The Wild Dead (The Bannerless Saga 2)

“I want to find who killed Ella,” Enid said. “You knew her. Do you know who else knew her, who might have been angry with her for some reason? Or how she might have gotten into danger? Had she done anything odd recently? Had she been scared?” Ella might have wanted to live at Last House if someone out in the wild was hurting her. Someone like . . . Hawk? Might all his grief be for show?

He’d started shaking his head before she finished speaking. “I told her not to come here, not by herself. I didn’t want her to come here anymore.”

Might he have done something to stop her? Might any of the other folk who lived in the hills?

“Where do you come from?” Enid asked.

Hawk’s look darkened. What tears there’d been now stopped. “Why you want to know?”

“I just mean: Do you have family? A village? Other people who knew Ella, who I can talk to?”

“Why?”

She’d known this wasn’t going to be easy, and reminded herself to be patient. “I want to find out what happened to her, and to do that I need to talk to people. Find out who saw her last, who knows where she might have been right before she died, and why.”

“Nobody knows anything,” he said, picking at the hem of his shirt. “She’s dead and that’s it.”

He turned nervous—no longer just angry and despondent over the loss of Ella, but nervous—and looked over his shoulder like he was about to bolt. But he didn’t; he lingered, however much he didn’t want to deal with Enid. Ella was dead. So what was keeping him here?

“What are you looking for?” Enid asked. “It’s why you’re hanging around. It’s not just Ella—there’s something else.”

His head went up, suspicious. Surprised that she would ask such a thing, maybe.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m like you, I want to know what happened. Any little detail might help.”

Nodding, he settled. “She . . . Ella . . . she had a thing with her. Did you find it?”

“A thing? What thing?”

“You’da noticed it if you found it.”

“We didn’t find anything unusual.”

Flustered, he said, “A knife, she should have had a knife.”

The back of Enid’s neck tickled, and she tilted her head, curious. Carefully she said, “We didn’t find a knife, I’m sorry.”

“But she had it, about this long”—he held his hands about a foot apart—“and thin, with a bone handle with a flower—”

Enid studied the knife on his belt, the polished antler handle sticking out of the sheath. “Like yours?”

“No. Better than mine. One of your knives, not one of ours.”

“That the only reason you came looking for her? To get that knife back?”

He didn’t answer. Which meant he had expected to come here and find her alive.

“Can I show you something?” She gestured to her pouch, hesitated. “I don’t have a weapon. Not like that.” She didn’t imagine he found her smile all that comforting. “It belonged to her; I think you’ll want it.” Finally, he nodded, and she drew Ella’s knitted kerchief from her pouch. The way Hawk’s face screwed up, tears ready to spill over again, he clearly recognized it. Holding it out like a prize, she finally lured him forward. He grabbed it out of her hand, balled it up in his grip, pressed it to his face.

“Smells dead,” he said.

“She’d been in the water for a while.”

“Someone did this to her. Got to be one of you Road people. She came down here, then she got killed. It had to be one of you all.”

“We don’t know that she was killed here. We think she might have been killed somewhere else, then washed in on the river.”

“How do you know that?”