“No,” the old man said.
The crow advanced a step. “If you don’t let me, then I’d have to hurt you indirectly. Your children and grandchildren, your home…”
“If I let you kill me,” the old man said, “They have you. They’ll use you against us. Better to destroy you or turn you back against him.”
“A canoe crosses the same river, day in, day out. Back and forth,” the crow said.
“Yes. But sooner or later, it has to stop. Each journey gets harder, more meaningful.”
The crow nodded.
It attacked, drawing a knife. It drew back, ready to throw the blade, then flung the weapon.
Stepping forward to complete the throw, it stepped onto something.
Gunpowder lit, going up in a moment. A symbol appearing in a puff of smoke, burned into the ground.
But the blade had left the crow’s hand a moment before.
The old man stared as the blade went well over his head, and through the wall of a building.
There was a distant roar, a scream, both from the same young man.
The crow bowed his head, folding his hands in front of him.
“I won’t ask what you just did,” the old man said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Don’t speak,” the old man said, his voice pained. “Take what I give you, and use it against them.”
“I don’t think you have anything strong enough to send me back,” the crow said. “Even if you did, they have my name, they have sealed me. I could stop them, make them pay, but when I was done, the next one could call me, and I’d be bound to act.”
The old man nodded.
The screams were joined by others.
Anxiety was writ large over the old man’s face and body.
“Then take what I give you, use it against them. Let the ones who bound you live, but never let them call you without paying a price.”
The crow smiled. “Some will be strong. I don’t think there’s much you could give me that would let me bend the rules like that, father.”
The old man frowned, eyes closing. “Don’t call me father, wretched thing.”
The old man produced a knife, and cut his own throat. Not a clean cut, in the end, but a savage one, where strands and matter caught on the knife, and the blade turned a sharp angle at one large vein.
The crow watched impassively as the old man dropped to both knees, then carefully eased himself down to lie beside the circle.
Blood flowed out, and covered the lines that had been burned into the ground.
The crow drank of the power. All that the old man was capable of. Nine more years of a practitioner’s life, distilled into a kind of strength.
The crow was no longer a child, but a man.
It walked, instead of flying, to the town it had flown from. Calmly, quietly, it put things in motion for those who had summoned it to find ignoble ends. Two men of the cloth found with their manhood deep inside cattle.
This took more power than the crow should have used. It took years to recover. Years where the crow studied the people and watched from the periphery. It was the sort of power that it couldn’t afford to use, and diminished it forever from that moment on.
But it had almost come to resemble a person, in the bargain.
It started almost from the beginning, building its power. A piece of paper signed to the wrong person, with the property and value going to the failure of the family, not the harder worker. A meaningful gift, with all the value attached, handed over to someone else, to forge a friendship between a scoundrel and a doctor. The doctor took to using laudanum, and his patients experienced agony for it.
The crow traveled, more patient, more slow. Working in three different places at a time, traveling from one to the other, so time might pass and events might unfold in their own time.
Twice, he was called. Twice, he went.
The first to call him lost a book that he had borrowed. It would be missed by both parties.
The second found her son and heir to her power stolen away by another woman, her one-time husband’s new wife.
Neither suspected.
Searching out the lovelost boy and girl, with their ill-advised relationship, the girl now harboring anger and resentment in her heart, he found both missing.
Looking for them, following the threads that tied everything to everything else, forming the fabric of the world, he found them in an old wooden house.
An old woman, one of the crow’s people, stirred a pot. Her daughter, yet to even approach adulthood, swept.
The lovelost couple were bound, sitting at the table.
“Have a seat,” the old woman offered.
The crow did.
She served a stew. None of the foods the invaders had brought with them. A pleasant change. She, her daughter, and the crow all ate.
The bound couple remained too terrified and perhaps too stubborn to even speak.
The crow was first to finish, and took the offer of a second bowl. He stared at the dolls that sat on the shelf as he ate. Each as bright as a lantern.
They each finished at the same time, the daughter dutifully picking up the bowls and carrying them outside to wash. A chain trailed from her ankle to the hearth, long enough that she could reach the trough where water had collected, to wash each of the wooden bowls.
The old woman spoke in Algonquin, “Why did you come, spirit?”
“Them.”
“Do you have a claim to them?”
“Not a strong one. I merely want them.”
“So do I,” she said. “I need strength.”
“We all do,” he replied.
He watched her, and he could see the connections between her and the area, between her and the stones, and the trees. She was brighter than any living soul the crow had met, and so set in her ways that she was almost a part of the grand scheme of it all. Here, at least.
“You have time,” he told her.
“When you have the time available to you,” she answered, “The moment becomes more important than the year.”
“I’ll remember that piece of wisdom,” he replied.
“How badly do you want them?” she asked. “What can you offer me?”
“I suspect we’re both immortal. I can promise friendship, and a promise to visit now and again.”
“I could promise the same.”
“You don’t travel. I have been told that any time one of them summons me, I am to take something they value. I’ll bring you one of these things as a gift, each time I visit, and show you the rest I have collected in the meantime. Each, shown or given, comes with a story.”
She didn’t smile.
But she looked at the fire and sighed. “Tell me it will hurt them.”
“It will hurt them,” he said. “You’ll see in time.”
“Very well.”