Page 23 of She, Wolf, Him.

I don't ask if I can. I come and sit on the bench against the wall, near enough to be company, far enough to be proper. He doesn't tell me to go, and that's the whole of the arrangement. Tonight there's a fine cold mist coming down and the light's failing early, and he works the cloth down the long barrel by feel as much as sight, his fingers easy at it, sure, the old rakes on his forearm catching what light there is.

"It comes and goes on me," he says, after a while, still at the work. "The sign. I find a thing that ought to make a trail, and it walks me three fields and ends in air. As though the country's playing me for a fool." He shifts the rifle, sights down it, sets it across his knees. "I've hunted fifteen years. I don't lose a pack like this."

"The high ground's hard," I tell him. "Stone where you want mud. The cold takes a scent before you've found it."

"It does." He doesn't sound like he believes the comfort, but he takes it from me anyway, as he's taken everything I've handed him since the hill. He's quiet a moment, his thumb moving on the stock. Then, lower, "You didn't have to come back. After your father. No one would have searched for you up there this week."

"I know," I say.

"Why did you," he says at last.

"Because you ask what the ground knows," I tell him. "No one else ever has."

"The ground's all I ask after," he says. It's a lie, and we're both courteous enough to keep it. "Your hands are cold." He doesn't look up from the stock. "Go home to your fire. The hill will keep."

"So will the fire," I say, and stay, and he doesn't argue it. He doesn't tell me he's sorry for my loss, and I'm glad of it, because everyone's said it and none of them has meant the half of what he'd mean by it without saying it at all. He gives me the full of his attention, his grey gaze softened in one of those rare slips when he forgets to keep it hard. The wanting is there in his face for one clear instant, plain, the same hunger I carry and hide, and I see him see that I've seen it. Then he bends back to the rifle, and the moment closes over. Neither of us is fool enough to open it here against a cold wall with the village a stone's throw off.

I rise to go. The space between our fingers is small enough to cross by accident. We both leave it. It costs me more to leave it than it would to cross it, and I think it costs him the same. I walk home in the dark to a house with no breath in it but the one I bring. The wanting comes with me up the lane, warm and unspent, a door I've stood at for weeks and not let myself open. But the want isn't what fills the house when I lift the latch. I put another log on the fire, wood I'm allowed to waste now. I sit in my father's chair. The house says nothing about it.

13

THE SHOW

GASPARD

The hunter spoke of the loup-garou as a man speaks of a beast he has looked in the eye. The coins came. The women crossed themselves. Not one of them thought to ask how he knew so much of a creature no living soul had faced and walked away from.

— TRAVELLER'S ACCOUNT, AUVERGNE, 1766

I've killed seventeen wolves in my life and not one of them was a devil.

I know what they are the way a butcher knows what a hog is. Teeth, fur, a hard winter's hunger, a hundredweight of muscle that wants to go on living and will open your throat to do it. I've tracked them, trapped them, shot them off a kill with the steam still coming off it. There's nothing in a wolf that a man with steady aim and cold iron can't put in the ground. That's the truth, and the truth is worth about a sou a yard in this trade, which is to say nothing at all.

So tonight I sell them the other story.

The tavern's the only room in Saint-Élie big enough to hold a crowd, and the crowd has come, near the whole valley packed in shoulder to shoulder with the doors shut on the dark. Tallow smoke, wet wool, the close animal stink of frightened people. They've left their fields and their barred houses to stand in here and have a stranger tell them what's eating them. I've made my living off that for fifteen years.

I let them settle. I let the quiet build until it's leaning on them. Then I tell them what walks their hills.

"Not a wolf," I say, and I let it sit. "I know wolves. I've killed more of them than any man in this room has seen. What's been at your people is no wolf."

I have their eyes now, every one. Even the children have gone still.

I give them the loup-garou. I give it to them whole, as the great halls pay for it and the market squares beg for it.

"It goes on two legs and four," I tell them. "It takes a man's shape by day and sheds it by dark, and no common shot will bring it down, because it's no common flesh. It's old. It was old before your grandfathers cut the first of these fields out of the trees. It doesn't care about your bells. It doesn't care about your bars, or your dogs, or your prayers."

I don't raise my voice. The trick is never the loudness. The trick is to speak of the devil-wolf in the same flat, certain tone a man uses for the weather, as a fact known and counted on, so they take the certainty for proof.

"You've heard the King sent his men," I say. "You've heard one of them killed a great wolf at Chazes last autumn, and they hung a cross on him and called the terror done." A pause. I let the bitterness up into it, and the bitterness, at least, is real. "And then your neighbours went on dying. Ask yourselves why. A wolf was killed and the killing didn't stop. Because it was only ever a wolf they killed. The terror itself doesn't lie down for lead and a King's seal."

That's the whole of the trick in a breath, and the beauty of it is that the first half is a lie and the second half is God's own truth. I've only changed the reason.

"You've buried your own," I tell them, quieter. "Every one of you can name them. The shepherd on the high shelf. The man in the lower pastures. Your Thibault, at his watch. You don't need me to tell you what's doing it. You need me to tell you it can be ended. And I'm telling you. It can be ended."

The room makes the sound I've heard a hundred rooms make, a low moan of dread that's half relief. Fingers go to crosses. "Ave Maria, gratia plena," an old woman starts, and three others take it up. The men set their jaws and stand like men again, men with a foe to kill instead of a dark to cower in.

"What does it want with us," a voice asks, out of the dark at the back. "What have we done, that it's sent to us?"