Bannerless

by Carrie Vaughn

  “We’ll rotate the racks partway through, and the whole mess will be ready to seal up this afternoon.”

  Back inside they dried off, changing shirts, hanging the wet ones by the stove to dry. After, Enid helped clean up the mess in the kitchen, and then gratefully accepted another cup of tea. She hadn’t realized how chilled she’d gotten until she held it in both hands; before, the work had kept her warm.

  Fisher talked, and Enid asked questions to keep her talking, about the household, the town, their work.

  Petula was an older household, on its third generation. A dozen banners were pinned up on the wall of the common room, including the new one, recently awarded. Some of them were old and faded, the next newest some eight years old. The kid it represented, the knitter Hild, ran around with a hyperactive amount of energy, harvesting herbs from the garden and digging weeds and talking about beehives, and then suddenly running out to Fintown proper on some mission or other. Petula had invited in new members over the years, as necessary. Fisher reminded her of some of the names and faces she’d forgotten the night before. Vinya made rope from hemp; Raul was a carpenter; Bin worked the scales at the docks, recording daily catches and quotas. The place had the same rhythms and energies that measured life at Plenty, but with different trappings, such as talk of how the sea looked and what storms brooded on the horizon, fish and seabirds and life on a rocky coast instead of hilly meadows.

  The older woman finally made her feel welcome in her own right.

  Fisher’s son Stev, represented by a banner on the wall some twenty years old, joined them that afternoon. He hadn’t been there for brandy the night before, Enid was pretty sure. He was short, stocky, with a shock of black hair and a small face in a seemingly large head—eyes set close together, wide lips. A near-constant smile. He moved carefully, as if he had to take an extra moment to be sure he had a good grip on a spoon, a chair, his own feet sometimes. He stirred the stew, delivered a pot full of kitchen waste to the compost pile in back, swept the floor after. If he’d been a child, Enid wouldn’t have taken a second look at him—he spoke like a child. But he wasn’t.

  “Can I show Enid my rocks?” Stev earnestly asked Fisher.

  “Ask her if she wants to see them.”

  Stev looked at her, his eyes alight, and carefully asked, “Would you like to see my rocks?”

  “He has a rock collection,” Fisher explained softly, nodding encouragingly.

  “I’d love to see it,” Enid said, and Stev beamed.

  He raced off and returned with a wooden crate filled with fist-sized rocks of every description, yellow sandstone and smooth beach rocks, granite sparkling with crystals and a dozen other earth-colored, unidentifiable samples. Stev had collected them all and told her exactly where each had come from—the beach north of town, the garden, the hill above the docks, and so on. A whole catalog of rocks ended up spread across the floor in the common room. Enid dutifully pointed to her favorites, and Stev arranged and rearranged them in categories of his own making. When it was time for dinner, Fisher asked him to clean up, and he did.

  Enid tried not to stare after him—was chagrined that part of her recoiled from him. She quashed that feeling. But she stared all the same.

  “It’s a genetic anomaly,” Fisher said, after he’d left to put his rocks away. “After he was born, the midwife brought a book about it from Haven for me. They called it ‘Down’s’ before the Fall.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Enid said. She might have read the book Fisher spoke of or one like it in the Haven archives. She’d never met anyone like Stev before.

  “We think the banner is everything,” Fisher said. “Once you’ve got that cloth to hang on your wall, you’ve done it, observed the quotas, earned a kid. But it’s just the start. There’s so much can go wrong.” She smiled broadly at the door her son had left through. “Not really what you expect when the committee hands you a banner. But you know what? He’s part of our house. He earns his keep.” She bustled for a moment, pulling bowls out of a cupboard, handing them to Enid, who took them to the table. Found a pitcher and filled it from the pump at the sink, then looked around, distracted, for something else to do. “Thank goodness for the household, so he’ll always have someone to look after him.”

  Stev couldn’t look after himself. Like Auntie Kath couldn’t, at the end. Enid had a moment of panic, a heartbeat where the bottom dropped out of her gut thinking of what would happen if she got hurt out here on the road, camping in the middle of nowhere with Dak, and she fell and broke her leg or hit her head. What would happen? Who would take care of her? Would someone find a car or wagon to carry her back home? Would anyone be so kind? She’d been so blithe. How easy to set off with a satchel, a canteen, and a couple of packs of dried fruit, when you’d never had to worry about who would take care of you. She had just done it.

  “Are you mad for a baby, Enid?” Fisher asked, winking. Still thinking about banners. “Some girls are at your age. Vinya’s trying now—it’s her turn.”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it,” she answered. “Not now, I mean. I’d never earn a banner wandering around the Coast Road with Dak, would I?”

  “Hmm,” she said, noncommittally.

  This was the moment Dak came in, blinking between the two of them with a look of panic. Enid rolled her eyes.

  “He emerges,” Fisher said.

  “Didn’t miss anything, did I?”

  “Just tea,” Enid said, pouring a fresh mug from the pot Fisher had brewed and pushing it over to him. “You should have some.”

  His look of panic vanished, and he seemed happy enough to slide into the seat next to her and kiss her cheek. Just like that, and she thought, Really? She wanted to yell at him. No, talk. She wanted to talk to him, like an adult. He should have warned her. She could handle anything with a little warning. She refused, utterly, to ask where Xander was and what they’d been up to all morning, and all last night. But she couldn’t think of anything apart from that to say, and the kitchen became unbearably silent. Even the sound of Fisher washing dishes at the basin seemed muted. As if she was trying to be quiet, to overhear what they might say.

  Dak finally broke the quiet with, “You seem to be getting along well then, yeah?”

  Fisher pressed her lips in a pitying look that Enid glanced away from before she’d have to respond. Brightly, she said, “Enid, I have a couple of errands I need doing this afternoon, if you don’t mind getting out in the rain. We trade eggs for bread with a couple of households down the way.”

  “I’d love to help,” Enid said.

  “You can also spread word that I’m playing at the community house this evening,” Dak said. “Folk might like getting out for some music, after being cooped up with the weather like this.”

  Or he could offer to go with her, tell folk himself. Or she could tell him she wanted to talk to him. Right now, she decided, she just wanted to get away.

  “All right,” she said, with forced cheer.

  //////////////////////////////////////////////////

  She and Dak finally talked at dinner. Sort of. They took their bowls of stew to a bench outside, sitting under the eaves to watch the rain, a gentle but persistent drizzle that beat on the world.

  “You’ve been quiet,” he said, after a long moment.

  She looked at him, and then away.

  “I’ve never seen you angry,” he said. “It looks strange on you. I’m not sure what to do about it.”

  “I’m not angry. I’m insanely jealous,” she said, deadpan, studying the carrots and potatoes in her bowl.

  He laughed, and she blushed. Embarrassment, this time. She wasn’t a child, but she felt like one at the moment, and it hurt.

  “Xander’s an old friend,” he said. “What did you want me to do, ignore him?”

  “Tell me?”

  “Ah.” Then, after they’d eaten a couple more bites, “I suppose you’ll want to leave, move on to the next place, then?”

  “You
can do whatever you want to.” She shrugged. “And so can I. It’s nice here. I don’t mind staying.” But she was still angry.

  He put a hand on her leg, brushed it up so it rested at her hip. Tilted, so his nose was in her hair, smelling, nuzzling. So all she would have to do was turn her face and he would kiss her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t think. Next time, I will.”

  She tucked that next time away in the back of her mind to consider later. For now, she turned her face and caught his lips.

  He spent that night with her.

  //////////////////////////////////////////////////

  The rain broke the next day, and Xander took them sailing on Petula Dock’s smaller boat, a little single-mast craft, maybe twenty feet long. Antique, he said, one of the old ones with a fiberglass hull. The community took good care of it, working hard to keep it cleaned, patched, and repaired. Not big enough for real fishing, it was mostly used to patrol the harbor, mapping hazards and changes in the coastline after storms, and helping when the bigger fishing boats got in trouble. When people had time and the wind was fair, it was perfect for spending a nice morning on the water.

  Enid was annoyed to discover that she liked Xander. He told jokes, many at his own expense, about how clumsy he was and how he had terrible taste in men while raising an eyebrow at Dak, who merely chuckled. He could set her at ease with a smile and was kind to her—he seemed to recognize that Dak had dragged her into this without warning her. He sympathized. As if Dak had done this before.

  She liked the sailing. It was new. It felt like an adventure.

  “Some people get sick from the rocking,” Dak told her. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  She hung on the side of the boat, watching the silky dark water slip past, trying to follow the patterns the waves and the wake of their passage made. She dared to reach out, dip in her fingers, and they made ripples to join with the others. The water was cold, slippery.

  She didn’t get sick.

  The canvas sail went up the mast, cracking and rippling in the wind. Xander worked lines and watched the fabric, turning the boom to take advantage of the wind. When it filled, the sail was a beautiful field of clean, taut white. The boat jumped with a burst of speed and raced away from shore.

  Dak sprawled in the boat, arms stretched out and face turned up to the sun. He might have been napping. Xander sat in the back, keeping hold of the tiller to steer. Enid watched the water, looking for . . . anything. She’d never seen so much water, and it smelled wet and briny and rippled in colors before her eyes. Fish lived here. Whales, even. She wanted to see it all.

  She asked Xander questions, which was how she learned the parts of the boat, how they fished, and what she should be looking for.

  “We don’t see many whales,” he said when she asked. “But you want to look for spouts. They come to the surface and blow out air through their blowholes. It’s like a mist shooting straight up a few feet. You’ll see that before you see anything else.”

  She watched until her eyes watered but didn’t see anything.

  They’d brought along canteens of water and sandwiches for lunch. Xander lowered the sail and they drifted, rocking from the movement of the waves, and he told stories about being a kid on fishing boats, the strange things they pulled up sometimes, rusted artifacts of the old world like bicycle wheels and street signs crusted over with algae and barnacles. Usually they tossed such things back, but onshore was a kind of pre-Fall graveyard where they sometimes brought and stashed such items of steel and rust.

  Enid might like to see it, but she asked more about the fishing, imagining spending days on the water, and maybe that was what she might like to do with her life. Find a household on the shore that would take her. A complete change from the way she grew up. Maybe that was what she wanted.

  “It’s hard work, Enid,” Dak said, a laugh in his voice. “All hauling and cleaning and weighing and watching your quotas—around here they ding you hard for going over. Overfish and there’s nothing left. And it all stinks.”

  “I don’t mind it,” she said. But not loud enough for him to hear.

  The wind picked up in the afternoon. They’d sailed a ways down the coast by then, out of sight of the village, into sight of the next one. A couple of fishing boats came close enough for Xander to wave at the people in them. They all seemed to know one another. Soon, though, the wind slapped at the sails, which jerked taut and pulled at the boom. Xander wanted to get back before the weather turned.

  By the time they docked, Enid was confident enough to help put the sail away and throw the line out to Xander when he jumped to the dock to tie up the boat. All in all, it made for a satisfying day. She’d been wearing a hat but her arms had still gotten a bit sunburned—sun reflecting off the water made it more intense. It felt like an accomplishment. Like she had something to show for the day.

  Dak slapped Xander’s shoulder, gave Enid’s hand a squeeze, and announced he was going back to the house to take a nap. That left them alone.

  She stared after Dak, not realizing she was doing so.

  “Are you okay?” Xander asked. They were collecting their canteens and bags from the boat, getting ready to walk up the path to the houses. She wanted to see this graveyard of artifacts first.

  “In what sense?” she shot back, without thinking.

  His smile was gentle, and she couldn’t be angry. None of this was his fault. He was stepping as softly as he possibly could, and she was grateful.

  “In the ‘Dak’ sense.”

  She sighed. “He doesn’t owe me anything. I don’t need anything.”

  “But wanting.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed.

  “What do you want?” he asked. “I mean, I know right now you want Dak. I get that, for sure. But without him, what do you want? What brought you all this way down the road with him?”

  “Not really sure,” she said. “But this . . . I’m really glad to have seen all this.” She stared at the ocean, its expansive breadth, the endless rippling sameness of it. Storm clouds gathered on the horizon and piled high, brought in by a sudden wind that tasted of brine. “I might just keep walking, with or without him.”

  “You can always stay here if you need to. With or without Dak.”

  She didn’t know she needed that encouragement until he said it. She grinned back warmly.

  Back at Petula, Dak was sitting on a bench outside, arms crossed, head resting against the wall. As if he’d gotten this far and couldn’t wait for that nap any longer. She hesitated a moment, watching him, setting sun turning his skin golden, his brown hair draped around his shoulders. His face looked young; his lips rested in a vague smile. He couldn’t have been more alluring if he’d posed this way on purpose, as if he were a piece of art.

  She had an idea. Second-guessed herself on that idea, then went back to it, and then considered a third time. And then decided to just give in to the urge. If it went badly, so be it.

  Dashing the last few steps, she threw herself on the bench, sliding right up to press against him, and wrapped her arms around his middle, holding him tight. Held her breath as she waited to see what he would do. Let it out with a sigh when he laughed and put his arms around her.

  That was what she wanted. What she’d hoped he would do.

  “Having a good day, I take it,” he said.

  “Hmm.” She hugged him harder, resting her head on his shoulder. She could almost hear his heart. Tipping her head up, she didn’t wait for him to kiss her, but touched his chin and held him still so she could kiss him. If she wanted something, she decided, she ought to ask for it.

  He seemed perfectly happy kissing her, and she melted against him. And all was again right with the world.

  When she heard footsteps on the path, she assumed it was Xander finally returning from the docks. But no, there were two sets, and unfamiliar voices in conversation. She and Dak broke their kiss and looked out.

  Two figures in brown unif
orms approached. Both she and Dak tensed, their bodies braced by instinct. Enid took a breath and relaxed as she saw the people wearing the uniforms—a short, dark-skinned woman with a kind smile, and the man who must have been her enforcer. He carried a staff, wore his blond hair braided, and kept a short strand of his beard braided as well. She didn’t know them, but they likely knew Tomas.

  Dak turned anxious. Worried. She glanced at him, his uncharacteristic frown.

  The investigators approached.

  “Hola,” Enid called out to them, to break the tension that was threatening to knot them up.

  “Hola!” the woman called back. “I’m Nala; this is Holt. Is this Petula Dock household?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “And how long have you two lived here?”

  “We’re not actually part of the household; we’re just visiting. I’m Enid from Haven—do you know my friend Tomas? He’s an investigator.”

  The man, Holt, answered with a smile. “Yeah—worked with him on a couple of cases up north. Good guy.”

  Enid beamed. Maybe not as good as seeing someone from back home, but still a connection.

  Nala looked at Dak. “And you are?”

  “Dak,” he said. “I’m just traveling a bit. That’s all.” As if he was trying to provide an alibi.

  But they weren’t here for Enid and Dak. Nala gestured. “The head of the house inside? That’s Fisher, isn’t it?”

  “Can I ask what this is about?” Enid asked. Pure curiosity.

  “I want to hold off on that until I speak to the folk I need to. You’ll hear about it soon enough, I imagine.”

  The two investigators went in through the archway to the household’s inner yard.

  “Well, you were very helpful,” Dak said, scorn in his voice, as if she had done something wrong.

  “Yes?” she answered.

  “You know they can’t be here for anything good. Don’t you wonder why on Earth they’d be investigating Petula?” He looked out, worried. “Xander needs to know about this.”