Page 13 of She, Wolf, Him.

"He kept the watch over his neighbour's flock," Reynaud says, and lets it sit. "A good man at a good man's work, and the Beast took him in the night." His voice goes low and pulls the cold square in. "We have asked why this is sent. Here is one more asking it of us. God does not strike the watchful and the faithful without a cause. The cause is among us. It has been among us a long while."

"Who does he mean," a woman near me asks. "The cause. Who's the cause." Nobody answers her.

He doesn't aim it at me on the last of it. He doesn't need to. Half the heads in the square have carried his glance for him, a flick toward the stranger and away again. The man came, and then the dying. I've worn that arithmetic in three villages before this one. I let it lie. There'll be a morning to answer it, and this isn't it.

A woman at my shoulder says it low, meaning comfort and giving none. "And him to be married. The banns read but yesterday."

Married. I turn it over. "To which of them?"

She tips her chin across the square. I follow it to where I'd have guessed if I'd let myself guess. To the one who lays out the dead. "They'd have been wed after the lambing," she says. "Poor child. Poor both of them. She nursed her mother into the ground, and now this."

She stands at the edge of the gathering with her hands folded over her apron, the still one, the one whose face told me nothing over the last body and tells me nothing over this one. Except it isn't quite nothing this time. I read faces for my bread, and I've read this one before. There's grief in it, the right and proper grief, set on straight. Held down hard beneath it is what I'd know anywhere, because I've stood over enough coffins wishing myself less glad. Relief. The man who'd have owned her is dead in the straw, and the woman under that composure has just been let out of a locked room.

There's a plain home for it. A girl handed to a man she didn't choose, loosed from him before the vow, there's no riddle in relief and no sin in it I'd damn a soul for. Half the widows I've stood near were gladder than they'd say. What I don't say is that I'm glad too, glad it's her the dying freed.

They want the word from me, so I give it, because a square full of frightened people steadies on a name. "It's the Beast," I tell them, plain as a price. "The loup-garou, come down on Saint-Élie as it's come down on the rest. And it's meat, like anything that walks. It bleeds like anything that bleeds. I'll put it under the ground for you." "Can it be killed," an old man asks me. "Truly. You've seen its like fall."

"I've seen everything fall," I tell him, "that bleeds."

"And if it doesn't bleed," a woman asks, white. "If it's what the Father says."

"Everything bleeds," I tell her. "Ask your husband's hogs." A rough laugh goes round at that, and it's the best sound I've heard in this valley.

They take it. The half of me that earns my coin marks them take it. The other half is back in the straw, believing not a word of it.

I take her in once more before I go. The almost-widow.

They carry him into the church to be laid out, and for once it isn't her hands that do it.

The two old women do it, and the soft-faced one who works the bodies beside her. "It's not right," an old woman says. "She's the one with the hands for it." "It's not fitting," another answers. "The widow doesn't tend her own." They stand her by the church wall and bring their grief to her. I post myself across the square, my back to the well, with nothing left in the straw to read.

The condolences come as they come everywhere. The women press her hands. "A good steady man," an old one says, cupping her cheek. "God rest him. God keep you, girl." "You'll come to us whenever you've a mind," another tells her. "You'll not sit alone." The men take off their hats, find they've nothing to say, and say it anyhow. "If there's anything," one of them starts, hat in hand, "anything at all we're good for," and doesn't say what. She takes all of it. Thank you. Thank you. God keep you. The words come out flat and even, worn smooth, and to the village that's a woman struck dumb with grief, and they're gentle with her for it. I'd read it the same if I didn't read closer than most. Closer, it's a woman doing what she's good at, arranging her face over what's underneath, and she's better at it than anyone I've seen try.

The soft-faced one won't leave her. She came out from the laying-out with her sleeves still wet and went straight to her side and hasn't moved, close as a burr, her open, country face doing all the weeping the still one won't. She keeps a hand at the small of her back, turns the worst of the well-wishers off with her own body, fetches her water she doesn't drink. "Just a little," I hear her say, holding the cup to her. "Just a little, love." And to an old one, fierce, low, when the old one would have her rest. "She's not to be left. Not tonight. Not one hour of it. I'll bide tonight. Her father's no company, he's less than none. She's not to spend tonight alone." There's a tenderness in it past what I've a name for, the warm one minding the still one. I note it and don't know what I've noted.

The priest comes to her last, when the crowd's thinned, and the two of them together tell me more than either means to. He stands too near and pitches it too low for me to catch, and whatever he says, she goes smaller under it by a finger's width, her chin dropping, her eyes finding his feet. That isn't grief. I've watched a dog go small the same way under a hand it can't get out from beneath. He lifts two fingers above her shoulder, where the dead man's hand used to ride, holds them there one beat past blessing, then lowers them. She says thank you. Of course she does.

A man near me, to another, under the noise. "Came right after the shepherd, didn't he. And how many since." A pause. "Wolves, he says." "Wolves," the other answers, and spits into the straw. "Wolves don't pass five men." I don't move my head. I push off the well and go to find the trail while the ground has sign to give.

The print at the pens runs three strides and dies on hard ground, but a weight like that doesn't cross a hillside without setting a foot wrong somewhere, so I go up after it, alone, while the village has its grieving to be busy with.

I cut it again above the pens where a seep has kept the ground soft. The same four toes, the same splay, the stride longer than any wolf walks. It runs uphill toward the black line of the trees, unhurried, in no fear of the open or the climbing light. Not skulking. Not driven. Walking its own ground.

Where the firs start the trail gives out for good on a shoulder of bare rock, the way they all do. I crouch where it ends. Cold stone, the wind off the high ground, the trees standing close and dark, giving up nothing. Snagged in the bracken at the rock's edge is a tuft of hair. I work it loose. Coarse, dark at the root, grizzled at the tip, more of it than a wolf sheds on a thorn, the guard-hairs longer than they've a right to be. No name for it yet. I roll it between my fingers and it tells me only that the quarry passed here, which I knew when I bent.

I put it in the pouch at my belt with the dried scat and the rest of the morning's nothing. A man keeps what he finds and waits for it to add.

What's changed is small, and I won't take it straight on. The composed face by the wall. The relief pressed down under the grief, right where I'd press my own. I find I've carried it up the hill with me, like the smell that rode home in my coat from the high wood, and I set it down off the path and start back down.

The light's long and gold by the time I come down, the day gone soft and mild once the mist burned off, careless of what it's lighting. They have Thibault Lavergne washed and boarded inside the church, and the square's emptied to the few with nowhere better to carry their fear. She's one of them.

She stands apart by the churchyard wall, not weeping, only staring out at the middle distance where there's nothing to see. No one's with her now. The warm one's been called home to get her father's supper, and the village has done its grieving at her and gone back to bolting its doors against the early dark.

I'd no plan to cross to her. I cross to her.

"You're well?" A fool's question over a fresh grave, and I hear it for one as it leaves me. I mean it as the village means its hats and its God-keep-yous, a noise a decent man makes.

She turns her head and looks at me, full on. Over the bodies she never gave me her eyes. She gives them now. Dark, dry, steady, taking my measure as I'm forever taking everyone's, and finding me, I think, about as honest as I am.