“No,” Dar Oakley said. There was a murmur around him—the Servitors, who were never far, had heard Kits too, and were gathering, solicitous.
“Yes, I’m dying,” she said, “and all along I have been, like every other Crow.” She lifted her wings, as though to show how ragged they were, and they were. “I’ll die. Not now, not this morning or this season, but not never.”
“I’ve died,” Dar Oakley said. “I’m here still.”
“It’s not the same,” she said. “One day like me you’ll begin to die for good, no matter how long it takes before you do. You’ll live so long you’ll think your life’s forever, and you’ll call it forever, but it’s not. You’ll see.”
“I don’t care,” he said. He was beside her, with her, and he felt as deathless as any youth. “It’s enough.”
“Can you have enough life?” she said.
“You can’t have more.” He came to groom her, took the feathers of her head in his bill one by one. “Not more than all.”
But she said to him as he tended her: What if you could? What if there was a way that a Crow could have more, could grow backward, start again? Because there wasn’t just one of the stones; there had to be more, she knew it, she didn’t know how many, maybe one for each of the Small People, because they seemed to live so long; she’d seen and been cursed at by the same ones, the same horrid little ones, for time out of mind, in every place she’d run to. One stone had certainly been given away: the one she stole. So if he went to them, he might be able to get another. And with another, a Crow might begin again.
“How do you know that?” Dar Oakley asked. “How do you know there’s another?”
“Because you touched one yourself.”
“Did I?”
“Just say you’ll do it. When spring comes, you’ll go and find them, and do this. I’ll tell you how. I’ll tell you all I know.”
It had begun to snow: they hadn’t noticed. Winter, come early so far North.
“Remember when we courted?” he said. “You used to demand that I do impossible things. Knock a Dog on the forehead and get away. Take food from an Eagle’s nest. Then you’d make fun of me when I refused, or failed.”
Of course she remembered; he saw it in her stance. “This isn’t impossible,” she said. “It’s not. It’s what I want.”
He knew how it would be: he would go into Ymr, and the farther in he went, the farther there would be to go. It was never the same place twice, and the Thing wouldn’t be the same thing, nor how to get it. It was a stone once, but now it’s a coat like People wear or it’s a bone belonging to no known being or it’s nothing at all though it talks to you and tells you lies. Once there you have to get it, can’t refuse it or spurn it or you’ll never get out or be free of it, which is all you want. And however it all comes out, it isn’t what you thought, or what you asked for.
He had thought the story was theirs, People’s, that he was in it by chance, somehow impelled into it by reasons not his, that it was a thing torn out of Ymr that shouldn’t be in Ka at all. But Kits was right, it was he who’d been in it, not People, however much they’d wanted to be and he had not. It was his story, and the stories about the story were his too. He was girdled in story, trapped in story, and the only way out was to go through. Perhaps if he did so, if he went on through to the other side, she would be healed and he done with Ymr and death for good. And he could simply be alive for some number of seasons with her in the plain world.
He lifted his eyes. A great Snowy Owl far off cruised the air, white against the white sky. The plain dangers, they stayed the same and could be learned; any smart Crow could make his way through them. Take care of a mate, raise young, live long. Pretty long. It would have been enough. It would be enough.
“All right. I’ll go,” he said.
“You will?”
“For life, Kits,” he said. “You and me. Life, long or short.”
The first thing he’d have to do, he thought, was to learn their language, so he could begin to bargain somehow with them. Before that first thing, though, he’d have to come close enough to hear them speak, without being driven off or killed. And before that he’d have to find them.
Kits believed that the Small People had pursued her in hatred wherever she went, she and whatever group of People nomads she and her flock followed. But Dar Oakley was pretty sure her thievery had drawn her into a demesne or neighborhood of Ymr, where Small People had always been, and—hardheaded Crow that she was—she’d wandered there not knowing what or where it was: Ymr, which wasn’t far from anywhere in Ka, as near to her as she was to herself. Now she was always partly in Ymr, as People were: as he was too.
When he did reach their land (and for all the things he can remember, in greater detail than it seems possible so small a head could hold, he can’t remember how he did), it seemed not different from the country round about it. The sun came up when and where it should, and went down again the same; beings that don’t speak in Ka—Snails and Moles and Snakes—were speechless there, too. But as he caught and lost sight of Small People on the mountain paths and along rushing streams, hairy-faced males and unsmiling females, he was less certain that he knew where he was.
They wore clothes: that was one thing. They wore broad-brimmed hats on their heads and coats on their backs. Dar Oakley knew what clothes were; he recalled them from his times among People who wore such items, unlike the People hereabouts, who didn’t.
And he could understand—almost—their speech. They’d stay far from him without seeming to flee or hide, catch him looking and turn their faces away to mutter with others, or make themselves scarce somehow, like a spotted Toad vanishing on a pile of dead leaves. But soon he could hear them as clearly as though he were near them, and in the language they spoke to one another he felt the language of People he’d first known returning to his throat from far away.
Mostly they talked about the weather.
Winter had come now, and as far as Dar Oakley could perceive—staying at a careful distance—they had no fire, and unlike Crows, People can’t live through winter without it. What he’d later learn would make him doubt that the Small Ugly People were People at alclass="underline" when the cold deepened, they went down under the ground into caves and holes, and there, in piles and heaps, covered in the mats and rugs they wove, they slept.
Dar Oakley spent that first winter alone, for whether this was Ka or Ymr or someplace neither of these, there were no Crows here that he ever heard. He heard Ravens, and Wolves, but saw none. Just the white mountains black with great firs, the waterfalls frozen in mid-fall. He feared starving; he thought often of quitting. He’d just found his first good meal in days when he saw that the Small People were coming forth, like Bears or Woodchucks, slow and weak and blinking in the sun, their hair and beards grown long enough almost to clothe them.
So there they were, and here he was, and now he must ask them to give him a thing for which they’d ceaselessly pursued the Crow who’d stolen it. It was impossible—he’d told her so.
It turned out to be simple. The Small People offered to give it to him. Actually, they offered to give it to her, because that’s who they thought Dar Oakley was: Kits. No more than any People could they tell one Crow from another.
What did they want in return?
In the summer forest Dar Oakley on a low limb above a brook discoursed with an old, old, bearded being, his face shaded by his ragged hat, white beard spreading over his breast and shoulders like a Snowy Owl’s neck plumage. Of all the Small People, he was one who didn’t vanish when Dar Oakley came close and called, and Dar Oakley somehow knew his speech. It was like the soft gurgle and clatter of the brook he paddled his big pale feet in, but it was speech, and clear to Dar Oakley.