Page 26 of She, Wolf, Him.

Margot is already at the hearth when I come in, her fingers busy with mending that doesn't need the care she's giving it.

She hasn't heard me come in. I stop in the doorway with her unguarded before me, the firelight on the side of her face, her head bent over a sock she's turned three times already. Longing and guilt arrive together, too quick to keep one from the other. Longing, because she's the one warm place in my life, and I've spent these last weeks looking past her at a man with grey eyes and a low voice. Guilt, for the same. I've been somewhere else while she sat here mending. She has felt it. She has said nothing, because saying nothing is the kindness we have always done each other.

Then she looks up. Her whole face opens, glad, plainly glad, and the gladness goes into me like a blade I've earned.

"You came," she says. "I thought you'd be up at the hunt." She tips her chin at the mending basket. "Take the shirt with the elbow through. Denis is on his third this season. That boy could wear a hole in a millstone." Fondness tugs at her mouth when she says it, and worry with it. There's talk of putting him with a mule-string on the Saugues road come spring, if she can keep him clothed well enough for a man to take him on.

It startles half a laugh out of me, the first of the week. "The hunt keeps daylight hours." I take the stool across from her and pick up the shirt, the elbow gone through as promised. On the board between us she has left a heel of black bread and a cup of thin broth gone lukewarm, covered with the clean half of a cloth to keep the ash off. She doesn't say she kept it for me. She doesn't have to. Margot has always known the measure of my hunger before I did, whether it was bread after a long morning or a quiet corner where no one would ask me for my face. I tear the bread in two and give her the larger piece, as I've done since we were girls and both of us knew she would only give it back if I let her.

Her father sleeps in the corner under his blanket, his breath going in and out with a soft catch in it, the only measure the cottage keeps. The younger ones are out with the flock while there's light. This is the one place in my life I've never had to make myself small.

"Berthe's rheumatics are at her again," she says, comfortable, into the work. "My mother sent me over with the liniment. She took it, and then she told my mother the price of every leaf in it, as though it were tithed." She holds out her wrist instead of laughing, a bright secret. "Smell. I traded three eggs for it off the Saugues pedlar. Don't tell my mother. She'd say a goat-girl doesn't need to smell of anything but goats."

I set the shirt aside and take her wrist, and her sleeve slips back a little. The skin under it is warm from the fire on that side, soft against my fingers, and she turns her palm up to give me more of it.

The soap smells faintly of flowers, the pedlar's idea of them, and I bend to it. There's wool and smoke about her as there always is, and under them, where her cuff has kept it close, the small extravagance, three eggs' worth, and she's saved the first of it for me.

I ought to laugh and tell her it was worth them, but I don't. I hold her wrist and look at what I'm holding. The inside of it is pale where the sun never reaches, the skin thin there with a blue thread showing under it, and her work has left no roughness in that one place, so my thumb finds it and stays.

The sock has gone quiet in her lap, and Margot, who can't sit through a Mass without her hands at something, lets it lie.

I lower my head again, though there's nothing left to learn about the soap, and breathe it anyway, close enough that my breath comes back off her skin warm. Her fingers shift, once, and settle deeper into my hand.

Her father breathes in the corner, in and out with the catch in it, and I count three of them before I look up, not ready yet to give the wrist back.

She's watching me with the smile still there, gone small, and she isn't saying anything, which Margot never does.

"Well?" she asks at last, quieter than she says most things.

"Worth the eggs."

"Three," she says, without taking her hand back. "Good ones."

The little complaint makes me smile, and the smile is easier than what's under it. I let my thumb go over the pale place one more time, slow, because it's the last I'll allow, and then I let her go. She draws her sleeve down without hurry, smooths the cuff flat over the place my thumb was, and picks up the sock, and a moment passes before the needle moves.

I take up the shirt, wanting the wrist back before the needle's threaded, and thread it anyway.

"How's your mother?" I ask, in the voice I keep for the square. "And your father."

"Cross, the both of them, which means well. His cough's eased enough to complain about the soup. She's worn to a thread and won't sit down to eat, so we're all fed and she's not. You'll eat that bread here or I'll hear of it." She takes the shirt back a moment and holds it up to the light. "It'll sit. God gave that boy elbows like flint."

Tonight the ease doesn't hold. I feel her not-asking underneath it before she asks.

She tucks a strand of my hair back under my kerchief where it's come loose, her fingers brushing my temple, quick and certain, as she's done since we were girls. "You look tired," she says. No edge in it. Only the old care, the only care in this village that's never asked anything back.

"I'm always tired."

"Not like this. There's a grey in your face I've not seen before. You wear it like your mother did." She goes back to her sock. A few stitches. Then, too lightly, her eyes down on her work, "The hunter. He talks to you. More than the rest."

There it is.

"He talks to everyone," I say. "He's selling them all the same wolf."

"Not like that." She doesn't look up. Her needle stops. "He asked at the trough whether you'd be up the hill again. He didn't ask after anyone else." A stitch, pulled through slow. "I've known you since we were small. You've never looked at a man the way you look at him when he's not watching. You know it isn't only talk."

"I don't begrudge it." Her voice does something halfway through, because that's Margot, she can't even begrudge right. "I don't. He's just—" She shakes her head at her own hands. "He doesn't look at you like he's pricing you. I've had the pricing all my life. He looks at you like he's reading you, and that's worse, because you like it."

Her needle starts again before she says the rest. "I'm not asking you to stop." Her voice has gone careful, stitch by stitch. "I'm not. I only want you to look at it with your eyes open. All your life you've been handed things and told to be grateful. Whatever you do, Agnès, do it with your eyes open." A stitch, another. "You'd tell me. If there was ever anything I needed to know. You'd tell me, and not let me hear it from the square."