Bannerless (The Bannerless Saga 1)

can do whatever you want to.” She shrugged. “And so can I. It’s nice here. I don’t mind staying.” But she was still angry.

He put a hand on her leg, brushed it up so it rested at her hip. Tilted, so his nose was in her hair, smelling, nuzzling. So all she would have to do was turn her face and he would kiss her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t think. Next time, I will.”

She tucked that next time away in the back of her mind to consider later. For now, she turned her face and caught his lips.

He spent that night with her.

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The rain broke the next day, and Xander took them sailing on Petula Dock’s smaller boat, a little single-mast craft, maybe twenty feet long. Antique, he said, one of the old ones with a fiberglass hull. The community took good care of it, working hard to keep it cleaned, patched, and repaired. Not big enough for real fishing, it was mostly used to patrol the harbor, mapping hazards and changes in the coastline after storms, and helping when the bigger fishing boats got in trouble. When people had time and the wind was fair, it was perfect for spending a nice morning on the water.

Enid was annoyed to discover that she liked Xander. He told jokes, many at his own expense, about how clumsy he was and how he had terrible taste in men while raising an eyebrow at Dak, who merely chuckled. He could set her at ease with a smile and was kind to her—he seemed to recognize that Dak had dragged her into this without warning her. He sympathized. As if Dak had done this before.

She liked the sailing. It was new. It felt like an adventure.

“Some people get sick from the rocking,” Dak told her. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

She hung on the side of the boat, watching the silky dark water slip past, trying to follow the patterns the waves and the wake of their passage made. She dared to reach out, dip in her fingers, and they made ripples to join with the others. The water was cold, slippery.

She didn’t get sick.

The canvas sail went up the mast, cracking and rippling in the wind. Xander worked lines and watched the fabric, turning the boom to take advantage of the wind. When it filled, the sail was a beautiful field of clean, taut white. The boat jumped with a burst of speed and raced away from shore.

Dak sprawled in the boat, arms stretched out and face turned up to the sun. He might have been napping. Xander sat in the back, keeping hold of the tiller to steer. Enid watched the water, looking for . . . anything. She’d never seen so much water, and it smelled wet and briny and rippled in colors before her eyes. Fish lived here. Whales, even. She wanted to see it all.

She asked Xander questions, which was how she learned the parts of the boat, how they fished, and what she should be looking for.

“We don’t see many whales,” he said when she asked. “But you want to look for spouts. They come to the surface and blow out air through their blowholes. It’s like a mist shooting straight up a few feet. You’ll see that before you see anything else.”

She watched until her eyes watered but didn’t see anything.

They’d brought along canteens of water and sandwiches for lunch. Xander lowered the sail and they drifted, rocking from the movement of the waves, and he told stories about being a kid on fishing boats, the strange things they pulled up sometimes, rusted artifacts of the old world like bicycle wheels and street signs crusted over with algae and barnacles. Usually they tossed such things back, but onshore was a kind of pre-Fall graveyard where they sometimes brought and stashed such items of steel and rust.

Enid might like to see it, but she asked more about the fishing, imagining spending days on the water, and maybe that was what she might like to do with her life. Find a household on the shore that would take her. A complete change from the way she grew up. Maybe that was what she wanted.

“It’s hard work, Enid,” Dak said, a laugh in his voice. “All hauling and cleaning and weighing and watching your quotas—around here they ding you hard for going over. Overfish and there’s nothing left. And it all stinks.”

“I don’t mind it,” she said. But not loud enough for him to hear.

The wind picked up in the afternoon. They’d sailed a ways down the coast by then, out of sight of the village, into sight of the next one. A couple of fishing boats came close enough for Xander to wave at the people in them. They all seemed to know one another. Soon, though, the wind slapped at the sails, which jerked taut and pulled at the boom. Xander wanted to get back before the weather turned.

By the time they docked, Enid was confident enough to help put the sail away and throw the line out to Xander when he jumped to the dock to tie up the boat. All in all, it made for a satisfying day. She’d been wearing a hat but her arms had still gotten a bit sunburned—sun reflecting off the water made it more intense. It felt like an accomplishment. Like she had something to show for the day.

Dak slapped Xander’s shoulder, gave Enid’s hand a squeeze, and announced he was going back to the house to take a nap. That left them alone.

She stared after Dak, not realizing she was doing so.

“Are you okay?” Xander asked. They were collecting their canteens and bags from the boat, getting ready to walk up the path to the houses. She wanted to see this graveyard of artifacts first.

“In what sense?” she shot back, without thinking.

His smile was gentle, and she couldn’t be angry. None of this was his fault. He was stepping as softly as he possibly could, and she was grateful.

“In the ‘Dak’ sense.”

She sighed. “He doesn’t owe me anything. I don’t need anything.”

“But wanting.”