Page 22 of She, Wolf, Him.

He considers me a moment, then turns us down toward it without a word, and the men follow.

It's there. Old, like the rest, picked to nothing, a scatter of bone gone chalk-white, a flattened place in the bracken where a sick beast lay up, licked its hurts, moved on. Gaspard crouches over it a long while. The men hang back and let him.

"How'd she know," one of them says, not quite low enough. Young Pascal, wiry and weather-raw, who farms the lower strips and lost a cousin in the valleys below, back before the killing was ours, the loss of him set hard about his mouth. "Walks us right to it. Does she ever turn her face from any of it?"

"She's at every one," another mutters. "At every body, before the crows are."

"She knows the ground," an older man says, slow. "That's all it is. The girl was raised on these hills." Nobody takes it up.

Gaspard lifts his head and holds Pascal in a flat grey stare until the man studies the bones instead. Then he goes back to them.

I keep my own face quiet over what works under it.

Pascal, though. He looked away from Gaspard's stare, but the thought didn't go with it, banked in him like a coal a man means to blow on later. He buried a cousin at the start of all this, near enough a brother to him, and a sorrow with no one to answer it fastens where it can. My face is close enough to reach. A woman who's never lost in the country of the dead. Until this week I was what the village couldn't quite see, and now I've gone and made them see me. It's a poor trade. I take it anyway.

The trail gives him nothing fresh. When he stands he's grim with it, and we start the line down for home with the morning half gone and the cold gone into everyone's bones. Gaspard falls in beside me on the way down and doesn't talk, and the not-talking is easy, the easiest hour I've had in days. I'm of use up here. That sits in me warmer than it should.

The village is close and colourless after the open hill.

The women are at the well when I come down, and they stop their talk to watch me pass, the way they do now. The old pity is still in it, the poor unlucky girl, but there's a new thread laid through the pity. Their eyes follow me down the lane and I keep my back straight under them and give them nothing to carry home but my plain good morning.

Margot's across the way with her mother's baskets. She's stopped working to watch me, and her face is doing what it does when she's worried and won't say so, except that under the worry today there's a hurt held close, a question she's decided not to ask. She doesn't come over. I lift two fingers to her. She lifts hers back. We leave it there, the both of us, because the lane is full of ears and whatever needs saying can't be said in front of them. I tell myself I'll go to her tonight. There are a great many things I'm too tired to make true.

Then I come to my father's house, and he's dead in his chair.

I know it from the doorway. The fire's gone out cold, and he hasn't moved to build it. My father, whatever grief took from him, never once let the fire die. The bread I left this morning sits where I set it, not a crumb gone. He's sunk down a little, his chin to his chest, his arms loose in his lap, and his face has the slackness I've seen on better men than him a hundred times. When I take his wrist it's cool already. He's been gone some hours, I think. Gone while I was up the hill telling a hunter where a wolf might lie.

I stand there over him and wait for the grief to rise as it should.

What comes is grief with too many rooms in it. I grieve him, the man who carried me on his shoulders before my mother died and the world fell out of him. But that man went into the ground a winter ago with her, and what's sat in this chair since was only the husk of him, getting thinner, asking nothing. The losing's only finished now.

And under the sorrow, low and shameful, is the other one, and I make myself name it, worn past the strength to flinch from the worst of me. The house is mine now, emptied by inches. My mother a winter ago, Thibault a week gone, and now the last of them gone cold in his chair. There's no one left in it to feed or to mind my hours around. No one in the world set over me or under my care, no one whose breath I have to keep. It goes down like cold water, and there's not a soul in this parish I'd own that to.

I let go. I close his eyes the way I've closed so many, two fingers, gentle, practised. I do for my father what the village pays me to do for its strangers. I go out into the lane and find a neighbour and say the words. "My father," I tell the woman who opens the nearest door to me. "He's gone. Will you send for the Father?"

"God rest him," she says, and crosses herself, and calls back into the house for her man's coat. "I'll fetch Berthe to you."

The village comes, as it comes for everyone, and the long slow business of the dead begins. "I'll help you with him," Berthe says, her sleeves already rolled to the wrist. "It's not right you do him alone."

She's gentle with him, and quick. "He didn't suffer," she says, when we've got him straightened. "You can see it on him. He went down like a fire banking, in his own chair, by his own hearth. It's how he'd have asked to go, if he'd asked anyone anything this year." When we come to his face, "I'll do his face," she says. "You take his hands. It's easier that way, with your own."

They bury him beside my mother two mornings on, in the cold, with Reynaud reading the words over him in his flat dry voice and his eyes finding me twice across the open grave. Behind their grief the village is doing its sums. My mother a year in the ground, then Thibault, now him. Three graves in a year, and the dry-eyed girl who walks out with the hunter standing at the middle of every one. No one says it over open ground. They don't have to. I read it coming off them, that death has grown fond of the ground I stand on. I've laid out half of them myself. In a kinder year that would only make me useful. In this one it's starting to make me a question the village will want answered.

Even Berthe feels it. She's stood beside me over every body this village has lost. Today she keeps a pace further off at the graveside than she used to, and doesn't seem to know she's doing it. When she gives me the word a woman gives the newly orphaned, "God keep you, my lamb," she crosses herself first. Quick. A ward, not a blessing.

"He was a good neighbour," a man tells me, at the grave's edge, hat in hand. "Quiet, but he kept his word." Past his shoulder Reynaud is watching still, and I give the priest a face with nothing in it.

After, the house is quiet in a way it has never been.

I'd thought I knew its quiet. There's been little enough talk in it since my mother went. But a man in a chair makes a sound even when he's silent, a shift, the small weather of another body in a room, and now there's none of it, only me, the fire I build for no one but myself, the wind worrying at the shutters. Even the grey dog is gone, walked off at the Vidal boys' heels the day after the burying, as a dog will when a house empties, and nobody has brought it back. I keep half-turning to the chair to see does he want his cup.

I'm tired in a way sleep doesn't seem to reach.

I take stock of it, sitting by my own fire with the dark come down. There's reason enough. I've walked the hard high miles two days running, stood the cold for hours, come home to a death and a burying. My knees ache from the slopes. There's a soreness in me bone-deep, the kind a hard season lays in you, and a grief on top of it heavy enough to founder a stronger woman than I am.

I name it grief and leave it at grief, because that much is true and that much is enough. I cover the fire. I think of the hill instead, the clean cold of it, the one place lately my mind goes light. I think of how it felt to be reached for up there for what I know. The hunter comes with that thought, his quiet, the way he asks.

He cleans his rifle of an evening, outside his lodging where the light lasts longest, and when the hunt's done and the men gone to their own fires I've taken to finding my way there.