“Hola,” Enid said, and the woman flinched, dropping the scraper. She glared. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you. Can I help?”
The woman frowned. “Think you can stake the next one like this?” She gestured to the vat, and to a clear spot on the ground.
Enid wasn’t sure, but she would certainly try. Gingerly, she reached into the vat, grabbed hold of what looked like the edge of a skin, held it up. Took a couple of tries. Soaking wet, the thing was heavy. She expected it to stink, but it had the nose-tickling scent of a dying fire. As the woman had done, Enid let the hide drip, then laid it out as best she could, taking small wooden stakes from a nearby pile, punching them through the edges and into the ground. This took Enid much longer to accomplish than it did when the woman had done it. But she managed it on her own, and by the time she finished, the woman was done scraping the first hide and ready to move to the next. She didn’t offer to let Enid try scraping, which was just as well. That looked like it required some real finesse.
“I’m Enid.”
The woman took a long time to answer. She had hair the color of rich brown earth, a tan face marked with soot and fatigue. Lines pulled at her mouth. “Creek,” she said finally. She never stopped scraping. The messy pile of byproduct was growing.
“These are deer hides, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t see a lot of deer down south. I understand you hunt cattle as well? Folk say the leather’s better here.”
“The best. We trade with you folk sometimes.”
“You ever go that way? South to the Estuary?”
“No need to.”
“Did you ever meet Neeve?” Creek seemed the right age to have known Neeve.
A pause, as the woman glanced up. She said, “When she used to foot it up here.”
“I heard she spent quite a bit of time up here.”
“Long time ago.”
A third skin was soaking in the tub, so Enid went to stake that one onto the ground too. She wasn’t helping much, not really, but Creek was polite about it. She moved straight to the third skin as soon as she’d finished with the second.
Enid asked, “You want to talk at all? About Ella? What you think might have happened?”
“She died. It’s what happens when folk leave, she knew that.”
“I’m not sure that follows,” Enid said.
Creek sighed. “No one trusts a person wandering on their own. You don’t trust us, we don’t trust you. Doesn’t end well.”
“And Neeve? Did you trust her?”
“Was never like us. She couldn’t stay, no matter how much she wanted to. And Ella . . . well, Ella was Ella. They were a lot alike.”
Enid waited, but Creek didn’t offer more.
“Can I ask some advice?” Enid asked. “What’s the best way to get El Juez to talk to me?”
At that, a corner of Creek’s lip went up, and Enid was hopeful. But she said, “You don’t. He comes to you if he wants.”
“Ah.” Well, at least that was something of a guideline. “Thanks. Take care.”
Creek remained bent to her work, scraping the last of the hides, not looking up to watch her go.
After that, Enid found a couple of guys chopping wood and offered to help. They let her, mostly because they couldn’t seem to figure out how to tell her no. Their axes were made from the salvaged, ground-down steel Mart had talked about. Not very good, making the work slow, even dangerous. The salvaged blades were unpredictable. But Enid knew how to chop wood, and the guys seemed impressed. She asked about Ella when they paused for a rest. They’d known her, but had little interest in the Estuary settlement and questioned whether Hawk was even telling the truth.
“Maybe she ain’t dead,” one of them said. “She decided to stay down there, it’d be just the same. We’d never see her again.”
“I miss her,” said the other, frowning.
They couldn’t say why she’d left, and if she was really dead, they were sure one of Enid’s folk must have killed her. None of the people at the camp would ever do such a thing. Exactly what the Estuary folk said about themselves.
“Thanks,” Enid said, and went in search of her next interview.
She caught sight of an altercation: way off, out of earshot, El Juez chastising Hawk. Pointing at him, flicking his collar, then pointing away. Ordering him off, to stay away from Enid maybe. That was what it looked like, but it was just Enid’s guess. Hawk stomped off. After that, El Juez was the one watching her.
The man was a patriarch, in the best sense of the word that she could think of. He had his people; he cared for them, looked after them, and kept them close. In turn they were devoted. They looked on him with admiration, with love. Some fear, but nothing like the cringing terror she might have expected. Which, oddly, made her trust him—he wasn’t one to lash out, she suspected.
By evening Enid knew she was being tested. If these folk ignored her long enough, would she just go away? How long could they make her wait? Enid knew there were answers here. The connection between Last House and the camp went deeper than trading deerskins and knife blades. She could go back and dig harder at Last House, and they’d say the same things they’d been saying all along.
This was the other side of it.
The gang had left her pack and belt pouch under the shelter, making it clear she could pick them up and leave whenever she liked. She was able to get some of her travel food from it. A couple of people offered her bites to eat, dried meat with a kind of flatbread made from ground nuts, and she accepted. Over the course of the day, she had spoken to almost all the adults and a few of the teens—they hadn’t known Neeve at all, which meant the woman had stopped traveling this way some time ago, just as Enid had heard. Enid got some stories, some corroboration. Ella was a picky eater. Was proud of the Coast Road–made clothes that Neeve gave her and wanted to learn to make such things herself. Thought following Coast Road rules for a few years in exchange for learning to make good cloth would be worth it. Some folk thought she was going to stay away just long enough to learn to make good woven cloth, then she’d be back.
But Hawk, they said, hadn’t thought the trade was a good one.
“You think Hawk might have hurt her?”
“Oh no, never.” They all said that, with an air of astonishment. They didn’t want to think ill of their own. No one ever did.
Which brought Enid back to thinking of who at the Estuary might have done this. Erik, who was so suspicious of intruders. If he’d chanced on Ella in the dark, he might not have even known what he was doing. Then there was Kellan, who couldn’t talk about the incident without melting down.
Everyone who agreed to talk to her didn’t say much, but they were usually specific. Eight or nine days ago Ella was still at the camp. She’d helped butcher rabbits, and she’d watched the kids. She was usually the one to fetch water every morning, and now someone else had to do that job. When she left, she let folk know. They all knew she’d gone.
Enid asked, “Did she seem normal? Was she acting strangely? Did she talk about anything odd?”
Now that Enid mentioned it, yes, a couple of folk answered. They noticed that Ella was restless. She rushed through work. She seemed distracted, maybe even sad. “She and her boy had a fight maybe, yeah?” one older woman said.
Enid suspected this was true, and that Hawk didn’t want to talk about it. Or Ella might have just been nervous about the big change she was embarking on. A kid like that, setting off to travel the wider world—Enid understood that restlessness well.
It may have seemed like small talk, but it was something of a relief. It felt like a real investigation—solid questions and solid answers. Enid made notes in her book. Folk looked at her writing with curiosity. They knew about reading and writing, but none of them knew how.
Everyone had knives. Everyone used them, on food and rope and daily chores. Some of the knives even had decorations, carved pieces of wood and bone, like what Hawk had described. Bu
t most of the blades weren’t ones traded from the Coast Road. Likely, they wouldn’t have been sharp or long enough to make the cut that had killed Ella. But that nice forged blade that Ella had gotten from Last House . . .
Enid asked more than one person, “Your knife . . . I hear that Ella had a nice one that went missing.”
The answers she got back were variations of “Whoever hurt her probably took it.” Thinking just like the Estuary folk did.
“So her knife—you haven’t seen it recently, have you?”
“Not since she left.”
And so on. Everyone made that obvious assumption, the same one Enid and Teeg had: whoever had that knife now had probably killed Ella. So no one was just going to show it to Enid when she asked.
Dusk fell. Fires were banked, until just one was left burning, and much of the camp gathered around it. Enid held back, nibbled on some of the beef jerky she’d brought in her pack. And yes, El Juez still watched her from across the way. She gave him a friendly smile.
She spent the night wrapped in a blanket, shored up against a tree trunk. Chilled, uncomfortable. Uncertain this was doing much good. She supposed she could have asked for shelter, for food. But if they gave her that much, would they feel the need to give her answers as well?
She could wait.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////
Her second day at the camp was a lot like the first. Folk didn’t go out of their way to be friendly, but they didn’t turn her away. She was like a dog who’d wandered in and didn’t make trouble, and might get a couple of scraps if she behaved herself.
She acquired a flock of children, following her at what they probably thought was a safe distance. Giggling, they’d whisper and dare one another to approach, then run away if Enid looked at them. Eventually, she settled on a slab of concrete, tore a page out of her notebook, and started drawing. She wasn’t very good at it, but the couple of round shapes for body and head and the long slender ears she made were plainly a rabbit. The kids were intrigued. They came closer, to see better.
“What should I try next?”
“Make one of Bill,” a small girl said. Bill was the not-feral dog that had kept an eye on Enid but stuck close to the people it knew. Enid did her best, and the kids oohed and aahed Enid gave the picture to the girl, and the children ran off.
The pattern of the day was similar enough everywhere to be familiar. This place might even seem pleasant, if it was what you were used to. But Enid couldn’t help but sense a faint background tension of desperation. So many kids, and so little food. Every inch of work mattered here. They didn’t have quotas because there was simply never enough to go around. The quotas were “as much as we can.”
In the old world, that attitude had remained in place even in times of plenty. “As much as we can” meant everything, until it was all gone.
For a second night, Enid watched the campfire, put up with surreptitious stares—not as many as during the night before—they were getting used to her, if not comfortable with her. She slept tucked up by a tree.
She decided she’d learned all she could here and would go back down to the Estuary tomorrow. Leave these people alone. She needed her own family.
The next morning, Enid was wakened by a hand touching her shoulder. El Juez knelt beside her and offered a clay bowl filled with something pudding-like and steaming hot, and a flat wooden spoon. Her stomach growled for it.
“Thanks,” she said. Tried to eat slowly and politely rather than shovel it in. It tasted nutty and smelled a bit like the pine forest around them.
“So,” El Juez said, settling in to sit cross-legged beside her. “What have you learned?”
“Folk miss her. But no one’s surprised she left.”
“No. Did they tell you she was mine? My girl.”
Enid paused, spoon half-raised, and looked at him. She saw it then, in the slope of his jaw, the brown of his skin. The rangy frame. But their faces were different. “Your daughter?” He nodded slowly. Sadly.
No one had said a word about either of Ella’s parents, but people’s reticence fit the general mood. They were letting Ella go, putting her in the past. Pushing all thought and knowledge of her away.
“I’m sorry. It’s a hard loss. I really am trying to find out what happened.”
“She wasn’t killed here,” El Juez said. “She left camp ten days ago. Next we hear of her, Hawk comes back saying she’s dead and that you burned her.”
“We held a pyre for her. It’s what we do.”
He nodded. “It’s what we do too. But she shouldn’t have died at all, not like that.”
“I agree.”
“Isn’t that a wonder, us agreeing?”
Her smile only flickered. This was hard. “Folk down in the Estuary think one of you did it. Maybe Hawk, in a fit of rage. Folk do crazy things when they’re angry.” The young man was up and poking at the fire near the main shelter, bringing it back to life. Pointedly not looking over at them.
“He says he didn’t. He says a guy from down your way did. Kellan?”
“Maybe he’s accusing someone else to turn attention from himself?”
El Juez grinned. “You think that one’s got the brains for that?”
Yes, he knew his people. Enid chuckled.
He said, “Even if you get the truth, it won’t bring the girl back.”
“That’s not the point,” she said. “Figure out what happened, stop it from happening again.”
“Still gotta eat.”
“Yeah.” The nut porridge was good; she finished it all.
“Come, there’s sage brewing at the fire.” He gestured toward the shelter, and she hauled her stiff body upright and followed him over.
The sage was dried sagebrush and mint steeped in hot water. Hot and astringent—it woke her up. Cleared her sinuses enough to make her eyes water.
He said to her, “Another question, since you seem chatty enough.”
“I’ve been completely open with you all.”
He nodded in acknowledgment. “Why do you keep asking about the knife she had?” So he really had been watching her.
“I think it might have been used to kill her.”
“It wasn’t.” Declarative. He was very sure.
“How do you know that?”
He held up a finger. “Wait.”
He went up the path a ways to his cabin and returned with an object in hand. Long, narrow. A knife in a leather sheath. He offered it to her. Enid took it carefully, like it was precious and fragile, and drew the knife partway out of the sheath. It was exactly what Kellan and Hawk had both described. A polished, cared-for blade, a stained leather grip, a carved flower at the end. It was personalized, distinctive. No mistaking it at all.
And if it was here, had been here the whole time, it probably hadn’t been used to kill her. Enid grit her teeth in frustration.
El Juez said, “She gave this to me because she said she could get another. Said we had more need of it here than she did, where she was going. Though now I can’t bring myself to use it.”
Enid handed the knife back to him, and he took it gently. Cradled it before him, very like how one would hold a newborn, cupped in both hands, gazing on it with love. This knife was all he had left of her. With a clenched heart, Enid thought of Olive and Serenity. She so wanted to be there now, but was so far away.
She arranged her words carefully and said, “Last House said they invited her to live with them.”
“I guess she was going to do it.”
“I thought if we found the knife, we’d find the murderer.”
“It was one of you, I’m sure of it,” he said.
This put her right back at the start, with no evidence but what people told her. She glanced around the camp, where women were working with fires and minding children. The middle-aged ones old enough to have grown children.
“What’s Ella’s mother say about it all? Is she here?”
He cocked his hea
d, confused, and she wondered what mistake she’d made. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
El Juez said, “Her mother is Neeve.”
Chapter Eighteen • the WILD
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Bannerless Child
Enid paced, too full of sudden energy to stay seated, her skin buzzing with it. Every scrap of information she’d learned, the whole timeline and all the details, crowded in her mind at once, arranging themselves in a new shape. It was too much; she needed to think.
“Wait a sec,” Enid said, as the air seemed to fall still, voices around her suddenly muffled. “What’re you saying?”
“Neeve’s her mother. Didn’t they tell you?”
No, they didn’t. Because no one in the Estuary knew. Neeve had kept it secret; all this time she hadn’t told anyone. No, that wasn’t true: Kellan knew. That was what he wouldn’t tell anyone. That was what drove him to fits every time the topic got close. Keeping the secret was breaking the man.
El Juez started to say more, but Enid held up a hand, shushing him. She needed quiet, space to piece it all together, because this one scrap of information kept skittering away from her. It wasn’t possible.
And it explained everything.
She sank back onto the concrete slab and got out her notebook, going over the timeline again, reviewing everything folk had told her about Neeve. Twenty years ago, she’d cut out her implant. She’d been caught, reported by her own household—namely her twin sister, Juni—and after that had become a recluse. She wandered, spent weeks away from the settlement. During that time, could Neeve have hidden a pregnancy? Had there been enough time for her to go upriver, give birth, and leave the baby with the outsiders—
Maybe.
But would she have done that?
Turning to the detailed description and inventory of the dead body, Enid recalled the girl—her hair, the shape of her face, the color of her clouded dead eyes. Compared that image to Neeve. And yes, there it was. The round face, the thick texture of the hair—it was the same, though Neeve’s own hair was going gray. The similarities had never occurred to her before—and why should they have? No one had ever had a bannerless pregnancy without being discovered. Investigators always found out, everyone knew that.