In later times, in centuries after, when the tales of Dar Oakley were known by Crows in many places, this one of how Dar Oakley nearly brought the Most Precious Thing to the Crows so that they never needed to die would be one of them. It would be said (though it wasn’t so) that the way Crows everywhere find and hide glittering and shiny things in secret places, how they’re always on the lookout for them wherever they go, the way they steal them from the People to have for themselves—all that’s because Dar Oakley lost the Most Precious Thing that he stole and made off with, and Crows ever after have been looking for it.
What would he tell Kits of what he had seen and done? There was no other Crow that he could imagine telling it all to—if she believed him, she’d laugh in delight at his misadventures, and also if she didn’t believe him. But as he made his way back to the lake and the Crow’s demesne and thought of recounting it all to her, she appeared to his inward eye to be far off, not near and listening; unable to hear or understand. He told the tale over to himself as he went, though not as he tells it now perhaps; as he told it then he was perhaps wiser in it, and braver, gave good advice, wasn’t fooled. He doesn’t remember.
He couldn’t find Kits in the winter roost, or among the Crows gathered at good feeding sites. He tried to ask after her, to learn who had seen her that day or the day before—but names were still new among the Crows, and the saying of her name brought no one to mind for most of them. Her children—or were they her children’s children?—could tell Dar Oakley nothing.
She could have been lost anytime, he knew, in the years he had been in the Other Lands—so many things could have happened. But no, he hadn’t been gone long, only so long as it took to reach that man-shaped mountain, and return again.
He saw her everywhere, of course: amid the Crows dismantling the bones of an old Dog whose corpse the People had dragged away from their dwellings; arguing over a dead Salmon by the water; walking the People’s bare fields in search of wintering grubs—none of them were her, none turned her head toward his call.
Well, she was smart and tough, she went her own way. She’d return when she liked—and mock him for fretting about her, for thinking the worst, which often he now did think when winter nights came down, and the noisy roost settled, and the snow was pink in the last light of the short sun. He felt he was without half of himself.
It was worse when spring came.
He knew by then that he would never find her or see her again—for if he could have, he would have: she would have found him. Yet still he believed that she’d appear again, any day, because of how much he needed her to. That was what did the harm, knowing the one, believing the other. He thought it would kill him, that spring, but it didn’t; and when the next spring and the next came, he knew it wouldn’t. It was no longer something terrible happening to him, it had begun rather to be something terrible that once had: and that was bad in a different way, and would never be gone.
In time the one whom only Dar Oakley now called Fox Cap really did grow old, though Dar Oakley didn’t. She took the Singer’s name for her own, not telling anyone what it was, not even Dar Oakley. Her daywise eye stayed as blue as a baby Crow’s, and with it on certain days of the year she could see what others couldn’t: the recent dead, striving to return or remain, unwilling to be gone for good. She never took a mate, no wife or husband, though (as the Singer had done) she drew to herself young ones who were unfamilied, unfriended, and from them she chose one to teach what she knew, the long songs and the knowledge of the tripartite world that Dar Oakley could not absorb. Of herself she could sing, as the Singer had once sung, I am a wave on the water:
I am a tale yet to be told
I am the eye of midsummer
I am the flash of the Trout
The Viper has heard my name
For I am the honey of the Yew
When she had lived a long life, and her settlement had grown great, with many dwellings and herds of animals and even a king in a tall whitewashed castle, with ground glass and mica in the wash to make it glitter in the low sun like the dwellings in the Other Lands, Fox Cap died.
But Dar Oakley did not.
When her death came near, Fox Cap went to a cave high in the stony mountain, where she was visited every day by one or another of the young People she had taken into her care, who brought her water and the food she began at last to refuse. Dar Oakley visited there too, sometimes, when she sat out in the sun on the rocks, as still as one herself, eyes closed but not asleep; though he wouldn’t venture into her dark dwelling.
The last time he came to where she sat, she raised her head and hand to welcome him. He settled by her. She waited for him to speak, for he had come to speak, that was obvious, and yet for a time he only flitted, and raised his head, billwise, darkwise, daywise. At last he said to her what he had never said before: that he was sorry, sorry that he had lost the Most Precious Thing that she had gone in search of, in his unwisdom and greed, and now she had to die.
“It’s all right, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea,” she said. “It’s a thing that can be sought and found, but it’s always lost again. That’s how the stories of it end. Every one. Mine too.”
“And mine,” said the Crow, and hung his head.
“It’s not good to die,” Fox Cap said. “But it’s not good to live forever, either. Grow old enough and you’ll know it.”
Her eyes lost their farseeing gaze at that, and she looked right at him and smiled—for a moment he saw the child Fox Cap that he had known. She seemed to sleep again then, and he ascended away.
The excarnation of Fox Cap was a great event among the Lake People. She was laid on a bier decorated with a hundred fluttering bits of weaving, and tall banners at each corner to draw in the death-birds (who were actually alarmed by flapping things, though they had grown accustomed to these, signals that it was time to come and do their duty). To the keening of the People and the thudding of drums, which the Crows had also to ignore, Fox Cap’s body was bared and opened. The keening turned to a great groan of awe as the black gang came in, gathering on the rocks above as they always did, first to study and converse, no matter how many of them had done this before. Then a few brave birds came down while big ones kept watch, and next others emboldened by them, settling their long feet upon the wealth, disputing, rising away and settling again at her head and breast, hard black bills striking.
After a day Dar Oakley came down too. In the cluster of Crows around the body of her, tugging at her flesh, she seemed to him the person she had been when alive and yet entirely different. He partook as the others did—there was never much to her, and in her last seasons she’d grown as lean as a Deer’s shank—but though he wished to honor her and all that had passed between them, he found he couldn’t yak and quarrel over her fats with any will.
He left them, and flew up to the ledge above, to which on a long-ago day Fox Cap had climbed to call him to carry the Singer to the Other Lands. Why was he unable to do the same for her now?
It was because with her gone he was again always and only in Ka, where there are no other lands, just this one.
But no, that wasn’t it: for in Ka a Crow or any being might eat any dead one; it was the way of things, everyone abided by it, even the dead themselves assented, if only by their patience. The one dead thing—the one palatable dead thing—that a Crow would not eat was another Crow.
If he couldn’t eat his old friend, even for her own sake, then it must be that she had become like a Crow to him. What had made her different from her own kind had finally made her one of his kind. Or perhaps—there were Crows who said so, mocking him—it was he who, in his difference from Crow-kind, had become one of hers.