Page 47 of Bannerless (The Bannerless Saga 1)

“Yes . . . I think so.” She seemed to notice her clenched hands then, and smoothed them onto her lap and sighed. “Maybe I was wrong about the whole thing. Maybe I overreacted, and Philos is right about this being an accident, an unfortunate accident—”

“Yes, you said a moment ago you thought it might be. But you still called for an investigation, and I want to know why. It can’t be just to annoy Philos. Because if that’s really the reason you called us, there’ll be consequences. And not for Philos.” Despite Tomas’s warning, Enid didn’t try so much to tamp down on her own growing anger. Let Ariana be frightened.

The committeewoman stared back at her and breathed, “You wouldn’t. You can’t. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“False reporting? Wasting our time?” Waste, one of the worst things she could accuse anyone of, and Ariana drew back as if Enid had raised a fist at her. “And all for the sake of simply making a man’s life difficult?”

“No, that wasn’t it; there’s more to it than that—”

“Then tell me what it is. Tell me why you really called us here.”

Stricken, eyes wide, she might not have been pressed up against a wall, but she looked like it. Enid thought the woman might flee, and planned what she would have to do to leap out of her chair and cross the room to block the doorway. There was a secret here; Ariana knew it—she just didn’t want to have to be the one to expose it. Yet here they all were. Enid and Tomas stayed quiet, letting the silence press on her until she sagged.

“I think he’s violating quotas. I—I don’t have proof, just that too many of his folk are gone off doing some kind of work that the rest of us can’t explain, and they’re trading too much. They have too much.”

“Philos is violating quotas,” Enid said, just to make sure.

“Yes,” she said. As if confessing the infraction herself. She had wanted to throw the investigators in the middle of the town and step back, Enid suspected. Now here she was caught up in it herself.

Proof in these cases was sometimes tricky. If the household bypassed the checks, the counts, and committee monitoring entirely, no one would ever know. Since Philos was on the committee—controlled the committee—he’d be able to bypass monitoring easily. But there were signs. There was always evidence to find, if you knew what to look for.

Ariana continued. “He’s going to request a banner and use Bounty’s productivity to back him up. But it’s a false productivity, based on breaking quota. He doesn’t deserve it! Especially when he’s purposefully blocking other households’ requests for banners. It’s not fair—”

“And you felt you didn’t have enough support to bring a complaint against him to regional on that score?”

“Can’t bring a complaint just because you have a grudge against someone.”

“So you needed a reason. An excuse.”

“Yes, I suppose you can look at it—” She stopped, bit her lip as the implication dawned on her.

Tomas said, “You want the banner for your own household? For yourself?”

“Of course—but only if that’s what the committee decides, if the decision is fair. But this doesn’t have anything to do with your investigation—”

“Except you used Sero’s death as an excuse,” Enid said. “Brought us here and now you’re trying to point us somewhere else, when you could have just reported your suspicions. We could bar your household from earning a banner for years, based on false reporting.”

“Except . . . except you think Sero really was murdered.”

She saw investigators as a tool—which they were, Enid had to give her that. But they weren’t a tool someone like Ariana could just use.

“Yes. And don’t you dare be glad of it,” Enid said.

“Thank you, Ariana,” Tomas said, with a professional calm that Enid couldn’t quite muster. “You can go now. Thank you for the lunch.”

The woman stood and gave the barest bow, jaw set and lips pursed, before calmly walking out. Enid grabbed a piece of cornbread and started tearing it to pieces. Some of it ended up in her mouth. Patiently, Tomas sat back and let her be frustrated.

“Would she really have done it?” she finally exclaimed. “Killed someone just to draw in investigators so she wouldn’t be accused of holding a grudge?” The one person in town without a household, who wouldn’t be missed even. It seemed ludicrous. Which was why Enid couldn’t discount the idea out of hand. “What a terrible thought.”

“Should we go to her household and look for bloodstains on clothes?”

“They’ve had plenty of time to wash everything,” she said. “You know—Dak told me he was gone that day. Traveling back from the market at Porto, didn’t get back to town until the next day when everything had already happened.” So was Dak just scared, or was he hiding something as well?

“They should have worked a little harder to keep their stories straight,” he said. “So what do we do about this quota question?”

“Investigate, I suppose,” she said. “What a mess.”

“They usually are, by the time we get called in to clean up.”

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