“Likely,” Widsith said. “Though neither young nor much like a girl anymore. Hath she taken a fancy to thee, young fisherboy?” He smirked like the old sailor he had just been.
“I do see it…”
His mind journeyed deeper into the Ravine.
“There is much at the northern end,” he added. “Have you been there?”
“I have, but not directly, and not on a horse,” Widsith said.
Reynard closed his eyes tight to see the high cliffs, and between them, heaves of pale, broken ice surrounding a winding path, connected by great arches draped with icicles the size of trees, in some places holding up scaly roofs. At least seven ancient castles clustered at the northern end, all in serious disrepair, remnants of past wars between opponents he could neither see, remember, nor understand. Most of those castles had been empty for a very long time—perhaps a thousand years, if that meant anything here. No Eater seemed compelled to do the work necessary to restore or repair them—since none wished to live there.
And none of their original inhabitants were still alive.
Along the entire Ravine stretched many arches, bridges to nowhere, carrying no traffic but hiding, under their parapets, little cubbies, small caves, compartments and apartments—some still filled, others having stood empty for long centuries. And some holes were filled by things neither living nor properly dead!
“The monsters Maeve talked about,” he said. “Have they come here?”
“Likely,” Widsith said.
“Many?”
The Pilgrim shrugged.
“This is an awful place,” Reynard said, eyes tight shut.
“Continue,” Widsith urged.
“I sleep! I dream!”
“But thou wilt go on.”
Valdis, young by the standards of other Eaters, had watched this place for centuries, but many mysteries remained. Some things had never been clearly explained to her.
“Eaters share!” Reynard said, dismayed. “They convene and spread their own lives!”
“Ofttimes Guldreth hath hinted at such, but seldom let me see. Thou art truly favored!”
“I see not how this be favor. How can such a being favor a mortal?” Reynard shook his head and stopped speaking. The pictures and stories came too fast. He squatted before the Pilgrim like a lost child, tears streaming down his cheeks.
The horses watched both with glazed eyes, as if about to fall asleep.
“That is a mystery I have no answer to,” Widsith said.
“You should not have brought me here!” Reynard moaned. “My soul is fretted! I have no protection, no purpose!”
Widsith sat beside him with a sigh of both impatience and sympathy. “I have faith thy thoughts and worries shall resolve.”
Reynard looked left, eyes still closed, and saw a corridor of memories, all dark, as if shrouded in night and despair. There was a permeating sense of loss all around the Ravine. So many still figures here and there, covered in ice or leaves, hiding in cubbies, frozen in sadness! They frightened him. Eaters, though in a way immortal, could sometimes simply lose interest in their necessary routines. And if they did that, within a few months or years, their sea-foam bodies, called by some meerschaum, along with their glassy skins, crumpled and fell in like old mummies. For an Eater, this was only a partial sort of death. A disembodied wisp remained for another few years and, sometimes, would pause people on the island’s roads and ask difficult, puzzling questions, frightening without means or intent—for such wisps were no threat, and in time, paradoxes and puzzles unsolved, themselves faded to night air and moonlight.
He shivered at the thought of meeting such a wisp. Widsith gripped his shoulder to stop the shivers from becoming convulsions.
In a way less marvelous than their lives and purpose, though no less explicable, Eaters did with water what insects do with silk. Over thousands of years, they had filled the Ravine with their homes, like sculptures in an age of ice, showing sometimes creativity, sometimes necessity, depending on their origins and natures.
“Are we invited in?” Widsith asked, caution foremost. “ ’Twould not do to trespass.”
Reynard opened his eyes. “I do not know,” he said. “But I feel her presence.”
Widsith patted Reynard’s shoulder. “This is but a small part of thy purpose. Lead on,” the Pilgrim said.
“I am here—and I am there!” Reynard whispered. He paid no attention to noises behind them. Widsith looked away from the Ravine, into the rocks and woods, away from the ice and cold, and saw men and women of their own kind gathering. Many had come from Zodiako, some wounded and on crutches, and others had come from farms deeper in the forests and meadows, all part of the trade that allowed humans to survive on this coast—to survive and support the Eaters.
“Eaters must eat as well,” the Pilgrim said, then quietly explained to Reynard the process. Mortal farmers and hunters traditionally approached the Ravine, during daylight, once each month, moving silently to refill the troughs and heap plates with the sorts of foods Eaters could tolerate, even desire—organ meats, wild animals that ate nuts and grass, dense black breads, cow’s or woman’s milk mixed with deer’s or pig’s blood. And on occasion, human blood itself—drained from someone recently dead. There was none such on this occasion. Those who died of violence were abhorrent to Eaters.
Widsith nodded to an old farmer and a hunter, bow slung over his shoulder and arrows in his quiver. Reynard viewed with some intensity small mountain animals, marmots and squirrels and rabbits, carried on a sled. The villagers sang a somber prayer of summoning. The farmers and townsfolk barely glanced at them, so intent were they on laying out their offerings.
“So few, this time,” Widsith said.
Exodus
VALDIS ROUSED from a numb dullness. Sleep for an Eater was never simple or easy. Her rest was hardly rest at all, in fact, and sleep very nearly impossible, fired as both were with vivid flashes from the lives of others—key moments of love and violence, disappointment and revenge, betrayal and injury, but also discovery and knowledge—a strange and broken sampling of humanity’s best and worst.
How long Valdis had been on the isle, she did not know, did not remember—so crowded was her memory with the lives and times of others. But there had once been awful tides and mountainous waves, and a battered longship had been caught in the island’s gyre, and she could still recall, in a dim and childish way, the soaked and agonized faces of a man and a woman. They must have been her mother and father. Their ten-year-old daughter had been injured by a storm-loosed sail and would soon die, and they had convinced a carl to take them north, at risk of being caught in the legendary tides, in hopes of finding this misty shore and leaving her here to die, if need be… Or not to die, but to be found. Given freely to be raised by those of the island, for it was said there were people here who never sickened, never died, but benefited from the charms of witches and magicians and devils—or were themselves witches, magicians, and devils.
And so those Norse voyagers had left their daughter on a misted shore, and she had not died. She had been found. A one-time mother had somehow recovered from centuries past enough kindness to lift up the limp girl, whose time had run dreadfully low, down to minutes or less—and had named her Valdis, which some said meant Dead Girl, and others said, meant Saved from Valiant Death.
The one-time mother had summoned another, much older than she, who had vast stores of life, to donate time and something resembling health to the girl, in exchange for her fealty.
Her dwelling was no sort of home for a living woman, made as it was of sticks and leaves pressed into banks of crusted ice. But for an Eater, it was enough. Her skin did not require softness nor any sort of luxury. Her hair kept itself clean without attention, as did her clothes, which were woven of threads secreted by the large, jointed, and heavily armored creatures that dined on the trees above the Ravine. She required no warmth, and could in fact wander through snow and ice without freezing her bare feet or blanching arms and fingers that were already pale. Hel had designed Eaters to be free of such concerns, that they might focus on all they saw around them—generally at night, for they seldom went out by day.