"Probably closer to camp."  He keeps glancing at Tigerstar and the tip of his tail is twitching.

"Great, lead the way."

He does.

Cam is not sure exactly how well cats can hear, so he waits a while before saying, "So it kind of looks like either Tigerstar orchestrated all his criminal enterprise to look thoroughly coincidental and innocent to a form of evidence-checking he cannot possibly have anticipated, or it's just that you kind of read into things which would be understandable since he does have a genuine prejudice against pet-backround cats. Mind, I'm not saying it's not the first thing, it's possible, but it would be sort of weird. Lots of things are weird here but not all of them."

". . . What does it mean to 'read into things'."

"...sorry, it means to interpret them as having more depth and meaning than they necessarily do."

"So - you think I . . . made it all up, to myself, that he did all the awful things I said he did.  Or that it's the other way and he's much more clever than I already thought."

"There's, uh, some possible middle ground? He might have some doublethink going on, like he had some impure motives but wasn't really thinking about them. But he didn't make any moves that were apparent, viewed in conjuration, as malfeasance. I can show you if you want, I took pictures of the conjurations."

"Yes please."

Cam shows Fireheart the video composites and the stills.

"That . . . isn't what I would have expected," Fireheart says of the Sunningrocks video.

"No?"

"It does . . . look . . . a bit like an accident."

"It's possible he staged it like that in case of observers who were there at the time? But - yeah, it does look that way. I'm not saying you should be his friend or anything, he doesn't seem to like you, and I will certainly be very concerned if you die under remotely weird circumstances while he's in the same general area..."

"Ravenpaw did end up seeing part of it - if it was an accident is there a reason why he would still try to kill Ravenpaw - "

"I asked about the hunting mission to Snakerocks and apparently he was fine and caught an adder, and was also supervised from a ways off and medicine cats can treat snakebites. Were there other attempts?"

"We overheard him trying to convince some cats that Ravenpaw was a traitor, which eventually probably would have gotten him killed or driven out."

"What other cats were these?"

"We heard him talking to Darkstripe and Longtail about it, maybe Dustpelt as well; there was other less-concrete evidence about the rest of the Clan.  Suspicious glares and things directed at him."

"Would any of them be likely to admit where they heard what?"

"Dustpelt at least, I think.  I could ask around.  - Also I should mention that there were almost no cats in ThunderClan who weren't distrustful of or angry at me at first for having been born a kittypet.  Only Bluestar, Whitestorm, Graystripe, and Ravenpaw weren't - were nice to me right from the beginning.  So it's not that Tigerstar was special in treating me poorly and so I made things up about him."

"Yeah, I was more imagining that the prejudice led to him making some judgment calls in your disfavor than that it led to you making things up."

"Oh.  Well, it still didn't happen with any other cat."

Cam nods.

"It's - strange.  I was willing to believe there was a chance he'd reached the limit of his ambition, but I don't know what to think of the possibility that . . . there might not have been that much of it in the first place.  Enough to kill cats.  Maybe."