Froststar's Destiny

Chapter Seven

The next few days were highly uneventful and Frostpaw found herself wasting away during the day. It seemed to have suddenly crashed on her that she didn't have a mentor, and since Stonestar never left his den at all, he never seemed to get down to giving her a new one. Skyfeather tried to train her a little, and it actually worked for a little while, but he was slightly too soft with her, plus after a while even his awesome fighting skills couldn't rival hers anymore. That was kind of annoying and Frostpaw was sick of that. She didn't know how she was so good at fighting but it was kind of sickening, watching the other warriors have to give up their wins to her, a brand new apprentice. It had been satisfying for a while, but a while only.

"Hey, you still in there?"

Frostpaw looked up as Stormpaw peered inside the apprentice den. "Yeah, I kind of am," Frostpaw admitted wryly. "I mean, no cat's training me from day-to-day anymore. I admit, Skyfeather is a good hunting teacher, but he's not my official mentor so he still gets sent on dozens of patrols. Today I woke at sunrise and he had already gone on the dawn patrol. I feel like that Skyfeather is working himself to death - what would he want an apprentice for, anyway?"

Stormpaw faced Frostpaw with an amused glow in her eyes. "That's not why he's putting in so much effort for you, Frostpaw."

Frostpaw just frowned back. What, then? He really wanted to show he could be her mentor so he could be deputy later on? She'd never pictured Skyfeather as an ambitious cat. He'd always simply seemed to hang around at the side, not really a main character in anyone's story, just one of those background warriors who would never play up. 

Stormpaw shook her head despairingly. "You are so blur, Frostpaw." She sighed, lifting her tail high. "Squirreltail is going to continue training you. Her face wounds have sufficiently healed and she is technically your mentor."

Frostpaw's jaw dropped. "You have to be kidding me."

Stormpaw frowned. "Of course I'm not. Why do you think Stonestar never assigned you a new mentor?"

"Because he's too busy moping in his den?" Frostpaw asked wryly.

"No, it's because you don't need one. You already have Squirreltail, and she's a pretty good mentor, right?" Stormpaw asked gently.

"To some extent," Frostpaw muttered. Stormpaw smiled.

Due to all that, Frostpaw found herself doing hunting training with Squirreltail. Frostpaw didn't really pick up hunting naturally the way she did with fighting. She'd always had a flair for fighting but she was just a regular apprentice on the hunting side, struggling to perfect the hunter's crouch like everyone else. And, somehow, the scars on her face seemed to make Squirreltail even more irritable than usual, and she had little patience to spend on Frostpaw supposedly keeping her butt lower and placing her paws more gently so she wouldn't scare her prey away.

"You're a natural at fighting, so what about hunting?" Squirreltail growled impatiently after four failed attempts. Usually mentors were a lot kinder and more encouraging, but all she had to give Frostpaw was temper.

Frostpaw growled back, "Well, maybe, you useless lump of fur, if you actually taught me something and corrected me on something, I might actually be walking the path to learning how to catch prey?"

"Didn't Skyfeather teach you anything?" Squirreltail growled.

"He taught me all I know right now!" Frostpaw fired back.

"And that week I spent trying to teach you how to hunt?" Squirreltail glowered.

"Useless! You yelled at me every hour of the day!" Frostpaw objected, moving into a battle crouch, ready to spring at any moment.