The Wild Dead (The Bannerless Saga 2)

about how he’s always causing trouble, how the others are always having to look after him. Kellan seems to do this kind of thing a lot, goes off alone, rants about things no one understands. You saw Mart when he got here, like this isn’t the first time he’s had to come fetch Kellan.”

“Yeah,” Enid agreed. “I think he might have some kind of undiagnosed anxiety disorder.”

Teeg nodded. “It seems to be why he ended up at Last House. No one else wanted to deal with him.”

“Like he’s a ruined house and not a person,” Enid said, frowning. “Last House folk knew Ella pretty well, I gather.”

“Yeah, they knew her, so who better to have access to her? To have that kind of opportunity?”

“But why? If it really was one of them, why would Kellan be out there looking for the knife? Wouldn’t one of them still have it? To hide it, if nothing else?”

“They probably didn’t think they needed to hide it, until the body turned up. With a couple of investigators on hand, no less. If we weren’t here, there’d have been no trouble at all. But now they have to cover their tracks.” It was an easy answer, and Teeg seemed keen to follow that line of thinking. “Out of them all, don’t you think Kellan’s the most likely to hurt someone, even by accident?”

“I’m not sure that follows,” Enid said. “He’s nervous, not murderous. On the other hand, with that ax, Erik looked like he might kill us. If he met Ella up near that house by chance, was startled enough, or angry enough . . .” She shrugged, leaving the implication hanging.

“Everyone around here’s got an ax or machete or knife. We have to narrow it down. But Kellan—what if he did do it, and he’s hiding behind his reputation of not being all there—”

“That’s an awful lot of very good acting for someone who seems so broken up over things.”

“We’ll just keep an eye on him, yeah?” Teeg paced on the road, a few steps back and forth, looking back at the settlement like he couldn’t wait to dive back into it. “What’s that thing you say? Put enough pressure on folk by just hanging around and asking questions, and they’ll confess everything.”

Enid got a sick feeling in her stomach. It would be so easy to accuse Kellan. He was the one who wandered away from everyone else, he was the one looking for the knife—and then what?

Say he did do it—what then?

“What’s the consequence?” Enid said.

“This sounds like a test question.”

“You’re not in training anymore. This is one investigator to another, talking it out. Say we find who did it, find the evidence, and get a clear-cut confession. Then what?”

Teeg thought a moment, looking out to the hazy coast, squinting. “Exile,” he said. “For the worst crime there is, that’s the worst thing I can think of.”

Sending them into the wild. Barring them from households, from trade. From any care at all, and leaving them to fend for themselves. For someone like Kellan, that might well be a death sentence. Enid didn’t like to think of it.

“Though technically,” Teeg added, “if Ella isn’t part of the Coast Road, do we actually have the authority to do anything about holding her killer accountable?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “If someone from the Coast Road did it.”

“Ah,” Teeg said, his tone uncertain. “But do you think we’re obligated? If one of them came into a settlement like this looking for help, would we have to give it?”

“It would be the kind thing to do, wouldn’t it?”

“But we’re not obligated. They don’t follow our rules.”

“We all came from the same place a hundred years ago. Keep that in mind.”

She glanced up at the sun; it was well past noon now. They still had a lot to do, taking care of the body, following a few more trails of information. She gestured back toward Bonavista.

“Let’s get back, take care of Ella’s body,” Enid said. “Take one more look at that wound.” Before they destroyed the only real evidence they had.

The two walked back to Bonavista, went around to the work house in back where they stored the body. It was the middle of the day, and everyone had gone inside, taken a break from work and the sun. The place seemed quiet; even the bugs and seagulls seemed to be resting, and the river’s water ran muted.

Enid drew back the cloth, once again confronted by the young face, the tangled hair, and tugged at the collar of the repaired tunic to expose the bloodless wound. It was a gash, maybe six inches long, its edges clean except for where the skin was peeling back, rotting. The flesh underneath was black, oozing. They’d definitely need to burn her this afternoon.

“It could have been anything that did that,” Teeg said, frustrated. “Chopped with an ax, slashed down with a knife. Looks like the blow came from someone about her size, maybe a little taller, striking downward.”

“She might have been cringing when it happened too. You see someone with a blade coming at you, you try to block—” She shook her head. The Haven archives had books on forensics. She’d read as much as she could, but it was never enough. Some of it was irrelevant—Coast Road investigators didn’t have the right tools to do what investigators had done, pre-Fall. Hard not to feel like she was covering old ground, and doing it blindfolded. “Used to be they could tell exactly what made a wound like this. Use microscopes and match the exact blade to the exact cut.”