Page 30 of She, Wolf, Him.

He asks like he means to listen to the answer, which is rare enough that I answer past the safe edge of it without checking my step.

"I was born up the lane there. I'll die somewhere I can see it from, most like." I mean it to sound dry, and it comes out barer than that. "There was a marriage that would have settled me a half-mile off. He died. The one it took before the drover." I don't say what the dying gave back to me. "So now there's just the house, the work, the hill."

"And the wanting to walk up into the wood and not come down," he says.

I stop on the path. I never said that. I've never said that to a living soul. "Why would you say that."

"Because you watch the high ground like a door you've been told not to open." He says it plainly, no triumph in it. "I've been watching this valley a month. You're the only one in it who looks past the last houses instead of barring it out."

He sees too much. The cleverer course, the safer one, would be to laugh it off, to be the dull good woman he can stop noticing. I don't take it. I'm so tired of being safe.

"You give a deal of yourself away, studying everyone so close," I say instead. "And nothing back. You're good at the asking. Not one true word about yourself the whole way up this path."

That earns me the barest edge of a smile I've had off him, a small crook at the corner of his hard mouth, gone almost before it comes. "Better at the asking than the answering. It's kept me fed."

"It's kept you alone."

He doesn't answer that. We've reached my door. He sets the bucket down beside it. Neither of us moves in the dark. I'm aware of him as I am of a fire I'm standing too near, the heat of a body that runs warm, the breadth of him, the old rakes hidden up the one forearm under the sleeve. He's a hard man who kills for his bread and tells lies for it too, and I'm a woman the whole valley has begun to watch. Standing this close to him after dark is a risk I can reckon the full cost of.

I stand close to him anyway. That's mine to choose.

He doesn't take the moment. That's what undoes me, in the end, more than any taking would. He gives me a small formal nod. He turns and goes down into the dark toward his cold borrowed room, and leaves me the choosing for some other night.

I stand there until the dark has him.

Inside, I stand a moment with the door still open, slower to bar it than I ought to be, because to bar it is to shut out the lane and him with it, the last place I saw him go. I'm not ready yet to shut that away. Then, from off past the last houses where the pasture climbs to the wood, a sound. Low and dragging, like a weight drawn over stone, gone as soon as I've caught it. A beast in the trees, or a gate on a bad hinge, or nothing my ears should be trusted with at this hour. It doesn't come again. It doesn't need to. Somewhere down the lane a dog starts up, two short barks, and is hushed by a voice through a wall. The whole village is listening tonight. I drop the bar.

The fire's down to coals. I build it up because the work gives me a task, then stand with my back to the barred door and listen.

I can hear them, faint, two or three houses off, voices low over the day's death. I've heard the murmur for weeks, and since the drover it's grown a harder edge. Tonight the words come clear. "He's the only newcomer under God in this valley since the dying began," a man's voice says, low. "Name me another."

"He rooms at the widow's, at the edge of the lane," another says. "A man could look through that room while he's up his hill. See what a man who kills for coin keeps by his bed."

"A King's paper that might be paint, for all any of us can read of it," says a third, easy, already half decided. "He came, and the dying came with him. What kind of people would we be not to wonder."

I hear what they're building, out there in the dark. I've seen this village make a monster out of less. And the hard fairness in me rises against it, hot and sudden, because it's wrong, it's simply wrong, and I have the facts. The men who found the drover ran to fetch the hunter, and he went down into that hollow alone when not one of them would go near it. I could stand in the square tomorrow and say so.

Fear wants a face. The killing was here before his boots ever touched the road.

I won't, of course. A woman who speaks up for the suspected stranger only ties herself to him in their eyes, and I've trouble enough of my own gathering. But the impulse is there, sharp enough to surprise me. I stand there in my own cold kitchen and have to ask myself why I should care so much what they do to a hard stranger I've known a handful of weeks.

The answer remains in me, in the place his fingers crossed mine. He saw me, understood what was there, and didn't flinch from it or try to take it. No one has ever done that. The man I was promised to never did. The priest who blesses my cage never has. Even Margot, who loves me, would still have me be a little less than I am so as to fit the life she can offer. He saw the size of me, and he let me be it. Then he walked away and left me my own.

I am angry at myself for caring this much. I am angrier still at the village that will hang the thing it can't catch on the nearest neck it can reach, and his is nearer than the truth.

I sit down on the stool by the fire and I am very still, as I've trained myself to be still since girlhood, and for once the stillness has nothing to do with hiding what's under it. The flames go up and fall. I turn it over in the firelight and see it plainly, this one wanting of my own, and I stop trying to put it down.

17

THE ONE WHO LIVED

GASPARD

He said the beast stood upright, and then went down upon four legs and came at him. The fever was high in him by then. We did not write his words in the register.

— SURGEON'S NOTE, MALZIEU PARISH, 1766

The man is still breathing when I reach him, and that's the first new fact this country has shown me in a month.