The Wild Dead (The Bannerless Saga 2)

Enid said, “Records say the road ends here, but you go up the river valley, and who knows what all’s up there. Maybe not towns, but there’s folk living there.”

“You serious?”

“I am,” she said. “Remember what Erik said—he wasn’t surprised to see a squatter in his house. He’s seen wild folk around. She’s one of theirs. Maybe she was the one hiding out at Semperfi.”

“Then where did she get Coast Road clothes?”

“That’s just one of the questions we can ask. Meantime, we send messages. Get the word out to way stations. If someone’s missing her—if someone’s looking for her—we want to know. And we want to talk to them. She might be from the wild, but that doesn’t mean no one’s looking for her.” Before the woman died she’d been healthy, well fed, well cared for. Must’ve had a family somewhere.

“Might she have been robbed?” Teeg asked. He was learning to think dark.

“You mean, did someone kill her and take whatever she was carrying?” Enid asked. “Would help if we knew what that might have been. Of if someone around here has something valuable they didn’t a week ago.”

“We can’t exactly ransack everyone’s place looking for something that might not belong.”

“No, we can’t. But we can talk.”

“But how do you know if anyone’s lying, really? Is it instinct? Can you just tell?”

“You never really know,” she said, sounding more tired than she meant to. “That’s why you ask a lot of questions, and you ask them over and over again, until someone slips up. And you look for hard evidence.” Evidence didn’t lie. Cultivated land exceeding quota, a smear of blood on a wall. A body washed up in a river. This was too big. She wanted to go home. “There’s a few hours of daylight left. We should get started.”

“Where do we even start?”

“We start right here,” she said, nodding over at Bonavista’s main cottage, close to the road, waiting to greet visitors. The first Estuary people Enid and Teeg had met were Juni and Jess, the heads of the household. They’d been bright and welcoming, offering water and rice bread, inviting them into the shade. And telling them all about Semperfi and how awful the house was and how sorry they were that Erik had caused all this trouble. It had been awkward but understandable.

She had absolutely no idea what to expect from these next interviews.

After the excitement of discovering the body, most members of the house, except Jess and Juni, had returned to the open plot of land behind the buildings, back to work that had to be finished by nightfall. One of the household’s main activities was collecting reeds from up the river. They’d been carrying back their harvest when Enid and Teeg arrived earlier in the day, great wrapped bundles balanced on their backs. Now they were spreading the reeds out to dry, separating stalks, turning them. They wove baskets and mats with them, traded them down to the next village for what they didn’t grow or make here.

And in a sheath on their belt, each one carried a machete—a stout, foot-long sharpened blade. They used the machetes to harvest the reeds, cut away underbrush, any job too big for a knife. Totally normal, a ubiquitous tool. Everyone around here probably had one. And every single one of them could have made the cut that killed the young woman.

Juni and Jess were sitting on the front porch of the main cottage, waiting. They must have known the investigators would start with them.

Juni immediately stood. “Can I get you anything? Some water? It’s been such a long day, please tell me if you need anything.”

“Water would be fine, thanks,” Enid said. The small woman seemed grateful for the task and bustled inside. Enid could hear dishes clattering and water flowing from a pump.

Enid asked, “You’re sure you didn’t recognize the young woman?”

Jess shook his head. “No. Not at all. How did she get here? How did this happen?”

Teeg started to say something, but Enid simply said, “We’re looking into that.”

The door opened, Juni emerged, two mugs in each hand; Jess caught the door, held it for her while she distributed water. “You’ll talk to everyone, I suppose?” she asked.

“Yeah.” She and Teeg accepted their mugs. Enid drank almost all of hers. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was. Easy to miss, in the exhausting heat. Too exhausted to remember to drink, even.

Teeg asked, “Juni, you didn’t recognize the body?”

“No, I never saw her. I don’t suppose she had anything that might tell you where she’s from—”

“As a matter of fact, we think she might be from outside the Coast Road,” Enid said. “Maybe from a settlement upriver.”

“Then what was she doing here?” Jess asked, astonished. “Those people never come down this far—”

“Erik says they do,” Enid said. “That he’s seen them, maybe coming down to the shore to scavenge.”

The pair glanced at each other, a worried look passing between them, and Enid waited for the explanation.