After the trial, Kier had been seething.

If it had been anyone else who had crossed him so publicly, their head would be rotting on a pike; he would have done away with a trial completely, would have given the joyous order right then and there that the first cat to tear their guts out upon the dusty floor would earn his favour and watched as the whole cavern descended on the poor soul. But it wasn’t anyone else. It was Bumblebeepaw. And that presented a tremendous problem for Kier — a problem that was easy for anyone to see, because he hadn’t killed them. When it came down to it, he had promoted them — and, yes, that had had far more to do with publicly belittling Duskpaw’s incompetency, and, yes, it had been a spitting, sneering, faux-smiling lauding, met with jeering, that felt far more like threat than reward, like humiliation, like mockery — Moonblight was a Royal Guard; Sagebristle was a Royal Guard — but it had still been, inescapably, a promotion. A promotion to the upper echelons. And a promotion intended to threaten, intended to be nothing at all, was still one in fact. And the problem was that it went further than that — because he didn’t know what to do with them.

No one ever knew where they stood with Kier, in favour one day and out the next — and it was utterly intentional. He had no reason, no one had to have done anything wrong — he didn’t like anyone more or less because he didn’t like anyone very much at all to begin with; they were all equally incompetent, all equally foul. It just served one, simple purpose: to ensure their desperate, scrambling devotion continued, vested in pleasing him and blind — or openly hateful and competitive — to each other. He wanted tunnel vision, wanted the world around them to be a blur, wanted everyone else to be vague, shifting, melting things. He was the only clear thing, the only thing that mattered — to kits, to apprentices, to warriors. That was the future he wanted to foster, and that was the future he was succeeded in creating. Utter blindness to the rest of the world and complete obsession with him.

Naturally, the pitfall of such social Darwinism, of such utter dictatorship, was the creation of dangerous rivalries, of instability — because when individuals with tremendous amounts of power were at odds with each other; when each knew that whoever had the leader’s ear had safety and influence just for that week, for that day; when all that happened, it was impossible to coordinate. But that was precisely the point. If he kept them isolated and distrustful of each other, they were fanatical about him. He liked to keep them all pitted against each other, all trying to please him and inadvertently falling out with each other in the process, too obsessed to notice — it kept them controlled; it kept them uncertain of where they stood; and, most importantly, it kept them unable to stoke their own ambitions, unable to focus enough to oust him. And even more than that, it kept the radicalisation steadily ticking forward — because when all they could think to do was please him, be noticed, they inevitability pushed themselves, pushed their Clan, further and further towards violence, towards total tyranny; and then how was he to blame, when he was just purring my, what a terrific idea and taking the things they’d offered into his lap, the things they thought they’d come up with all by themselves, the things that made them such good little NightClan sweetlings? There was no amount of instability that couldn’t be solved by pure brute force — and he thrived on the jealousies, on the flattery.

Youth needed something to believe in blindly, and so he gave it to them. It was just as important to spend time on propaganda and publicity as it was to spend it on terror and policy — and he spent it. He spent it in droves. Perhaps the brilliant thing about being so young himself was that he remembered; he remembered that need. And so he fed it. Oh, he fed it. All the things designed to appease she-cats’ fiery little tempers and ease them into letting themselves be oppressed; all the things designed to reduce familial love to the bare bones of biology, something crass and loveless; all the things to inspire devotion to him instead, to supplement and replace intimacy, companionship, family with him as their only carer, their only direction — he fed it. The generation of Kier — that was what he wanted. The ones who had been born and grown up under him; the ones who would carry for the rest of their lives both the scars and the guilty, or fanatical, devotion to the one who had loomed a god in their childhoods and adolescence. Whether they ashamedly rejected his role in their childhoods once they were grown, with eyes downcast and the shame of ever having once believed eating at them, or whether they carried his banner till their deaths, one thing was inarguable: his legacy would haunt them. It would be within them. That was what he wanted. And for a sick tom like him, that went beyond mere practicality, beyond mere convenience for his tyranny now: he wanted to lie under their skin for the rest of their lives. He wanted to be inseparable from their very minds, from their very ideology. He wanted to be a sweet infection.

But where did that leave Bumblebeepaw?

All he needed from the youth was devotion. Youthful minds, if brilliant, were adored by Kier. Any others were silenced.

But where did that leave Bumblebeepaw?

It was these questions that had kept him awake, that had kept him oscillating between frantic, ranting anger, that had him halfway out of his den to order their immediate arrest two, three times a day, to his mate's annoyance — and guilty, frustrated fondness. All the Clan had heard him shouting about it to Eris, just as he had once shouted about Snowblister; all the Clan had leaned in and listened, only to scatter back and pretend to be busy when Kier came storming out. Bumblebeepaw had disobeyed him in the most tremendously public way possible, had flouted disrespect in his face, in front of Snowblister, in front of them all — but they had killed a traitor. And they had saved his daughter. From the very beginning, they had been driven, ambitious, loyal — and it was all of that, the shy, uncertain gratitude when he was so unused to anyone doing anything for him, that conflicted him so. He relied on Bumblebeepaw more than he could say. Even with what he knew of them, that great secret, he relied on them. And how could he reconcile such a complete affront to his power with the need he had for Bumblebeepaw to stay alive?

He couldn’t. But even now, as he padded over with unsettling silence from where he’d been watching the newly-named Royal Guard from the entrance to his den, he knew he was teetering dangerously close — was already resigned, though he couldn’t admit it — to something he’d never given before: forgiveness. For selfish reasons, and for a confronting, angry affection he couldn’t reconcile himself with. Watchful, boiling grey eyes never leaving Bumblebeepaw, he sat down in silence beside them, turning as he did so and wrapping his tail around his forepaws. For a long minute, he was silent, letting them wait, letting the fear spread, just gazing out at the camp in front of them. And then, finally, he spoke. “Well, my dear boy,” he began, quiet and ominously intimate (there's no one else to help you), turning his head to gaze at them with a disapproving, calmly hooded stare, “that was quite the stunt you pulled, wasn’t it? Mm? Quite the little stunt indeed.”

It was something he always did: he didn’t speak of something for days, weeks, for so long that the guilty party thought he had forgotten. And then, without prompting, he suddenly brought it up. It was unclear whether he meant the mess at the trial, or the saving of Brat; really, intertangled and inseparable from each other — and that was precisely the reason he couldn’t kill them, the reason he was forced to reprieve, because he couldn’t disentangle them, because this was both breathless gratitude and resentment — it was both. It sounded calm in two ways: because Kier had already given up, already resigned himself to forgiveness — well, this is quite the mess you've gotten yourself into — and because now would be the time to beg.