Page 16 of She, Wolf, Him.

Past him, in the empty stretch of lane before my father's house, I let myself feel it, since there's no one to see now and no future watching. It isn't love. I don't even know him. A wiser woman, a better one, would bury it. I find I'd rather not. After today I am tired of burying myself alive.

I reach my own door and go in. My father sits where he sits, by the low fire, gone so far into his grief that there's no room in it for mine or anyone's, and he doesn't stir. So I stand a moment in the low room with no one in the world laying claim to me, which hasn't been true since I was a girl, and may not be true again, and is true now.

9

THE OUTSIDER

GASPARD

Let no stranger lodge within the parish bounds while the Beast walks abroad, for who knows what hunger he carries in his heart.

— PASTORAL LETTER, DIOCESE OF MENDE, 1765

The common room's gone cold at this hour, the fire grey in the grate, and I have the place to myself until I don't.

I take my bread and hard cheese at the trestle by the dead hearth, alone, as I've eaten since the second burying. The woman who runs the house set the cup down and was gone before it stopped rocking. I don't hold it against her. This week the fear has found a face it likes, and the face is mine, with my outland boots under it and my rifle on the wall.

The door opens on a wedge of thin light and the priest comes in on it.

He crosses the floor with the economy I've marked in him before, and comes to a stop at the end of my trestle without troubling with the stool. He lets the silence sit first, laid down between us like a stake he means me to meet.

"They put Thibault Lavergne in the ground yesterday," he says.

"I was at the back of it."

"A young man. Strong. Promised to be wed." He sets each down between us, unhurried, and lets them lie. "Three graves since the summer turned, monsieur. You rode in the night before we found the second of them."

"The first was in the ground before I crossed your valley. You buried him yourself. You know the day."

"I know the day." He doesn't blink. He never needed it to be true. "I know also that God looses no scourge on a faithful people without a cause, and that He sends His answers in their season. A stranger comes. The dying quickens. You would have me call that chance. I have grown too old to credit as many accidents as your trade asks of me."

"And I'm too old to believe a wolf waits on a man's repentance before it feeds." I keep it level, easy, because easy is the one weapon he can't take off me. "You want a sinner, Father. You've wanted one since I rode in. It's a tidier tale than mine, I'll grant you. Mine ends with a carcass on your church wall and a bill for the parish. Yours never ends. There's always another sin to root out, and you the only man who can read where it's hid."

"I read nothing that isn't written," he says. "In your heart, monsieur, there is no God. A man with no God and a gun, walking out when the Beast walks. The parish will make its own reading of that. I need make none."

His face gives back nothing.

"Mind yourself, monsieur," he says, gentle as a blessing. "A village will carry a great burden of fear, and then one morning set the whole of it down on the nearest shoulder. I've watched it done the length of my life. I should not like a guest of ours to bear more than his share." He steps back from the trestle. "I will pray for you. I pray for all of us."

He goes out as he came, and takes the cold with him.

I sit in the after-quiet with the bread gone to paste in my mouth.

I've eaten this breakfast before. Another village, a black coat much like his, a man who stood in a square and counted out loud until the counting was a rope. I learned young that the truth of a thing is the first part of it a frightened people agree to do without. The last man who sat where I'm sitting didn't leave his village on his own feet.

I finish the bread. The room doesn't get to choose whether I'm fed. Then I take the rifle off the wall and go out into the morning the priest has spent, to do the one work in this valley that still makes sense.

By midday there's a market of sorts in the square, such as the place can raise. A few trestles, a woman with the first apples in flat baskets, wool in greasy hanks, a man with a side of mutton hung and souring in the air. The nearer farms have come in for it. Market day is the one morning of the week the valley pretends it isn't afraid, and even the pretence has worn thin.

Talk cuts off at the root the moment I'm among them. A knot of men by the well goes still as I come near and finds other places to put its eyes. A mother takes her child by the collar and steers it behind her skirts without once acknowledging me. "Keep by me," she tells it.

"Apples, monsieur," the woman with the flat baskets calls, the one soul in the square with a reason to talk to me. "First of the year. Keeping apples, these. They'll last a man to Christmas." I buy a twist of them off her. "God keep you, monsieur," she says, counting my coin, and means the coin. "Mutton," the man with the side of it says, to my back mostly. "Fresh killed." "How fresh," I ask him, and he finds somewhere else to be.

"It's the drovers I'd keep out," a woman at the next trestle says, not troubling to lower her voice. "And the men that follow after them." "And the soldiers the King never sent," her neighbour answers. "The King," the first woman says, and spits, delicate, into the mud. "The King's in his palace with his wars. He's not in our graveyard."

The men give me a nod if they must and their shoulders if they can. I've worn a village's welcome and I've worn its refusal both. I'd know the refusal blind, a cold coming up off people who had my measure last week and have decided since that they took it wrong. It doesn't stay cold. I've a week before this one gets there, maybe two.

A drover I've never traded a word with turns his head as I pass and spits, deliberate, onto the stones a stride off my boot. I don't break my step. Answering would give him what he wants, and besides, the drover's right to be afraid. There's a killer in his hills taking his neighbours out of the dark. He's only mistaken about its make, and I've neither the time nor the standing to teach him better.