above the lake and they share a dream in which Yellowfang says to Squirrelflight ‘you’re going to have to raise these kits, because you will never have kits of your own’. Now we don’t know the truth of that of course, but Yellowfang just knows that Leafpool can’t raise these kits herself, she knows firsthand the trouble that would cause.

I have sort of painted Squirrelflight into a corner, I’ve maneuvered her into a position where this could be her only chance of being a mother, do this for the Clan, do this for your sister, do this for your kits, they don’t want to live in shame, you have a mate in Brambleclaw, you’ve chosen him over Ashfur... It seems the only option that Squirrelflight raises these kits as her own. That was really important to me, that this was such a huge decision. And also, of course, by the time I wrote Leafpool’s Wish, I had done Power of Three. I knew exactly how massive this was going to be. The fact that these three kits were not Squirrelflight’s biological children. 

This filling in the gaps story, Leafpool’s Wish, had to be absolutely concrete, absolutely convincing. Convincing for me, convincing for you as the readers, and convincing for the cats themselves. These cats are very alive when I wrote their stories. Nothing was done lightly. And this, this I really felt I had to get right. 

I have to say that reading through Leafpool’s Wish... Sometimes when I read to you, and I read things I write on my own, I think ‘ooh, wow, I was on fire’. But I don’t think Leafpool’s Wish is the best I’ve ever written. I was a little bit disappointed in some of it. But I am my own harshest critic. 

I’ll read from another novella next time. I think it’s going to be Ravenpaw’s Farewell. He is me, Ravenpaw. Alright my lovelies, thank you for watching and listening. See you soon!

[darudedogestorm]

in tigerstar’s fury, tigerclaw notes that dawncloud and stumpytail were close friends as apprentices. however, stumpytail was brokenstars apprentice back when he was brokentail. dawncloud was made an apprentice a couple moons or so in to brokenstar’s leadership. 

now normally this is the part where one might say ‘lmao the erins cant keep their timeline straight’ but i think it’d be infinitely more funny if all these accidents were just cats misremembering or not giving a shit about each other. like in this instance tigerclaw’s like ‘oh they look close. guess they musta been like best friends as apprentices or whatever. i think i definitely remember seeing stumpytail hanging out with a cat as an apprentice.’

or like for dovewing’s eyes it could be that so much crazy shit is going on around the 3  (plus ivy & holly)’s lives that theyre like ‘you know what dovewings eyes might as well be fucking hot pink because frankly i do not give a shit with Hell On Earth happening in about 2 weeks’