Page 19 of She, Wolf, Him.

"I couldn't come near you. I stood there like a stone." The rest of it doesn't need saying between us.

"I know," I say. "I saw you. It was enough."

What I don't tell her is where it goes when I let it. That it isn't only the high ground and the open miles. That there's a man who sluices the hunt off his arms at the well of an evening, the old rakes gone pale up one of them. A man with a low dry way of asking what's behind my eyes, as though my answer might be worth the having. The thought of him comes up in me hot and unbidden over a grave not a week cold. I lock that away alongside her name.

Margot is quiet beside me. Too quiet. She hums when she's easy, a tuneless under-the-breath sound she doesn't know she makes, and she isn't humming now. When I glance over, hurt works across her face before she catches it and smooths it away. I let her smooth it. I'm a coward, and I think that if I read it plain I'd have to answer it, and I have no answer that wouldn't cost one of us. She heard what I said just now, what I didn't, and maybe the man in the silence. We keep each other's silences, as we always have. The old silence was the two of us in the hay-store with the rain coming down on the thatch, shoulder to shoulder, the whole frightening world shut outside the door. This one has a man in it now.

At the foot of the hill the lane forks, my father's house up the arm that bends toward the pasture and hers facing it across the width of the lane, and we stop at the parting as we've stopped a hundred evenings.

"Go in," she says. "Bar your door." The hunter's words in her mouth, and it very nearly makes me smile.

"I will."

"And swear me this." She's looking up the lane past my house, toward the hill we've just come down. "Up there, you stand at its edge every evening now. Stay on this side of the trees. Whatever you go up there for. Swear you won't go in."

"I swear it," I say, and it's the easiest true vow I've made all day.

"Good," she says. "Now I'll have something to hold over you when I'm old."

She doesn't go, though, until I'm at my own gate. She means to see me to my door before she crosses to hers, the lane's width of dark and no more, and neither of us says so. I watch her cross. When her door shuts on her, the cold comes in where she stood, like a shutter drawn over a lit window.

My father's house is dark but for the fire, and my father is in it. The broth I left him at noon has gone cold beside his chair. He hasn't stirred in days. I drop the bar across, for him, for the hunter, for the thing in the trees. I sit on the low stool by the hearth where the heat can reach my shins, and for a while I don't think at all. I let the fire sink and the day settle over me like silt.

When the thinking comes, it comes all at once after I've held it off too long.

I'm caught. There is the edge of the wood, the open country past it, the freedom I've reached for since I was a girl and never had a name to give it. There is Margot, warm and certain, mine in every way but the one the world would never allow us. There is the hunter, waking this hunger in me with nothing but a question and a pair of grey eyes, a man who will take his wolf, collect his coin, then be gone down the mended road before the first snow.

Three-and-twenty years forbidden to keep anything of my own, and now that I'm awake to it I'm greedy as a child, with no room in one life to feed it.

I bank the fire at last. The bar is down across the door. The dark is outside, and so is the wood. Margot's warmth is still in my palm. His question waits with the coals. The name I never say stays with me, unsaid. They are small things. They are mine. I keep them, and sleep.

11

THE HUNT BEGINS

AGNÈS

The men went up with their dogs and their staves to drive the Beast off the heights. They never knew it came down among them at dusk and warmed itself at their fires.

— FRAGMENT, HUNTSMAN'S CHRONICLE, HAUTE-LOIRE, 1764

The morning the hunt goes up is the first hard cold of the year, the sky scoured a high thin blue, the breath of every man in the square hanging white before his face.

I come down as they gather. I tell myself it's because the dead were mine. I washed two of them, closed their eyes, bound their jaws. The third they kept from me, as they keep a widow from her own. A woman has a right to see the men go up after what made her that work. It's true enough to say to anyone who asks. The rest of why my feet bring me there before the morning's chores are rightly done is that for once the men of Saint-Élie aren't only barring their doors and bowing their heads. They're taking their fear uphill, and I'm so tired of the praying I could scream.

They've gathered by the church wall, a dozen and more coming in off the nearer farms, the dogs milling underfoot, staves and two or three old fowling pieces among them. Gaspard stands at the head of it, the one man not afraid to keep his back to the open square. He has them in a loose half-ring.

"We go up in a line," he's telling them, his voice low and even, carrying anyway, sure of where he stands. "Shoulder to shoulder and slow, the dogs out front, and the dogs stay leashed till we're past the wall. Nobody runs ahead of the line and nobody drops behind it. If the dogs strike, you hold where you are and you shout."

A man works himself up to asking it. "And if it comes at the line?"

"Then hold. It wants the ones who run. It can't spend itself on a line that holds. You're not going up to be heroes. You're going up to be a wall that walks. The shooting's mine."

"And the dogs," the Berthou man asks. "If they won't go in under the trees?"

"Then we go in without them. The dogs answer to their own noses. You answer to me."

"What are we beating for," an old man asks. "Wolves, or the other."