Who has taken it? Dar Oakley asked.
You are her friend, the Singer said. I have called you to help me find her, and bring her back.
Dar Oakley wanted to ask, Back from where? But he thought where would get no better answer than who. He said, When she finds her cap, she will come home on her own.
The Singer shook his head side to side in the same gesture the Crows make to say no. They want her cap, he said, but even more, they want her.
He took a thin, long, knob-ended bone, and with it began striking rhythmically on the taut skin of the pot he held, which produced a noise louder than Dar Oakley would have guessed. They want her. It seemed to Dar Oakley that he was at long last about to be told something that even Fox Cap would not reveal to him: that the People, who preyed on animals large and small, were themselves preyed on, sought for food, by beings who were their predators and no one else’s. But the Singer didn’t continue that way. His eyes closed at the striking of the bone.
If you will help, he said, I will guide you to the place, though I may not enter it.
Where is this place? Dar Oakley asked.
At that the Singer hesitated, and the dark space, the pale man, the dull fire, all changed back into what they had been before those leaves were burned, though Dar Oakley hadn’t really seen that they had ever become different to begin with; and then with the striking of the bone they became again sharper, larger, more.
Is it, Dar Oakley said, a realm?
The Singer smiled to hear the word. A realm, he said.
Whose?
Ours, when we are there.
The ceaseless beat of the bone on the skin made it harder to hear, but easier to understand. Dar Oakley said, How far?
I will go with you, the Singer said, as far as ever I can. But they will bar the way to me. You are a stranger to them; you can pass.
When?
Soon. Today. Now.
The dark and stifling place was now darker than when Dar Oakley had entered it. Day was going.
Too late, he said.
Dark is day there, the Singer said. He extended a long white hand toward Dar Oakley, a hand that was to Fox Cap’s as a Falcon’s foot was to Dar Oakley’s. It’s light enough, he said. Come.
Dar Oakley once said to me, I remember how I came to agree to do as he asked, and how he and I went out from that place and abroad. But then he said, No, what I remember is that I don’t remember, that I didn’t know. And that was the way it was and would be, as I’d learn: I could always remember how it was to go out to there, to that place and to others in that realm, but all I’d remember was how I always forgot.
What he remembers: flying over the People’s scored land and the bent backs of those who cut the golden-headed grasses growing there, and then to the margins of the lake. The Singer was there with him, traveling as fast as he did himself—how could that be? But when the Singer went out over the wrinkled gray waters, Dar Oakley could no longer see him, and he thought it must be that he had gone under those waters; and he remembered how Fox Cap had told him that the Singer’s mother was a wave on the water, so (he guessed) that would account for that, and yes, when he reached the island in the lake, he saw the Singer come dripping out of the lake and somehow stride onto the shore.
In the center of the island—Dar Oakley hadn’t noticed it before—was a sort of circle of four large stones standing upright like People. Amid those stones was a flat one, nearly swallowed up in nettles and woodbine, that the standing stones seemed to look down upon. To this stone the Singer bent. He stooped so low his chin nearly touched it, and his long arms were stretched across it, feeling along its edge for handholds. With a long cry he lifted the great stone, staggering, and moved it some ways away. Dar Oakley on a branch of an Alder watched this in—well, you couldn’t say in disbelief, because a Crow believes what he sees; he watched.
Beneath the stone was not damp earth and grubs wriggling from the light but a hole, Dar Oakley couldn’t see how deep. The Singer bent to look into the hole as though to question it, and a wind that came up out of it stirred his hair. He was lean and white as a fish. He sat down on the hole’s lip, pushed the skirts of his wrapping between his legs, and slid down in.
Come, he called to Dar Oakley, or perhaps he only looked up to where the bird sat. Dar Oakley waited to see if this command would make any sense to him. Come?
Come in, the Singer said. He went farther in. The hole was deep, and soon only his head was still visible.
I can’t go in there, Dar Oakley said. Just the thought of the close, earthy darkness made his feathers compress around him.
You can. You must.
The Singer disappeared entirely. Dar Oakley, in distress such as he hadn’t known before, dropped to the edge of the hole in the ground and put his head in. It was darker down in there than any darkness he had ever looked into, darker than his mother’s underwing, darker than the backs of his eyelids closed in the night.
Hurry, he heard the Singer say.
I can’t. I can’t see in the dark. I’m not an Owl.
There’s no dark, the Singer said. Come.
Out of the blackness the Singer’s white hand and arm appeared, and Dar Oakley thought he could see farther down the glitter of an eye. With a hopeless cry he hopped off the hole’s lip and onto the flat of the Singer’s hand, and was lowered into blindness.
It was indeed light enough out under the sky (how they had gone out under the sky is what he can’t remember now), though it didn’t seem to him to be a sky you could fly up into. Dar Oakley kept to a low flight, as though he might strike it if he went up too far. Below him the Singer crossed the moorland with great strides, leaving no path in the grass.
Then there came up over the rolling margin of the earth a dense wood, one without an end that they could see (for now the Singer seemed to be up beside him as well as down on the ground). If they kept on, there would be nothing else below them forever, a forest as dark and closed and unwelcoming as the hole in the ground where he had suffered. He hoped that it wasn’t where Fox Cap was lost, even as he knew for sure that it was; and the Singer was drawing or pressing him down to enter it.
But now when he came close to it, it wasn’t so drear. It opened up to them, sunlit and green (hadn’t it been late in the year when they set out?). The easy way to go within was clear, and they took it. There was a tall Oak there, not far from the field’s edge, all alone.
Your Oak is strong, Dar Oakley heard the Singer say, but the Birch is the wisest of the trees in this realm. The Birch knows all of life and death.
I’ll rest, Dar Oakley said, and sat a branch of the Oak. It felt to him that he rested on an outstretched hand. Down below, a Boar—no, it was not a Boar but a Pig, one of the People’s beasts, like Boars but not—looked up from snuffling in the acorns.
The beings of this realm are these, the Singer said, his voice—if it had ever been a voice—grown dim: the Birch, the Roe Deer, the Lapwing, the White Stag, the Pig, the Little Dog. Listen when they speak, but don’t answer.
Dar Oakley had never been spoken to by any of these, and never by any tree. Yet the black Pig in the mast looked up and considered him, as no beings but his own and the People ever did.
Crow, the Pig said.
Dar Oakley made no answer.
Crow, you have taken something from my mother that does not belong to you.
No, Dar Oakley said, I would not do that.
The Pig considered this. Very well, he said, but one day you will. And ever after you will regret it.
Dar Oakley did not know what regret might be; no Crow then had ever felt it. Listen but don’t answer, the Singer had said, and Dar Oakley clapped shut his bill. The Pig returned to his mast, as though he hadn’t spoken at all, but Dar Oakley felt that now he might proceed farther in. He flew from the Oak to a Birch down along the open way, and took a perch on a low branch.