Pay no attention to the Pig, he heard. Remain with me. If you go farther, you will regret it.
Who said that? No one and nothing was near. Only the Birch he sat in. Dar Oakley was here alone: the Singer was gone. The forest waited in stillness to see what he would do, go or stay.
He called.
He called in his own tongue, not in the language in which he and the Singer had spoken, nor the language of the Pig and the Birch. A plain call of inquiry that, where he had been born, would very soon have brought a response; he would have heard Who are you? We’re right here! Go away! What do you see? Any of that. But Dar Oakley heard nothing, only felt the forest shudder, as though no such sound had ever been made there.
Then down on the ground in the low undergrowth he saw a flash of red: a Fox slipping off, looking back to see or hear him, then vanishing.
He went that way. At once the forest changed, or what he could see of it changed. Something had happened to his sight: everything he looked at in every direction seemed larger and closer to him than it should, distinct and looming; but things farther off faded quickly into irresolution and vagueness, startling him as he came closer by suddenly turning into what they were. As now: he caught up to that Fox, now walking upright on its hind legs, and he knew who that was; and not far beyond, in a clearing where sunlight fell slantwise and dusty, why, it was a whole crowd of People, clear and vivid as anything; how could he not have seen them from the Birch where he’d sat? More than a Crow could count, they sat on seats they had placed there for themselves. Their big shaggy heads turned this way and that, grinning, cheeks like blushed haws. In their great hands they held pots of drink. And more of them came in sight, grinning and hale, bringing in burdens, armloads of their golden grasses, carriers full of things, foods, small animals, orange apples.
Only none of them made a sound. No being anywhere, not in the trees or the sky or on the forest floor, made a sound Dar Oakley could hear.
Fox Cap—now herself complete—sat herself down among them. Her cap was on her head, for (just as he had thought she would) she’d got it back from them. Those around her petted her and with their fingers they fed her this and that, a tiny wan thing amid their overbearing fatness.
So there was nothing to fear, was there? Her own kind, come to live in the greenwood, wasn’t that all right? If they’d stolen her cap, they’d given it to her again. It was all right.
Dar Oakley called in his own voice: It’s all right.
The People seemed to hear that, and looked around themselves, troubled; one took hold of Fox Cap in a grip that seemed not friendly. A little black Dog that had been prancing there before them turned and sought the source of that call, head snapping this way and that, teeth bared. Fox Cap sought too, looking up, rising from her seat though the others held her.
Dar Oakley flew nearer and called a third time into the silence, the universal everyday everywhere call, the Ka.
Remarkable. The many, many coming into the clearing halted at the sound, or turned to walk away again and vanished. There hadn’t really been that many after all; only the trees were thick. Ka: Those in the seats grew pale and perplexed, they lost flesh, withered—even the furs they were wrapped in faded and grew thin. Fox Cap, though, darkened, or brightened; she thickened, grew distinct, and saw him.
“Dar of the Oak by the Lea!” she cried, and he heard.
“With the Fox Cap!” he cried back to her, dodging over the heads of the People, stalling and hovering. “Come! Come away!”
At the real speaking of these names the People got to their feet, alarmed, staring and staggering this way and that like a flock of sparrows. Some had weapons, and struck out feebly with them at nothing or at one another. Fox Cap pushed them away from herself with one hand while holding her cap on her head with the other, dodging the People’s hands that reached to snatch it or hold her back.
As loud as he could, Dar Oakley shrieked at them, Get, all you! I’ll fight you! I’m so mad now! This is mine! Calls that a Crow would cry at another Crow in a fight; he knew no other ones. They seemed to cause the People pain. Fox Cap broke from them and ran out into the forest beyond, chased by the little black Dog.
Later Dar Oakley would remember that moment best, always with a blow to his breast but laughing, too: how that foolish young one had run not out but in, not toward but away from where he and the Singer had entered the forest. From branch to branch he went, in this forest that hated him, keeping her in sight, whether she appeared as Fox or Fox Cap, calling for her to stop. At last she did, and they fled together, girl and bird. The three black Dogs kept on in pursuit of her—Dar Oakley can’t remember when the one had become three, but they were now a lot larger too, heads as big as Horses’ heads and full of great teeth. They could do no harm to him—he could fly—and Fox Cap dealt with them as she did with bad Dogs in her home place: she’d eye them and kneel as though to pick up a stone to throw, and the cowardly Dogs would vanish, for a while. None of the pale People had followed, he couldn’t think why—soon they were all left behind, Dogs and People, and he and she walked on alone.
They walked a long time. Sometimes she wanted to hurry toward home; she’d ask him about the Singer and the People at the settlement, or tell him of all the things she’d been given that she’d bring back there, things that if he saw them he’d envy and want for his own treasure, though she showed him none of them. At other times she wandered aimlessly, as though she meant to stay in this realm forever. From a high hill she showed him settlements of People that went on a great way, far farther than his new short sight could reach. Roe Deer wandered there; one raised its sleek head to look their way.
It was turning winter again. He had ceased to be able to tell which direction they went in, couldn’t tell daywise from darkwise, the red sun appearing through the trunks at dawn where it shouldn’t be and seeming to stare at him amused. When had he last eaten?
“You must remember all this,” she said to him. “You must remember it, so that you can remind me if I forget.”
“All right,” he said, feeling it all run away from him even as he promised, so that he would have to re-create it, beast by tree, long after.
Then they were no longer there.
“Here we are,” she said, arms outstretched. The forest thinned; it began to cease, not as though they came out of it but as though it marched backward away from them as they stood still.
Here was the lake and the lake island. The rising land beyond.
“What realm was that?” Dar Oakley asked. “Was it . . .”
“The Happy Valley,” she said. She looked pale and hungry now, as the ones who sat around her had looked when Dar Oakley had called his calclass="underline" filled with some distracted longing. But here wasn’t there.
“Why,” he asked, “did we come back by the way we did? When it wasn’t the way I went in?”
She was looking far off, hand shading her eyes. “You never come out the way you went in,” she said. “And if you go back in again, you never go by the same way.”
“Oh?”
“Because,” she said, “you never do go back anywhere. You only go on.”
She set off with her long stride into the grass. Dar Oakley flew to the old Oak from where he had first seen People, which—well, well!—stood there, right there. He called a farewell to her, thinking he might never see her again, though that couldn’t be so. Ka! he called. Just that. But as he said it—Ka!—the world around altered: the lake, the moor, the mountain heights, the running girl raising her hand without looking back, all flew away from one another, becoming a vastness that yet was sharper, far sharper, than before.