The Wild Dead (The Bannerless Saga 2)

He raised an eyebrow. “Without that sort of trouble, at least. Still plenty of the usual kind.”

“Oh?” she asked.

“Folk getting into each other’s business. You know.”

She chuckled, thinking that Mart might end up giving her the best account of the region of them all.

“I don’t know what the others told you, but it really doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about that Semperfi house. The next storm, that thing’ll slide into the river, nothing anyone can say about it.”

Enid agreed. “So you didn’t know about the request for an investigation. You have an opinion about that?”

“Or about investigators in general?” Teeg added softly, and the man looked sharply at him.

“Don’t know that the problem needed investigators at all. But Erik . . . he’s stubborn.” Mart led them to the back of the house. “Have to warn you, the others won’t be happy to see you. Might be twenty years on, but they’ll remember.”

The other three

members of the household were on the back porch, which was set up as a workspace. Screened in, open to the air, the space was cooler than the rest of the house. Kellan sat on a chair. A man knelt by him, holding his hand, murmuring to him. A woman stood holding a large mug, maybe of water. Either Kellan had just drunk something or she was trying to get him to.

The woman would be Neeve, the one who’d cut out her implant twenty years ago. No one would ever know, looking at her now. She wore long sleeves; the scar wasn’t visible.

From the doorway, Mart made a curt announcement. “I think I found out what’s got into Kellan.” Stepping aside, he gestured to Enid and Teeg. The two in their brown uniforms filled the doorway. Even spattered with mud and worn from travel, those uniforms intimidated.

The way those on the porch reacted, the investigators might have walked in swinging axes. Wasn’t just shock on their faces as they drew back; it was fear. Enid smiled calmly and turned to murmur to Teeg to maybe put the staff away, but he’d already shifted it behind his shoulder, partly out of sight.

“Hola,” she said. “I’m Enid, this is Teeg—”

She was about to ask for their names, but froze when she got a good look at the woman, Neeve.

She looked just like Juni.

A more tired, wary version of her, but still the same: round face, hair in a braid instead of up in a bun, streaked with gray where Juni’s wasn’t. Frowning and quiet where Juni would be smiling. Nothing in any of the notes Enid had made prior to coming here had mentioned that Juni and the woman at Last House were sisters, much less twins. Yet they clearly were.

“They’re Neeve and Telman,” Mart said, nodding at the woman, then the man. “You met Kellan already.”

Telman—near forty and balding, with brown skin and a long face—looked back and forth between Neeve and the investigators. He would jump in to protect her, if he thought he needed to, Enid suspected. They were wary. They had every right to be. This, not the eager helpfulness they’d seen so far, was the reception investigators usually got.

Enid studied the woman again, getting over the initial surprise of her appearance. Forty or so, with ruddy, sunburned skin, Neeve stood with her gaze downcast, clutching the mug to her chest. She stood like she was bracing for something terrible.

And why shouldn’t she? The old investigation had been about her. But this wasn’t about her. Enid turned to the man in the chair.

“Kellan. You had a shock. How are you doing?”

The others watched him carefully; they didn’t seem to know what to expect from him, either. Kellan straightened, took a deep, unsteady breath, and scrubbed his face with his hands. “There’s a body,” he said.

“Yes,” Enid said. “We’re talking to everyone. You said you didn’t recognize her.”

“No, no, I didn’t, no.” He shook his head quickly, nervously. Looked at the others, almost pleading, as if he wanted them to confirm.

Mart said softly, “Any idea who it was?”

“She was a young woman, maybe twenty. Brown hair, about five feet tall or so. We think she’s from outside. Not Coast Road.”

A silence stretched on, fraught and interesting. The folk of Last House seemed to hold themselves unnaturally still, afraid to speak.

Finally, Neeve said softly, anxiously, “Can we go look? I . . . I’d like to look.”

“You think you might know her?” Teeg said, leaning in, maybe a little too excited.