Tragedy {A Warrior Cats Fanfiction}

» Chapter Thirty «

      "But it's only me and Birchpaw," she said. "We're the only ones you assigned to the patrol."

      Kestrelfur nearly cursed under her breath. This was going nowhere.

      Harestar came out of the leader's den, looking surprised to see the racket."What happened?" he asked, padding up beside her.
  
      "She's miserably failing at assigning patrols," announced Badgermask, shooting her a smug look. Kestrelfur stuck her tongue out at him.

      "Oh," said Harestar, resting his tail on her shoulders—from which she had learned is a comforting sign in GladeClan. "I bet it's hard to assign patrols to cats you've never seen before. That's alright; I'll take care of the patrols. You can sleep in if you like."

      Kestrelfur gladly obliged, thrilled at the thought of sleeping in.

--

"Today we will do running drills," said their trainer, Echoshine. He turned to Kestrelfur. "Do you do these in CloudClan?"

      Kestrelfur shook her head. She didn't like the word running in what he said. "No. We do climbing drills, as in tree climbing, but not running drills. And usually it's an apprentice thing," she added. She looked around at the other cats. Everyone was a warrior; no apprentices.

      "Well," said Echoshine, "here in GladeClan we must make sure we're always able to run at top speed in order to hunt, so we must practice running. I bet it's like your climbing drills in CloudClan, but running instead of tree climbing."

      Kestrelfur sighed. She was going to fail. She had already made a fool of herself at hunting and assigning patrols, and now she had something else to look dumb at.

      As if reading her mind, Badgermask shouted, "Does Kestrelfur really need to practice this? I mean, we all know she's going to fail, just like she's done with everything else."

      Kestrelfur gave Badgermask a death glare, to which he returned blankly. She couldn't tell if he was hiding his emotions for some reason or if he was actually spooked by her glare.

      Echoshine ignored Bagermask's comment, though he had clearly heard it. "For this exercise we will just do a simple run. Go as fast as you can from these red flowers to those blue flowers." He gestured over to a field of blue flowers. From where Kestrelfur was standing it looked far.

      "Let's send off two at a time," he said. "Let's do Tallfire and Moorfoot."

      The two warriors lined up side by side in the field of red flowers, keeping their eyes at the end where the blue flowers were.

      "Get ready. Go!" Echoshine announced.

      The two warriors took off so fast they looked like a blur against the green grass. The flowers waved as they went by and whatever prey was in their path scampered away. Kestrelfur was amazed by their speed; they were even faster than Waspstar.

      I'm slow in CloudClan, and these cats are much faster than any cat in CloudClan, thought Kestrelfur. I'm going to look as though I've never ran in my life.

      The warrior named Tallfire pulled slightly ahead of Moorfoot, heading straight for the blue flowers, which were getting closer by the second. It seemed inevitable that he was going to win when Moorfoot started pumping his legs even faster, shooting past Tallfire and running through the blue flowers.

      Kestrelfur half-expected Echoshine to go over to them and give them a huge congratulations, but all he said was, "You two went very fast."