The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

Author:Carrie Vaughn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Chapter Twelve • the estuary

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Scavengers

Back at the edge of the woods, she found Teeg waiting for her. He’d been savvy enough to keep his distance. Had there been two Coast Road folk bearing down on him—investigators, no less—she was sure Hawk would have fled sooner, or taken to violence.

“Did you get him to talk?” he asked.

“A little. Not much of use.”

“And you let him leave?”

“Should I have held a knife to his throat?” she asked, brow raised.

“But what if he’s the one that did it?”

“He seems awfully broken up about it.”

“Broken up that you found him out, maybe,” Teeg shot back.

Enid moved past him, walking back toward the pyre near Last House. “He’s looking for a knife she had with her. One with a flower carved in the handle.”

Teeg trotted after her, and she shouldn’t have been so satisfied, stoking his frustration like that. Petty feeling, there. They were supposed to be partners. Partners didn’t often disagree. But they didn’t often see a case quite like this.

“The same knife Kellan was looking for?”

“The one that probably killed her, yeah.”

“So where is it?”

“That’s what that guy wanted to know. I couldn’t say.”

“Enid,” he said, coming up beside her. “We’re never going to find the weapon. We’re never going to find who did it.”

“We don’t know that. We’ve only just started poking at wasp nests.”

“It’s too . . . it’s too . . .” He shrugged expansively, arms raised.

“Too what?” Enid asked.

“It’s too much.”

She said, “If you had a chance to find the weapon. If you assumed that someone wouldn’t throw away a thing as valuable as a good sharp blade, in a settlement that doesn’t have a blacksmith, what would you do?”

He thought, staring ahead, steps pounding. “Track down every blade in town. Can’t really look for blood—the killer would have washed it, yeah?”

“Likely.”

“Then we’d have to follow the body. Track where she was and what she was doing before she died. But that would mean—”

“Yeah. We talk to her people.”

“That’s not realistic. It’s outside our watch.”

“That boy might come back.”

“Or he might not.”

“Then maybe we should wait and see.”

“Enid—”

She cut him off with a gesture; they’d arrived back at the clearing and shouldn’t be seen arguing in front of the local folk.

The pyre was sinking to ash, and most of the Estuary folk had drifted off. And why should they stay to watch the whole thing burn? The woman wasn’t theirs.

Kellan had a length of rusted rebar that he was using to poke at the base of the pyre, collapsing ashes, bringing air to the buried segments of wood, causing flames to rise up again, then subside. The barest shape of Ella was still visible, a shadow buried in light. There were bones, charred, broken. After dark the last of the embers would glow orange, and fade.

Mart had brought out a low stool and sat fireside, whittling on a length of wood. A spoon, looked like. Something with a long handle for stirring. Enid eyed the knife he was using, but it was too small to have made the wound that killed Ella.

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