Page 21 of She, Wolf, Him.

The light's already failing when he's satisfied. These shortening days give a hunt only so long, and the wood drinks what's left of the sun early. He marks the dark gathering under the firs and calls it, back down while there's light to go down by. The men don't need telling twice.

And not one of the men coming down quicker than they climbed feels what I feel, which is that the day was no waste at all.

At the foot of the pasture the hunt comes apart, the men peeling off toward their own doors with the light near gone, glad to be down and quit of it for the night. "Same muster at first light," Gaspard tells them. "Every man with a stave or better, and the Vidals bring their two big dogs. Eat before you come up. Cold men drop behind, and I won't wait for stragglers, and neither will the hill."

"And if we find it," the Berthou man says. "If we find the other one. What then."

"Then you hold the line," he says, "and stay out of my shot."

They take the orders, which a week past they'd have spat at an outsider for giving.

I take my own lane, and his hand comes to my arm. Just above the elbow, light, a stay so brief I have no time to decide what to do with it. "You held," he says, low, for me and not the square. "Most don't, their first time up. You walked it as though the ground were yours."

I've no ready answer. I understand thank-you, the flat coin I've handed men all my life for handing me my own days, but this isn't that, and the old word won't sit on it. So I give him the truer answer. "I'll come tomorrow," I tell him. "And the day after. As long as you've a use for me."

"Tomorrow, then." That's all, and it's enough.

He goes back to his men. I go up the lane alone, and the village watches me go, the glances coming off the doorways and the cracked shutters. The widow who walked out with the hunt. The strange girl who went up the hill after the Beast that killed the man she was promised to. Yesterday I was only unlucky. Tonight I'm a question they don't have the name of yet, and I can feel them worrying it over behind their walls. Let them worry. I've been theirs to name since I was christened. Tonight, for once, they're naming a thing I did with my own will, and not even their fear of me can sour that the whole way through.

My father's house is dark and close when I come in, the fire low, the one rushlight guttering to nothing. He's in his chair.

The bread I left him is near untouched. He eats less every day, a few mouthfuls to please me and even that grown rare. When I speak he answers, if at all, in a word or two, his voice thin and far, a man calling up from the bottom of a well. He's going as my mother went at the end, from grief rather than any sickness a body can name, from the slow letting-go of a man who has decided, without once saying it, that he's done. I've watched it come for weeks. Tonight I let myself see it plain. I'll lose him too, and the Beast will have no part in it, only the same grey tide that took the rest of him when she died.

I tend him as I do every night. Bank the fire, set his cup where he'll find it, say the small useless nothings you say to a man leaving by inches. There's grief in it, real grief, the kind I couldn't find anywhere in me for Thibault. And tangled through it is the knowing that when he's gone I'll be alone in this house, and that the aloneness, God forgive me, has a freedom in it I can already taste. I've come loose from the woman I was meant to be, and I can't make myself sorry enough to climb back into her.

After he's abed I stand a while at the door of his room, listening to the thin rise and fall of him. I think of the shot in the firs, the line holding after all, some of that holding mine.

The Beast is up there yet. It took the old shepherd, the man from the lower pastures, and Thibault. There will be more before the hunter ever puts it in the ground. Fear is here with me. I'd be a fool not to know it, and I've washed enough of the Beast's work. But it doesn't pin me behind the bar tonight. It sits with the smoke and the cold, part of what I'll carry up in the morning.

Outside, the wind comes down off the heights, the same wind I've stood in at the wood's edge every dusk this autumn. Tonight it's nothing but weather over country I'll walk again come morning. I have somewhere to be.

12

THE USEFUL ONE

AGNÈS

She was good with the dead. Patient, thorough, and she never once turned her face away while the rest of us did. We thought it a mercy in her. We never thought to ask where a girl learns to be so easy in a dead man's company.

— DEPOSITION OF A SAINT-ÉLIE WOMAN, UNNAMED, RECORDED AT MENDE, 1766

Gaspard tells me I have steady hands, and I don't tell him what the village has spent them on.

I've washed the dead, bound their jaws, pressed coins over stubborn lids. I've sat the long hours with the ones still dying, after the wife had gone to pieces and the sons couldn't bear the room, listening to a breath go ragged and then stop. None of it has ever made me flinch. He takes that for strength, a useful trait in a useful tool. He doesn't know I learned to make my fingers steady the same winter I learned to make my voice disappear, that I've been making myself still since I was a girl of fifteen with reasons to need it. The dead are easier than the living. They only ask to be made decent, and that I can do.

So when he sets me at the front of the line on the second morning of the hunt, I keep my hands steady.

The frost is down for the first time, a white fur over the dead grass that crunches and goes to wet under our boots. The men have steam hanging in front of them, the dogs casting low with their noses full of cold. We sweep the long shoulder of pasture east of where we went up yesterday, ground I know better than the lines in my own palm, and where the knowing's needed I give it, low. "Bear left along the wall," I tell him, when the line wavers. "The bog's to the right, under that grass that looks like grazing. It's taken a sheep before."

By midmorning he's found nothing fresher than yesterday's ewe-kill. He stands too long over clean ground, his jaw set. The men stop when he stops.

The men feel it, in their own fashion. "Not a dropping in two days," one of them says, disgusted. "It's not natural, a pack quitting good country mid-season." "Maybe it's heard about the King's man," somebody says, and for the first time in two days there's a laugh in it, small and gone quick. "Wolves you can hear are wolves you can place," one of the older men mutters, to no one. "I'd sooner hear them," another answers. "Howling. I'd take howling over this." The men near him cross themselves and close the line up tighter, and nobody laughs at them for it.

"There's a fold under the chestnuts," I tell him. "Where the slope drops to the stream. The flocks watered there in summer. If a sick beast wanted a lie-up out of the wind, it's where I'd search."

"How far's the stream."

"A quarter-hour's drop. And the fold's out of the wind."