The Wild Dead (The Bannerless Saga 2)

“Enid, look at this.” Teeg had walked a circuit around the body. She hoped he studied the ground as he did so, surveying every inch for anything that might have fallen from her when she washed in. Enid joined him, slogging in the mud.

“There,” he said, hushed, pointing.

Enid stepped closer to the body, crouched down beside it. The dead woman’s brown skin had turned sallow from wet and decay. Eyes half-closed, clouded. Full lips and high cheekbones in a round face. Fingers slender and curling.

But Teeg was pointing at her neck and chest, and the streak of blood down the front of her tunic, the wide brown stain still visible even after what seemed like a good deal of time in the water. Carefully, gently—wondering, as she always did, at this need to be gentle with people who were dead, who were long past needing such kindness—Enid pressed against the shoulder, turning the body over so it lay flat on its back. This revealed a gash, across the woman’s throat and arcing down her chest.

This woman hadn’t drowned. She’d bled to death.

The collar of her tunic was ripped from the cut, which started at the right side of her neck and ended halfway down her rib cage. The cut itself was deep, exposing muscle, even part of her collarbone and a glimpse of rib. It tore into her windpipe as well as the veins and arteries around it. She might have suffocated or even choked to death before she bled out. A real autopsy would determine that for sure—did she have blood in her lungs, for example. But they didn’t have time to get a medic up here to say for sure, and Enid didn’t have the skill to do it herself. Really, the finer points were moot. The awful wound had stopped bleeding long ago and had been washed clean, making its severity all the more clear. Anyone could tell what had happened.

“She was murdered,” Enid said. Stating the obvious, needing to say it, out of some sense of procedure. Saying it out loud made it real, and she didn’t want anyone to argue otherwise.

She glanced over her shoulder at Teeg, who stood with a hand over his mouth and horror in his gaze. “Murdered?” he said. “Like, someone did this to her?”

“I expect so,” she said. “I suppose there might be some scenario where some accident did this.” She considered. What possible accident could have caused this? Could someone possibly fall on a blade in such a way as to make a cut like that? “But then she likely wouldn’t be washed up in a marsh, would she?”

“No, I guess not,” Teeg said. “So . . . what do we do now?”

“We start another investigation.”

It pained Enid to say it—she had so wanted to foot it for home this afternoon. She thought briefly that she could maybe pass this case on to another pair of investigators . . . but no, getting more investigators here would take too long. Besides, Enid had to find out who did this thing, even if it meant delaying her return home. She supposed she ought to send a message on to Sam and the others, saying what had happened. Get word to the regional committee.

She straightened and looked over the wetlands, streams of sparkling water cutting through thick dark mud, all flat as a table, bounded by stands of grasses. They ought to be able to find some evidence. But artifacts, like whatever had made that awful cut, would sink and disappear in this kind of marsh, among a century’s worth of ruins. And of course there wasn’t anything so obvious as a suspicious figure running away; the woman had been dead enough time that the assailant was long gone, likely.

“Find anything?” she asked Teeg.

He was still staring at the body, and shook his head as if waking up. “No . . . I don’t think so. I . . . I should look again. Just in case.”

They stepped around the body, searching for anything that might look out of place. Only the body itself, Kellan’s bag, and Kellan, still standing rooted some distance away.

Enid was going to have to talk to everyone in the settlement. Make a decision about what to do with the body. She didn’t know where to start. But she knew what her mentor, Tomas, would have said: you pick one thing on the list and do that. Then the next, then the next, and eventually the task reaches an end. That was how they’d solved a murder once before. Or rather, she had solved it. He’d died on the investigation before they finished. A year gone and her thoughts still shied away from the memory. Now, though, she needed to remind herself of his steadying presence. You can do this, he’d have told her.

She had a job to do.

“All right,” she said finally. “Let’s see if we can get a stretcher down here to carry her out of the mud. Find out if there’s a cool space to keep her, at least for the next little while.” With the water table so high in this area, there weren’t any cellars. They probably ought to plan on burning the body in the next day or so, unless Enid could find out for sure where the woman had come from, then deliver her to her people. Maybe this wouldn’t take too long.

Or maybe they would never find out what had happened.

She picked up Kellan’s bag and carried it to him. Couldn’t resist peeking inside—it gaped open when she pulled the strap over her shoulder: junk, mostly. A couple of lengths of rusted metal. Didn’t look good for anything, as far as Enid could tell, but she might be wrong about that. An intact glass jar the size of her hand. A few seashells. Exactly what one might scavenge off a beach like this.

Kellan took the bag from her and hugged it to his chest. “What do we do?” he asked. His voice was tight, like he might cry.

“We’re going to try to figure that out. Do you recognize her? Is she from around here?”

He quickly shook his head. “No, no, she’s not from here. No.”

“Any idea where she might have come from?”

He kept shaking his head, over and over. The man was going into shock, and Enid tried to anchor him, speaking calmly.

“You scavenge the coast here regularly,” she said. “Have bodies ever washed up like this before?”

“Never.” Fearful, he looked past her, at the lump in the mud.

“She was just like that when you found her?”

“I—I ran, soon as I saw she wasn’t alive. To get help.”