Bannerless (The Bannerless Saga 1)

“But I want to see how it turns out.”

He gave her that look again, the pitying one, like she was a child and couldn’t possibly understand. “I’m not sure you do, really.”

“But . . .” She realized she didn’t have anything else to say, that she wasn’t going to convince him of anything. He brushed her cheek, smiling like he thought he’d won something. She sank into his arms because her body wanted it.

He was right, after all. What happened in Fintown was none of their business, really. Dak could do whatever he wanted, and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t accompanied him by her own choice. She could go her own way whenever she chose.

She was annoyed at herself for being so annoyed by all this. But she couldn’t seem to convince her emotions to just stop. Alas.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////

Enid and Dak packed up the next morning. She liked Fisher and thought she could learn a lot from her. She wanted to go sailing with Xander again. Count chickens with Stev. Spend a whole day watching ocean waves shush in endlessly from the horizon.

“You’re welcome back anytime,” Fisher said. They gave each other a long, heartfelt hug, right after she put handfuls of fish jerky, boiled eggs, and flatbread in Enid’s pack. Enid’s, not Dak’s. Fisher was talking to her. And Enid felt welcome. She could always come back, and she thought that yes, maybe she would.

Dak and Xander said their farewells privately, for which Enid was grateful. She’d rather not face that particular mess of emotions in her gut right now. But before that, Xander sought her out.

“I’m very glad to have met you, Enid,” he said.

She smiled. “Me too. I really liked sailing.”

“You two look out for each other, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Enid had time to run out and find Nala and Holt. They were at the way station, eating breakfast. She knocked shyly at the open door, and they invited her in.

All in a burst she said, “After you leave here, if you see Tomas, tell him I’m okay? I don’t know if he—or my household—is worried about me. But. Well.”

“I’m sure he’ll b

e glad to hear news about you,” Holt said. “Even if we don’t see him, we can pass on a message.”

“Thanks.”

“Take care of yourself,” he said.

Then, late in the morning, Enid and Dak hiked back to the main road and continued south, and inland.

After another week of walking, the Coast Road ended. Just trickled out to one southern outpost, a lone household called Desolata at the edge of baked desert, home to a briny inland sea that shrank a little more every year. Farther north got too much rain; here, there hadn’t been any rain at all in years. Somehow, the household survived.

The folk here took in Enid and Dak for stories. Dak didn’t even need to sing; they just wanted news of how the harvests were going and the number of storms that had hit the coast over the last year.

The people here produced salt. Scraped it off the flats and sent it north once a year with a trading party that brought cloth, herbs, cider, and foodstuffs they couldn’t provide for themselves, which was pretty much everything. Enid asked them why they didn’t leave. They could go north, buy into another town, go to a more prosperous household.

“This is our home,” said Vega, a sun-toughened old woman with grizzled gray hair and arthritic hands; she grinned warmly.

They didn’t have any banners hanging on the wall of their common house. Not a single one, which struck Enid as incredibly sad. They barely took care of themselves; they certainly didn’t have enough to feed another mouth. But the household had been here for decades, they said. It seemed that every few years someone wandered in, wanting to see the edge of the world, decided they liked the quiet, and stayed. The place just suited some people. Even bannerless, Desolata would always be populated.

South of that was more desert, an alkaline wasteland. Stories said there used to be cities even here, and even farther south. Paved roads and power lines and all the rest. Enid and Dak wandered along mesas and gullies and found isolated slabs of concrete, the rusted struts of a steel tower, a set of foundations half covered with sand dunes. Like everywhere else, these places lost their people, and without power or anyone maintaining them, the buildings fell and were swallowed up by drought and the expanding desert.

Vega told them she suspected there were still people farther on, scattered places where they hunted, scavenged, and maybe survived. Maybe. No one felt inclined to travel on to see. You couldn’t carry enough water to keep going that far.

After spending a couple of days at Desolata, sharing their stories in exchange for the roof, Enid and Dak turned around and started back north. Neither one said a word about continuing on into the desert or heading east to try to find Kansas.

Northward, the desert gave way to scrubby plains, then the rocky grasslands near the coast. They came back to the turnoff to Fintown. Enid considered: they could just pop in. Say hello to everyone. Find out what happened with the investigation. Dak didn’t want to. It’d be a couple more days before they reached the next town, and they were low on foodstuffs. But still he didn’t want to go.

“Not even to see Xander?” she said, her tone biting, but she didn’t really care.