Page 14 of She, Wolf, Him.

"I'm alive," she says.

Truer than I'm well and stranger than the flat thank-you she's spent on the rest of them all morning. She says it low and even, with the smallest weight on the I, as if being alive were the remarkable part and she'd only this moment marked it. Relief again, and who'd grudge it her.

It doesn't account for the pull of it. For the fact that I linger here with nothing left to say, not leaving. I've a hunt to raise before dark, a hill to climb again. I spend the last of the light on a woman who won't weep. I name it the hunter in me, the part that goes after the one thing in a room that won't sit right. The naming is a lie, and I know the shape of my own lies by now.

"Then mind you stay so," I tell her. "There's a thing in those woods that's careless who it takes."

"I've laid out every one it's taken till today," she says, plain as fact. "I know what it leaves."

Then she draws her shawl up and goes toward the church, where her almost-husband is laid out at last, with her kept from the tending. I stand in the gold light, and she takes the last of my day with her across the square.

I've a Beast to kill. The Beast is in the trees. I keep telling myself that until she's through the door.

8

PITY AND THE WHISPER

AGNÈS

The widow is quiet. The widow is dutiful. The widow grieves as a woman should. Yet I have seen a widow look once toward the road and not toward the grave.

— FOLK SAYING, MARGERIDE, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

They bury Thibault on a grey morning, and I stand at the head of the open ground where the almost-widow is meant to stand and grieve as they need me to.

It's the easiest lie I've ever told. Grief and relief sit close in a body, near enough that one can wear the other's clothes, and all it costs me is to keep my gaze down and let the village find in it what it came to find. A bowed head is grief. Tears would be better, and I haven't any, so I fix on the dark cut of the earth and the pale roots where the spades went through, and they read a woman too struck to weep. They're gentle with me for it, and the gentleness is the worst of it.

Reynaud stands over the grave in his black with the missal open before him, his Latin going up into the grey for the wind to take across the yew. "Dust thou art, and unto dust," he says, "and the spirit unto God who gave it." A good man, taken at a good man's work. God's will. He gives the same words I've heard over every grave since I was a girl, and somewhere under the saying his eyes come down to me and stay. He is hunting again. The old cold comes up the side of my neck.

Margot's at my shoulder, close as she's been since yesterday, and down in our skirts her hand finds mine and holds it, hidden, hard. She doesn't say a word. She's the one person here not waiting on me to play it right, and I lean the morning into her grip and let her take it. She would never measure what I gave her and find it short.

By rights I'd be the one laying him out. It's my hands that wash the village dead, that close the eyes and bind the jaw. There's a mercy in that work I never knew I leaned on until they took it from me. Yesterday they wouldn't let me near him. The widow doesn't tend her own, they said, kindly, and put me by the wall to be tended instead. So I have no work to hide inside this once. There's only me in the open with my empty hands, being looked at.

The women come when it's done. They press close and draw my fingers from Margot's grip. They hold them while they tell me what there is to tell a girl whose man is dead before the vow. "So young," they say. "So unlucky. God keep you, you poor lamb." "He'd have given you a good life," says another. "Give over your hands a while," says old Berthe, taking them in her red ones. "You've washed enough of ours." "You'll marry yet," one of the young ones starts, and is hushed by her mother, and the hushing says it plainer than the saying would have. "You poor lamb," an old one says, cupping my cheek. "You've not a mother to stand for you now. You'll come to me, when you want mothering. I've raised half this village."

I give them back what's owed, yes, thank you, God's will, and the words come out worn and even, and to them that's a woman emptied by sorrow. I let it stand.

Gaspard is there at the edge, hat off, apart from the rest as he's always apart. He doesn't come and he doesn't speak. He only watches, his gaze steady on me over the heads of the women, and for a breath yesterday comes back, the gold light at the wall and the true word I said to him that I shouldn't have. "The King's man will see to it," one of the men mutters, hat in his hands. "He'll have it, see if he don't."

As the crowd loosens and I leave the filled grave, there's the old woman at the wall.

Pétronille keeps to the edge of every gathering, small and bent over her stick, the white hair loose at her shawl, her face folded to leather around a hooked nose and deep-set dark eyes that watch more than they show. The village lets her come to its buryings as you let the weather come. Reynaud's eye is on her too. I see it harden as it crosses her, the expression he keeps for the woman who lives past the last house and answers to no priest. She feels it and pays it no mind. She has worn worse than him.

But as I pass her she catches my sleeve. There's none of the village's pity in her. Her fingers press a dry stem into my palm, the nails dark with the green of her trade, and close my own over it. A sprig of lavender, summer-cut, the smell coming up sharp and clean between us. She doesn't speak. She only holds me there a moment and nods, once, as though she knows the difference between grief and what's been stood in its place, and thinks no less of me for it. Then she's gone back to her margin.

I walk away from the grave with the lavender, and I don't go back to it. There's nothing in that ground I want.

By midday the cloud has broken into patches and the sun comes and goes. The villagers go back to their work as they must, and they stop me even so.

In the lane a woman I've known since girlhood catches my arm as she passes. "Hard on you, girl," she says. "Hard on you," and goes on about her day, which does me more good than a week of God-keep-yous.

The pity's warm while it lasts. Under it, today, there's an edge that wasn't there for the shepherd or for the poor man from the lower pastures. I hear it in the silence after my name. "Be brave, my girl," an old neighbour says, and means it. Past her shoulder two more stand at the trough, bent close together, and what's in their faces isn't sorrow. I'm not meant to hear it and I hear it. "She never seemed easy with him," one says, low. "A strange one, that girl," the other answers. "Not a tear at her own man's grave." "Quiet," says the first, as if it explains anything. "She was always quiet. Even as a girl."

It's small. But I've lived here long enough to know how such talk starts. The Beast is in the trees and can't be scolded, and a woman who buries her man dry-eyed is right here in the square, where the pity can fasten on her and, given a hard enough winter, curdle into a story with teeth.

Reynaud finds me where the lane bends up toward home, where there's no one near enough to make it a public matter. He doesn't touch me. He never touches anyone where it can be seen. He only stops in front of me so that I have to stop, and lets the quiet stand until it's a pressure of its own.

"And how do we find you today, Agnès?" he says.