Page 18 of She, Wolf, Him.

The wind comes off the high ground and asks nothing of me, whether I weep or don't. There's a kind of rest in that I've found nowhere else in my life.

Margot never could move without a sound, and still I don't hear her until she's close. She comes up the pasture with her breath sawing, skirts hissing through the dead grass. When she reaches me, she has to press a fist to her side and bend over it a moment before she can speak. Small and winded as she is, she has come the whole way up the dark hill alone. "Here," she says, when she's got her breath, and presses a cloth into my hands, still warm from her pocket. Cheese, and a crust. "You'll not have eaten. Don't argue it. A heart can't grieve on an empty stomach." She looks at the wood, then away from it. "I looked in the church. And at the trough, and at your door. Your father's asleep. I should have known to start with the hill."

"Why the hill."

"Because it's where you go when you've gone somewhere." And then she stops a step short of where the grass ends. The whole time she stands beside me she keeps the trees in front of her, and when I turn she turns with me, so the black under the boughs is never once at her back.

"You're always up here now," she says. It's a worry she doesn't know how to set down. "It isn't—" She tries again. "You come so near to it, is all. And it took Thibault out of a field with five men in it. A field."

I don't tell her why. I don't have words for it that wouldn't frighten her worse. I only shift a little to make a place for her at the edge beside me. She takes it, and we stand and watch the last of the colour bleed out of the sky behind the firs. Her shoulder finds mine. Then her hand finds mine too, down in the folds of our skirts as it has a thousand times since we were small, and holds it.

Tonight it holds a beat past comfort. A beat past what a friend's touch does. She knows I notice. Neither of us moves to end it. Her palm against mine is rough, warm, certain. Ma mie, I think, and tonight I come nearer saying it than I've ever come. I don't say it. I press her hand once instead, the old answer, and let that stand for the word.

Down in the village I'm good at being what they need, the quiet one who says thank you and keeps her face shut over whatever's under it. Up here there's no one to be good at it for. Up here whatever I am can come loose, and the only soul who sees it is the one soul I'd never have had to hide it from.

"It's quiet," I say.

"Tell me a thought you've had today," she says, "that you couldn't say down there."

I think about it. "That the trees don't care who I am. That up here I could be anyone."

"You couldn't," she says. "You'd be you wherever you stood. It's the rest of them that can't see it. Someday they will. Or they won't, and we'll have each other, and hang them all."

"It's cold," she says then, which is her way of saying come down, come home, don't make me stand between you and the dark any longer than you must. But she doesn't pull me. She waits. And because she can't help herself, "Another quarter-hour. Then I'm dragging you down by the shawl, and you'll come, because I'm stronger than I look."

The red goes to grey, the grey to almost nothing, the firs only a black mass above us. At the last it's me who guides us back toward the lights coming up yellow in the valley.

We go down slower than the dark warrants, the both of us. Neither of us ready to be the first to arrive, to step back into the village and be again what the village makes us. The path is all loose stone underfoot and Margot knows it blind. Her shoulder stays near mine the whole way, ready, though she doesn't take my hand again with the cottages so near below.

"How are you," she says, partway down. Then, because she means it, "How are you, really. Not for them. For me."

No one else alive asks me the second question.

I think about lying to her, because lying is what I'm best at, and she's the one person who has earned the truth. In the end I give her a piece of it, the safest piece. "I feel awake," I tell her. "Like I've slept a long time, years, and the waking is so strange I don't know what to do with myself. Thibault dying should have broken me. It didn't. I wait for the grief to find me, and it doesn't."

What comes instead I won't say out loud on an open hill where it might carry, but the word for it is alive.

"I feel like there's a whole life I was never allowed to reach for," I say. "I can't have it, and it won't lie down."

She's quiet a few steps, and then gives me a piece of her own, so I'll not feel alone in mine. "My mother's after me again," she says. "About the Vidal boy."

"Which one."

"She hasn't settled. Any of them, so long as he's got hands and a holding." She says it light, and it isn't light at all. "It's not that he'd be cruel. They're none of them cruel, the ones they pick for you. That's what makes it—" She stops herself. "Listen to me. You've just buried your man and I'm complaining about having too many."

"What would you do," I ask her, "if you could do anything. If there were no village to answer to."

"I'd sleep late," she says at last, and it isn't the whole of it, and we both let that be. "Every day for a year. You?"

"I'd walk out of the valley. Just to know what's past the ridge."

"Past the ridge is Besseyre," she says, "and old Chastel and his sons, and they'll chase you off their goats with stones." It makes us both laugh, down the dark path, quiet so the village won't hear.

"My father's cough is worse," she says, when the laugh's done. "Pétronille's given him the coltsfoot again. She wouldn't take a thing for it."

We go a while without saying anything more. Then, not looking at me, "Was it very bad. Sunday. The banns."

"It was what it was."