Page 24 of She, Wolf, Him.

"What you've done is for your priest to weigh," I say. "My work's the plainer one. What it's done, and what I'll do to it."

At the back, against the wall, the priest watches me do his work for him.

Reynaud hasn't moved since I started. He stands with his hands folded and nothing in his face. Cold satisfaction sits behind that stillness, worse than anger. I've just told his flock that an unkillable evil walks among them on account of what they are, and that's the sermon he's been preaching since before I crossed the valley, only I've dressed it for the market and he never could. He'll let me have tonight. A man like that can wait, standing where he's always stood, with God in his mouth and a scapegoat in his eye.

And near the front, where the candlelight reaches, the still one watches me too.

Agnès. A head taller than the women crowded round her, her shawl up, her face giving the room nothing. The whole tavern leans into my devil. She doesn't. She listens as she does everything, level and quiet, from somewhere a half-step back, and I have the sudden discomfort of a man who's caught one sober face in a drunk room. I don't let my eyes hold on her. I've enough trouble in this valley without the priest marking where the stranger's attention lands.

I bring it home. "I'll have it before the snows," I tell them. "I've cut its sign on your own high ground. It can be killed by a man who knows the proper way of it, and I do. When it hangs on your church wall, you'll know your own parish again." The coin comes then, pressed into my palm by people who haven't the bread to spare. "God keep you, monsieur," a woman says, pressing a sou into my hand. "For my man," says another, with two worn deniers. "He's on the watch again tonight." I take it all, because a man who works for nothing is hiding a reason. The show is bought.

The crowd breaks into talk and drink, and the formal part of it gives way to the other part, the questions a man gets once the fear's loosened his tongue.

The priest has gone, back to his cold church, and the room eases the moment his black is out of the door. The keeper's boy can't draw it fast enough. The cask is up on the trestle with the bung out and a line at it, and the men who were grey at the jaw an hour past are red at the cheek now and shouting each other down over what they'll do to the thing when it's hung. "Skin it," one says. "Burn it," says another, "and the ashes in the river." "Eat the heart," says a third, a big slow man, to a shout of laughter. He doesn't laugh with them. He may mean it.

Somebody gets a bench under him, stands on it, and gives them a drinking song from the low country about a miller's wife, in a voice better suited to calling sheep. At the last verse he stops and makes a new one on the spot, about the King's man and the King's man's gun. It scans badly. It gets a cup thrown at him and the whole room roaring the line back. I've had rhymes made on me before. None I'd have paid to hear twice.

A wager starts at the far trestle on what the carcass will weigh, sous laid down on the board in a row, the keeper holding the stakes in his apron. Coin they hadn't an hour ago to spare for bread, laid on a wolf's weight, and nobody in the room sees the joke of it but me. A man doesn't bet on the weight of a devil.

A pedlar kept in by the dark and glad of it has the Beast outrunning a post-horse along the high road for a mile. By his third cup it's two. By his fourth it's carried off a calf over a wall the height of a man. Nobody stops him.

Near the fire an argument starts as arguments start in drink, low and then not, over whether the Father has the right of it after all, a scourge and a sentence, and one man has another by the shirt with the floor still between us. I put a cup in each of their hands. "Drink to the hunt," I tell them. "Argue over it when it's on the church wall." They drink.

The keeper charges me double for mine and says so, grinning. "A devil's price for a devil's story, monsieur." I pay it. He's the only man in the room who's had honest dealing out of me tonight, and I'd sooner be robbed by him than blessed by the priest. I've had more wine than I meant to by now.

A knot of them keeps me by the fire with a cup I didn't ask for. They want the stories. Has he seen the King's hunters, the famous ones. Did he ride with them.

"I've crossed their trail," I say. "I've never ridden with a man I'd trust at my back." I drink. "D'Enneval, the Norman they sent first, brought his own dogs and his own pride, and went home by midsummer with neither worth the road. Antoine de Beauterne shot his wolf at Chazes and let the court call it the Beast because the court wanted it called that. A wolf does not become a devil because a King needs a victory by harvest. They wasted two years and a deal of powder proving what I'd have told them for the price of this cup. You don't kill what's here with a royal warrant. You kill it with patience, cold iron, and a man who isn't in a hurry to be knighted."

"And what did the King pay you for yours," a man asks, sharp, "to speak so free of his hunters."

"The King doesn't know my name. He signs my warrant with other men's hands. I don't speak free of him. I speak free of men who shoot from the saddle and call it a hunt."

That gets a grim laugh out of them, the laugh of men who've never had a thing from a King but a tax.

A drover I don't know, in for the market and stranded by nightfall, leans in. "Any of our own still after it? Hill men. The ones who'd know the ground."

"Here and there." I turn the cup. "There's old Chastel and his sons, over Besseyre way. Run goats, poach what they please, know the backcountry better than any map. But they're not hunters, they're hill farmers with old guns, and they hate every soul that isn't blood to them." I set the cup down. "They won't be the ones to end it. Men like that catch nothing but rabbits and grudges."

"What'll you do with it," a man asks, "when you've got it. The body."

"Hang it where your children can see it. Let them put their hands in its fur and learn its teeth. Fear dies faster when it's got a face that's stopped moving."

"What does a devil cost," a man asks then, and it's the most sensible question I've had all night. "When you've killed it. What's the price of it."

"More than a wolf," I tell him. "Less than a winter of graves."

"Has it a name," a boy asks, before his mother can hush him. "A true one?"

"It's had a hundred, in a hundred years of parishes. The one it wears now is yours. The Beast of the Margeride, they're calling it below. They'll be calling it worse by spring, if it's not stopped."

"It'll be stopped," I tell them. "Inside the fortnight you'll have it on your church wall to look at, whenever you're afraid. And after that you'll have your winter back."

"Will it come into the village," a woman asks, and the room turns toward her, because it's the question under all the others.

"It goes where the food is," I say. "You've penned the food. That's what the wall and the watch are for."

"What does it eat," the same boy asks, before his mother can stop him twice.