Page 20 of She, Wolf, Him.

"Sign," he says. "We're beating for sign. What we find, we'll read together."

They listen to him as they'd listen to no other outsider, because he carries the King's paper and the rifle, and because doing what he says beats doing nothing, which is the whole of what they've had till now.

Reynaud is there at the edge, in his black, not part of the ring and not leaving it. He named the hunter to the village. He's been saying it in the tavern since, and it's gone mouth to mouth till it reached even me, and now the hunter has the parish's own men gathered round him and is about to lead them up the hill like a captain. The priest watches with his hands clasped and his face shut, and I wouldn't want to be what he weighs behind it.

Margot is across the square with her mother's baskets, stooped over them the way she does whenever she's afraid for me and won't say so. I give her the smallest shake of my head, and she believes it no more than I do.

Then Gaspard lifts his head and finds me at the edge of the crowd. The others' eyes touch me and slide off. His hold.

"Agnès." Not loud, but the square is bent toward him and so it carries. The whole gathering turns. I feel the heat come up my neck and keep my chin level under it.

"She's laid out all but one of the souls this beast has taken," he tells the men. "She knows this ground better than the lot of you who farm it. Where they grazed, where they walked, where each was found." He gives the question back to me. "You knew the dead. You won't lose your head when the dogs lose theirs. Walk it with me."

The men shift. "A woman, on the line," somebody mutters, not loud enough to be made to answer for it. It isn't done, and three or four faces say so. But none of them puts it to the man with the King's seal.

"I'll come," I say.

And there it is, under the proper dread any woman with sense would feel, that I do feel, I'm no fool, I've buried what's up there. Under it, a lift, bright and shameful, at being asked. At being wanted for what's behind my eyes and not for what my hands can carry or what my body's worth to a man with a field to stock.

The murmur rises behind me as I cross the stones to him. Let it rise. Reynaud's gaze fastens and stays, not the old lingering weight he keeps for me at Mass but something sharper, newly woken. Now I'm a woman standing of her own will beside the man he's named to the parish. I keep my face to Gaspard. I've handed the priest a fresh page to read me by.

By midday we're high up, strung in a ragged line across the brown shoulder of the pasture where it climbs to the firs, beating up through the bracken with the dogs casting ahead. The cold that was only bracing in the square grows mean here, finding every gap in the wool.

I keep to the front, near Gaspard, because the front is where the knowing of the land is wanted. I tell them where the paths run that a man alone would take. The shepherd's track to the summer grazing. The cut through the chestnuts where the man from the lower pastures came down at dusk. The far fold where Thibault stepped off the night they lost him. The last ground they walked is more familiar to me than my own door, and the grief of walking it now is mine to carry quiet, because grief isn't what the hunter brought me up here for.

Gaspard says little. He goes head down, reading the earth as he reads everything. "This seep," he says, when we come to it. "Here in summer?"

"Year round. It never dries. The flocks water here on the way up."

He takes my answer with a nod and asks the next, at a stretch of cropped grass. "A flock would hold here."

"They do. It's sweet grazing, the shepherds say."

And later, where the path forks. "The cut through the chestnuts. Who uses it."

"The chestnut men, in season. No one, now."

He doesn't doubt a word I give him. After a lifetime of men who treat what I say as weather to be waited out, there's a strange plain pleasure in being believed the first time. And I understand, as he works, that he doesn't drive the slope as though he'll flush the Beast at noon with farmers and frightened dogs. Today is for the lay of the country and the men's eyes, so the parish sees the outsider leading the hunt and not skulking behind its dread. The real killing he'll do another way, and not in daylight.

The men come up loud with their dread, talking it down rough and constant. "My grandfather saw one taken, in the low country," somebody says early on. "Big as a donkey, he swore it." "Talk of something else," another tells him. "I'm not afraid," the first man says, too loud, and the line laughs, thin, and goes on. The higher we climb the quieter they go, until by the time the firs stand close above us there's no talk left in them, only the wind, the dogs, a dozen men breathing hard at the black under the trees.

The dogs feel it worse. As we come up under the first firs they quit casting and fall back among us, hackles up, bellies low, one setting a thin whine going till a man cuffs it quiet. Not one will go in under those trees, and I can't fault them. The wood holds itself shut, the firs close and dark, the light not reaching the floor of it. We stand at the edge of it and none of us speaks. It's the same dread the dogs have, only slower to reach a person, the certainty that the dark under those trees isn't empty, that a watching shape stands just inside the treeline and has stood there a long while. The firs give us no proof, only our own held breath and the drip off the needles. Not one of us will be the first to say it.

The Berthou man's fowling piece jerks up to his shoulder. "There," he says, and the shot cracks before Gaspard can reach him. Bark flies from a fir a few paces to our left. Men duck into one another. A dog bolts between their legs, pulls its lead tight, hauls its master sideways. I catch the man by his coat before he falls across the other gun coming up and drag him down with me into the bracken.

"Guns down." Gaspard's voice reaches us through the ringing. He takes the Berthou man's barrel and bears it down. "Every one."

The other muzzle sinks. The dog is caught, held between its master's knees. Nobody speaks. Beyond the splintered trunk there's nothing to shoot, and the Berthou man won't look at it.

"Hold where you are," Gaspard tells us. "Nobody loads till I say."

I want to be down off this hill. I get up anyway, my knees wet through the wool, and take my place beside him. When he asks which way the slope falls under the bracken, I can still tell him.

Then we come on the kill he's been angling the line toward this past half-hour.

It's old, days old. A ewe dragged in under the firs, opened, left where she fell, the ribs bare and white where the crows and the cold have been at her, the fleece in tufts over the needles. I've seen a hundred ewes a wolf has had, and so has every man here. A loosening goes down the line at the sight of it, breath blown out, low muttering. "Only a ewe," a man says, and the relief's wide open in it. "A wolf's supper." "This we know," says another. "This we've known all our lives." A torn ewe is a grief they understand.

Gaspard crouches over the bones a long while, shifts them, reads the earth I can't. When he stands he pitches it loud enough to carry down the line. "Wolves. A pack, four or five, working this high country a good while now." He doesn't say the rest, that this is the answer he's wanted, that a pack of plain wolves can be trapped, shot, strung on a wall for the parish to cheer. But I've come to read him, and I see the ease he takes from those poor bones, the kind he finds nowhere else.