Page 25 of She, Wolf, Him.

"Whatever's slowest," I say, and let them make of that what they're already making.

Chastel's name goes down among them and sinks without a ripple. The talk moves to whose flock has lost what. I let it move, and I think no more of him than of any other man I'll never meet.

I drain the cup and make my excuses before the drink in the room turns from grateful to bold.

Outside the cold is clean after the press of the room, and the stars are out hard and close over the black line of the hills.

I stand a moment and let the night take the smoke and the patter off me. The show's a coat I put on and a coat I take off, and the taking off is the part I never let them see. I don't know what's killing them.

"You don't believe a word of it."

I didn't hear her come out. She's a few feet off, the door fallen shut behind her on the noise, her face pale in the starlight and turned up to mine. It's a plain one, the kind a crowd forgets, dark-browed, the jaw held hard. Nothing in it asks for notice. I've given it more notice than anything else in this valley. She doesn't make it a question. She says it as she says everything, plain, like setting a stone down where it goes.

I could lie. It's my whole trade, and she's a village woman alone in the dark with the man the priest has named. The sensible move, the only move, is the easy denial and the road home.

I don't give it to her. I find I can't be bothered to spend the lie on the one soul in there that didn't buy it.

"No," I say. "I don't."

She takes that in. She doesn't seem frightened of me, or pleased to have caught me out, which is what most would be.

"Then why," she says.

"Because a true answer's no use to you." I keep my voice down, for her sake more than mine. "You've buried three it took, and your father besides. You want the thing that did it dead, not explained. I can't give you the truth and a corpse both. So I give you the corpse." I hold her eye. "And you let me. Same as the rest of them."

"I'm not the rest of them," she says. Quiet. No heat in it. Just true.

"No," I say again, the answer out too quickly. "You're not."

Neither of us does anything with that. Then she draws her shawl closer and goes past me toward her lane. I stand there, watching her go, and don't call her back, because I haven't the first idea what I'd say that wouldn't cost one or both of us more than it's worth.

My room is cold and the candle's near out and I don't light another.

I sit on the edge of the cot with the show clinging to me like the smell of the fire and let the day come apart. The coin's in my coat. The lie's done its work. The hunt's another matter.

It's failing me here. I can name the break.

The track that walks where no wolf walks. The smell, twice, in empty wood with nothing dead to make it. The kills that don't read like hunger. Tonight's pack on the hill accounts for none of it.

And the whole time, outside my one window, the valley lies black to the treeline, and the true one is somewhere on it. Abroad tonight, walking its own errand in the dark I've just finished selling, while the coin its story earned me sits in my coat. I've hunted enough ground to know the feel of a country where the killing isn't done. It isn't done. I'd stake the whole purse it's barely begun.

I do with it what I do every night. I'm too long at the trade to think denial will make a truth stay down. I set it in the dark at the back of the room where the candle doesn't reach, with the rest of what I can't yet use, and I don't carry a light across to it.

The rest of it waits in the dark. She belongs there with the whole of what this valley gives me that I can't account for, and I've set her there every night since I rode in.

Tonight I don't, not straight off. I sit in the cold with the candle gone and think about her. The starlight on her face outside the tavern. How she said I'm not the rest of them. The dark eyes that have never met mine afraid. I want her. Not as I've gone after the few before her, a warmth on a cold road, gone by morning. I want to be in whatever room she's in. I want her to go on seeing me and stay.

Then I put her away, because a man in my place can't afford her and a woman in hers can't afford me. The candle's dead. The morning comes whether I sleep or not. But I don't tell myself she's none of mine. I'm done telling myself that one. I just don't yet know what to do with its being a lie.

14

UNSPOKEN

AGNÈS

Item, that she was seen often in talk with the beast, and it troubled her not at all. The unusual ease of her in its company was remarked by several.

— DEPOSITION FRAGMENT, AN AUVERGNE WITCH-TRIAL, 1643