The Wild Dead (The Bannerless Saga 2)

“He was scared,” Mart said. “He didn’t say anything because he was scared.”

“He lied!” Teeg countered.

Neeve had folded in on herself, eyes shut tight, as if holding in tears. Telman put his arm around her shoulders, and Mart moved to stand between the investigators and his folk. Protecting them. Enid must have been glaring harder than she thought.

“I’m not angry,” she said, trying to make it sound so. “But you really need to tell us what you know, and you need to be honest. How do you know her? Where is she from? We’re only trying to learn what happened to her.”

Neeve said, “You know there are folk living up the river. Up in the wild.”

Enid nodded. “Yeah. There’s more people living out past the roads than some folk realize.”

Neeve nodded. “A few of them come down the river to trade sometimes. They bring food, beef, and leather—they hunt feral cattle. And some deer. Bring some pretty good salvage. Still lots of unpicked ruins up north. She’s . . . she’s one of them. She came down a couple of times a year, with some of the others.”

“You traded the cloth with them, then? What she’s wearing?”

“Traded the finished clothes. They don’t do a lot of weaving, I guess.” Her hands clutched at each other; she kept looking back at the body, her face puckering with unshed tears.

That answered that question, and more easily than Enid had expected. “No, a lot of those folk are nomadic. They don’t have big looms.”

“Neither do we. We trade with Everlast for cloth. But I sew.”

Enid smiled kindly. “Everyone’s got something to trade, that’s what makes it all work. Do you have any idea how she might have ended up in your marsh with her throat cut?”

Mart swore under his breath. Unhappy with her bluntness, maybe.

This required bluntness.

“No,” Neeve said softly. “She was a quiet girl. Her name was Ella.”

The body had a name now, and that felt like a small victory.

“Everyone around here knows you trade with outside folk,” Teeg said. “Did you try to hide it from them? Keep it a secret?”

Enid thought she knew where he was going with this and waited for the answer.

Neeve’s hand closed on her collar. “Well, no. I mean, we didn’t keep it secret, but we didn’t . . . it isn’t like they came to the market in Everlast, yeah? They needed things; it felt like helping them to trade. No one much comes up to our end of the road.”

“But you had extra to trade with?” Teeg continued. “Surplus?”

Surplus—that was a whole other accusation in itself. If Last House had tried to hide this, what else might they be hiding? Then again, maybe they’d just been keeping to themselves.

“A few things a couple of times a year doesn’t usually affect quotas,” Enid said. It wasn’t like Last House was growing crops that would feed the entire settlement.

“Exactly,” Mart said. “It’s just odds and ends mostly. Kellan’s salvage and the like. There’s no quota on salvage.”

“Are . . . are you going to find out who did this?” Neeve asked.

“We’ll try,” Enid said. “Any information you have—anything you can tell us that might help—even if you don’t think it’s important, I need to hear it.”

“It was probably one of them that killed her, wasn’t it?” Mart said. “One of the other wild folk. Must have killed her and the body washed down from one of their camps. It couldn’t have happened here.”

That would be easy to assume . . . and it would absolve Enid and Teeg of any official need to discover what happened. “I don’t know,” Enid said.

“She wanted to come to the Coast Road,” Neeve said. “At least, she talked about it sometimes. She and I did. I tried . . . I knew she’d be safer here.” Her gaze turned to Enid, to the uniform, but only for a moment. “I thought she was just about to decide to come live with us. We invited her, and . . .” She shrugged and finally looked away, eyes shut.

It wasn’t unheard of. Especially after a year of bad storms or drought, when food wasn’t as easy to come by. If someone came stumbling into a town asking for help, people were supposed to help, no matter what. The young woman, Ella, had already established a relationship with Last House folk. Wouldn’t have been out of the question to take that a step further. Rare, but not impossible.

“This invitation, it was recent?” Enid asked.