Page 27 of She, Wolf, Him.

I could tell her she's wrong. The lie's right there, easy, and she'd let me have it, as she lets me have everything. But she'd know. I'd know she knew. I haven't got it in me to spend a lie on Margot, who has never spent one on me.

So I say nothing.

"Right," she says, quiet, to the sock. "Right."

The warmth leaves her face by degrees. It shutters, the way a window goes dark when the candle's carried into another room, and what's left is careful, quiet, turned from me. There's no hum under her breath now. She sews. The silence that was the best of what we had goes hard between us, and I sit with a child's torn shirt in my hands and the one word that would mend this caught in my mouth, where it has lived for years. Ma mie. I don't say it. I've never said it. Tonight, for the first time, the not-saying feels less like keeping her safe and more like a door I'm shutting in her face.

I almost tell her there's nothing in the hunter worth what it's costing her right now. It would be a lie, and a crueller one, because he's worth that much and she knows it. I haven't even the courage to tell her I'm sorry, because sorry would mean naming what it's for. I've lost a mother, a father, a man I was promised to, and not one of those losses frightened me the way this one does, the slow quiet losing of the one person who ever saw me whole.

"I should get back before dark," I say, when I can't bear the quiet any longer.

"Yes," she says. "You should." And as I reach the door, to her work and not to me, "The broth's yours. Take the cup with you."

She doesn't see me to the door.

The light's going amber and long by the time I cross the square, and the village is out in the last of it, taking what comfort there is in numbers before the dark sends them behind their doors. On the church step two men argue low over tonight's watch. "You had the early watch the last two," one says. "It's your turn at the dark hours." "The dark hours are when it walks," the other answers. "I've children. I'm no use to them dead."

They watch me come. They've taken to it lately, a turning of heads, a dropping of voices.

Father Reynaud is on the church step in his black. He finds me the moment I'm in the square, and stays on me.

His eyes on me now are colder and more patient than the old weighing. He's a man turning something over to see what it's made of, and I know without being told that I'm the thing. He's reading me for the answer to a question the village has only started to ask, and the answer he wants is one that ends with someone to blame.

I don't drop my eyes. I hold his until he's the one to look away, toward the church door, pretending he meant to all along. It costs me, and the cost is the old anger risen with nowhere to put it, and not only at him but at the watching, the weighing, the long habit of making a thank-you out of fury. I make one now, as I always do, and feel the anger go hard instead of gone.

His attention leaves me and finds the edge of the square, where old Pétronille sits by the well with her basket of dried stalks, bent and small, apart as she always is. His eyes rest on her a moment too, harden, move on. The priest is always watching someone. Today it's the two of us, the herbwoman and me, the ones who don't fit the pattern this place wants its women cut to. Pétronille has kept her place at the margin and it has kept her alive. I've just walked out of mine, up a hill, beside the man they're learning to hate.

And across the square, against the tavern wall, the hunter.

He's watching the crowd, or letting it think he is. I find him before I permit myself to. The same pull that's been waking in me since the night he rode in answers now over the heads of the whole village. In the open square, I want a man I have no honest place to want, and the wanting doesn't care what it costs me or her or anyone.

I make myself break from him. I walk faster. The hunger comes with me.

The house is dark, cold, mine when I come into it. The silence in it is the new kind, the kind with no father's breath in the corner to soften it.

I could have stayed at the hunt's edge tonight, found some use for my hands, some reason to be too tired to feel. I rake what's left of the fire together and sit by it in the dark. The day comes back at me in pieces. The hunter's touch, the careful, sure way he works, and what he might do that has nothing careful in it at all. On the heel of that, guiltily, Margot's wrist, the warmth of it under my thumb.

I will not spend the wanting tonight. That at least is mine to decide. Tomorrow I'll go to Margot. I'll bring bread, or mending, or any ordinary work that lets me sit beside her without asking her to name the hurt I put there.

When I reach to set the latch, a red thread from her mending is caught on my cuff. I wind it loose carefully, the little curl of wool bright against my chapped fingers, and set it on the table where I'll see it at first light. The promise looks smaller there than it did when I made it. I leave it there anyway.

15

WRONG TRAIL

GASPARD

The beast passed through the hollow and left no mark on the soft earth where a mark must lie. This is not the way of any natural creature.

— HUNTSMAN'S JOURNAL, THE MARGERIDE, 1765

The body's still warm when I reach it, and that's the first of what this morning won't explain.

They found him at first light, and they came for me white-faced and useless. "It's taken another," the first of them said, when I'd got the door open. "Down in the hollow. The drover, from the inn."

"Who found him."

They looked at each other. "The innkeeper's lad," one said. "Fetching the mules out. He came back white as whey and won't say the half of it."