Bannerless (The Bannerless Saga 1)

She’d managed a quick look at his feet; his shoes seemed larger and wider than the steps she’d found outside the shed. He probably wasn’t the one who’d run away. Probably.

Arbor explained that he’d recruited Sero to help him dig new latrine pits the afternoon of the day he died. When he didn’t show up on time, Arbor went to find him, first checking the house, then knocking on the front doors of the shed, then opening them and finding the body.

“So the shed doors were closed?” Enid asked. “Did Sero normally close the doors when he worked?”

She let Arbor think a moment, his head bent as he searched memory. “No,” he finally said, brow furrowed. “Not in this heat; he’d leave them open to let in air. I know I’ve seen him working there with the doors open.”

Then someone had closed the doors before running away from the body. “Did you touch the body?” she asked.

“Oh no! No. I—I didn’t have to.” His gazed flickered nervously to the table, then back to her. “There was so much blood, and flies. He was dead; I didn’t have to go near him. I didn’t even go inside, really.”

“So you didn’t get blood on your hands? On your shoes, maybe?”

“I don’t think so. No, I didn’t.”

“You ran to get help. Where did you go?”

“To Newhome household, to find Tull.”

That meant up the hill to the main part of town. Not back behind the shed. And he didn’t have blood on his hands, confirming that he hadn’t been the one to make that smear of blood. Someone else had been there first and closed the doors before fleeing, slapping up against the wall.

“What else did you see?” Enid asked.

He described just what Enid would have expected: sprawled body, a pool of blood. Nothing else out of the ordinary. He had fetched Tull, the medic, who went to check the body, then called on the committee. Ariana first, who’d ordered the body taken to her cellar. The scene must have looked like it required an investigation, and she must have been eager to pass that responsibility along. Well, this was why they had investigators, wasn’t it? At least they were starting to build a timeline of what had happened. Arbor had found the body early afternoon, four days ago.

“Sero was usually reliable, then?” Enid asked, calmly and without accusation, going over the same information, searching for telltale gaps. “He agreed to do a job and he’d be there?”

“Well, yes. Mostly. I was ready to be angry at him if he’d forgotten what we agreed on.”

“But he hadn’t forgotten.”

“No.” Arbor’s hands rested in his lap. “Was there something else I should have done?”

“No, that’s fine. You didn’t see anything else in the shed? Any sign of commotion, anything knocked over? Any kind of weapon?”

The man wouldn’t meet her gaze. “Can’t say I looked around enough to see anything. Just the body. The blood.”

“Did you notice anything odd that morning?” Enid pressed gently, hoping to jog a memory. He seemed keen to scrub his mind clean of any such recollection. “Anyone else going to talk to Sero, anything out of the ordinary?”

Arbor, short and stout, bearded and balding despite being a relatively young man in his late twenties, said, “No one ever went there. I’m not sure what you think anyone’s going to tell you.”

She expected such evasions and offered only calm. “I’m only trying to be thorough. Any scrap of information, even if it doesn’t seem important, might help me understand what happened. It seems odd that Sero would just fall, doesn’t it? With the floor that clear?”

“Maybe he died then fell. Heart attack. Something like that.”

“Maybe,” she agreed, and wondered if an autopsy would tell them if there’d been some other cause. Maybe the medic would be up for performing an autopsy. “Are you sure no one else ever went there?”

Arbor bit his lip, looked away. “If anyone went there, it was likely to talk to him about a job. Find out what he was working on, who he was doing jobs for. Maybe someone else will know.”

“That’s a good idea. I’ll ask around. Let me know if you think of anything else, yeah?”

She started to get up from the kitchen table when Arbor re

ached after her.

“He was bannerless, you know,” he said. “That’s why he was alone. That’s why he didn’t get along with anyone. Why no one liked him.”

The one did not follow the other, in Enid’s experience. If Sero was the product of an unauthorized pregnancy, that was on his parents, not him. He’d have been adopted out, taken care of. No one ought to hold it against him; ideally no one even ought to know about it.