“So there will be no more battles now?” Dar Oakley asked her.
“Oh there will be. Not with those, maybe. There are greater ones coming from far off, stronger even than those ones. That boy knows it.”
“But all of you together, you’ll be strong. Who could push you out?”
She held up a hand toward where the sun was rising over the lake. It made him think of the Singer, raising his hand: as though it could by itself draw from the world the thing he held it out to. “They aren’t our kind,” she said, “and they’ll come from where we have never been. Their fighters are many, many more than all our fighters, and they will kill all our fighters. There’s no way to stop them, not for long. It may be many seasons before they come, but they’ll come.” She smiled at her old friend. “You’ll be well fed, Crow.”
She turned away then, looking out over the water, but not as though she sought something. Dar Oakley waited.
“There is a cauldron,” she said at last, not to him. “It can be set on the boil, and slain fighters can be put in, who come out alive and well, all their cut-off limbs put on them again.”
“What,” Dar Oakley asked, “is a cauldron?”
“It lies over the sea,” she said, “and we can’t have it.”
“What is the sea?”
“I don’t know.”
The People had been a long time at work in their old home place, digging up their dead: now winter was near.
“Better than a cauldron,” she said, “is a thing such that, if you have it, you would never die at all. Not ever.”
“What sort of a thing would do that? What would it be?”
She didn’t answer. She rose, restless. He saw that she had a piece of an Oak branch: the one the boy had carried, he guessed. “They know where it is,” she said. “The ones we brought home. When we gathered them from where their bones and flesh had been cast—in the fields, left in the forests, in the roadways underfoot—it woke them, and they were grateful. In the night while we rested on the way, they talked about it. I heard them.”
“About this thing.”
“A precious thing,” she said. “The most precious thing.”
Dar Oakley felt a strange tug at his mind and heart. What she said made no sense to him, not here. But he felt that if she kept talking he would soon be here no longer, but where she was, in Ymr.
“It’s a long way to go to find it,” she said. “Or short. Short and hard. It lies far to the North, I think. We’ll have to find the right path, and keep to it. We’ll go neither to the right hand nor the left. Unless the right way is wrong.”
It was how People lived in the world: for them the world was made of paths, and turns in those paths; the past was where the path had led them from, the future was where it went on to. The turns and forks of paths were where their lives were lived, and were named for their two hands.
“We?” he said.
“Come winter,” she said. “That night, the night when the light side of the year changes to the dark. That’s when there’s a path that opens for us.”
“But I don’t want this thing,” Dar Oakley said. “It’s not for me. Is it? Not for Crows.”
“No. I guess not.”
Dar Oakley thought of his own precious things, which once he had shown her, in the rocks beneath the thornbush. “Why should I go? Why do you want me to?”
She pulled tighter her mantle, but didn’t cease shivering. They were naked as hatchlings their whole lives, People were, without pelt or plumage, and it left them in harm’s way in the dark side of the year. You could fear for them then, if you cared to think about it.
“Because,” she said, “I’m afraid.”
Nothing was stranger to Crows than this: how People thought that only by their own actions would the seasons be made to turn, the days grow warm after winter and the green things grow up that they planted. They thought the sun was a person like them, and did what it pleased; on the longest of winter nights, they must fire a great pile of dry brush on a hilltop to cause the sun to wake and rise rather than remaining below the daywise edge of the world. The Crows knew the world had no edge, because they flew, and could see the steady arising of it up from the far-off, tree by hill, and then beneath them and away—but the People didn’t know it and wouldn’t have believed the Crows if the Crows had told them.
But People knew the day on which the season of the long sun changed into the season of the short sun; they knew when the moon would brighten and when it would darken, and for how long: and about those things they were never wrong.
“I have a journey to take,” Dar Oakley said to Kits. “I don’t know how long. I’m sure I’ll return.”
“You might or you might not,” said Kits.
The winter roost was thickening at evening with Crows young and old. The noise was terrific. Somewhere in the black moving mass were Dar Oakley and Kits’s young, full-grown now.
“When I do return,” Dar Oakley said, “maybe—I don’t know, but it might be that many seasons will have passed.”
“Oh?” Kits said, not as puzzled as Dar Oakley thought she would be. Maybe she hadn’t understood him. He hardly understood himself. “And where are you going, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea? And can I not come with you, I and others? Not good to be alone.”
Kits’s teasing eye was on him. How could he say, Because the place I go to may not exist—may not exist even if I go there? “I’m going with one of the People,” he said. “The one called With the Fox Cap, far billwise, in search of something.”
“What something?”
“She wants my company. I don’t know why.”
“What something?”
“Something precious, that People need or want.” He spoke softly, so as not to be heard amid the jabber. “It’s to keep People from ever dying. They say.”
Crows are never still, if they aren’t asleep, or cold in deep winter: but Kits was still then.
“If you’re gone long enough,” she said at last, “I might be here when you come back, and I might not.”
“I know.”
“Lots of reasons.”
“I know,” he said. It was a plain fact, but it seemed suddenly dreadful. “Maybe you can come. Would you really?”
She still regarded him, though she seemed, he couldn’t say why he felt so, to have ceased to see him. “I’ve traveled,” she said.
Which was likely to be all the answer he was to get.
“For life,” he said, a little desperately. “You and I.”
“Life is short, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea,” she said, and turned away, and lifted her great beautiful wings in that slow beat that was like no one else’s, and went away toward where other Crows were calling.
“It belongs to us, this thing,” Fox Cap said to him, stepping along a track invisible to Dar Oakley, marking her steps with her long staff as though it led and she followed. “Not to them.”
“Because they don’t need it,” Dar Oakley said. “They’re already dead.”
“They are more than dead, these ones,” she said. Her eyes were straight ahead. He rode her shoulder; her mantle was stained with his droppings. They went always billwise, North, which he always knew, and he could point her that way: to the sea, though neither of them knew that. “They were great and brave, and when they lived they had lives far longer than ours, and they’ve been so long beyond life that they’ve grown out of being dead, and have a new life. It may be they never died at all.”