Page 33 of She, Wolf, Him.

— FOLK VERSE, MARGERIDE DISTRICT, COLLECTED 1802

The village spends the whole grey day getting ready to be afraid of the night.

Days have gone by since they carried the Crouzet man home alive, and now it's a full-moon night coming, and Saint-Élie has learned to dread it the way the village once dreaded only the dark. No one says why a beast should mind that pale light when it has minded nothing else, neither weather nor watch nor the men with guns. But fear needs a mark to point at. The great white disc coming up over the firs is the easiest one there is, so all day the women lay in extra wood, the men see the stock penned close, and Father Reynaud goes house to house leaving prayers at every door like salt against the slugs. At the wool of an evening like this one the old women hum the carding-rhymes their mothers gave them, about the wood, the dark, what walks it, pitched low so the girls learn the fear before they learn the words. Bar the door and count the flock, and set your shoulder to the lock. What walks the wood was walking there before the first stone of the church was square. And the darker one, kept for the worst winters, there are women the wood takes and does not give back. I had mine off my own mother. I could sing every verse and believe none of them.

I do my own day's work in the middle of all of it and feel none of their particular dread, only my own kind, the kind no latch touches.

I haul water. I split what kindling I can and stack it dry. The work knows me too well to need my mind, which leaves my thoughts free to go where I can't put a foot. The restlessness has been on me for days, since the well, since his fingers crossed mine and I let them. What he woke there has slipped its latch and won't go back behind it.

I see Margot once, across the lane, her arms full of her mother's washing.

She sees me see her. For one instant the old gladness is there, the lifting of her face that's been the one reliable warmth in my life since we were girls. Then she remembers, and it closes. She gives me a small nod, the kind you give anyone, the curé, a stranger at market, and she turns up her own way with the washing and doesn't stop. The place where her warmth used to be goes cold at once.

I did that. I wanted what I'd no right to, plain enough for her to read one evening. Now she carries the knowing of it closed up inside her, and there's nothing I can say that wouldn't make it worse. It goes with me the rest of the morning, heavier than the water.

Because the day means to use me hard, there's the hunter.

He's across the square with a knot of the parish men, talking the morning's hunt, his back to the open as always, that long stillness on him. I don't mean to glance his way. I do. He lifts his head as though I'd said his name, finds me over all their heads, and holds the look, a beat past anything a careful man should risk in a square full of eyes. I forget clean what I was about to say to the Vidal woman beside me at the well. I'm the one who breaks first. I have to be. But the wanting stays lit in me a long while after, an ember I can't quite stamp out. I'm angry at it, and I want it to stay.

Two of them. Two people in all the world have lately turned toward me as someone worth the trouble. I can't go toward either without losing the other. The village would burn me for the one, the church damn me for the other. The only answer I was ever taught for wanting is to put it out of sight and say thank you, and I've lost the trick.

The first cry comes while there's light enough left for Saint-Élie to see which houses choose to open.

It finds me gone down in my father's chair without meaning to be, the day's hauling heavy in my arms, and I'm at my own door before I'm full awake.

It's the Berthou woman, out in the lane with her kerchief half off and her arms held useless before her. Her youngest is gone. "Only to the woodpile," she says, when I reach her. "Only to the privy. Only to the yard. Gone since I set to barring the hens, and I called and called. She always answers me. She always—" She can't finish it, because finishing it is saying where this night might end. "Find her," she says, to all of us, to none of us. "Please. She's small. She'll be so frightened. Find her."

The lane has gone quiet.

The light isn't gone yet. The firs stand black against a low silver sky, and every house has a man at the threshold with one hand on a latch, a woman behind him with her rosary caught tight. "Who is it," a woman calls from her doorway. "Who's gone." "The Berthou youngest," comes the answer, up the lane. "The little one." We all hear the same fear in the cry. A child missing. A latch lifted. A rule broken. A little body somewhere outside the line of firelight the village has drawn for itself and called safety.

Father Reynaud is there before the men have finished glancing at one another. "God protects the faithful," he says, which is a strange comfort to offer a woman whose child has just proved a latch isn't faith enough. "Pairs," he tells the men. "No one goes alone, and no one goes past the light. The women keep the houses sealed. Lanterns at every door." His eyes pass over me once, then over Pétronille at the well, then away.

Margot steps out with a lantern swinging at her side.

She doesn't turn to me first. She studies the lane, the Berthou yard, the low sheds, every place small enough for a child and dark enough for fear to make larger. Then she faces me.

"Come," she says.

I go.

We search the way women search, close to the ground, under benches, behind barrels, in the places men step past because they're hunting for a trail and not a child. "The wash-shed, then the pen," Margot says. "Look under anything a cat could fit. Here, sweeting," she calls, soft, into the dark of the sheds. "It's Margot. Come out to the lantern." I take the goat pen. "It's only us," I call, into the pen's dark. "Come out, now. Your mother's here." She lifts the lantern without being asked when I crouch, and I duck before she can warn me about the low beam. It's caught us both too many times. We've been moving around the same village all our days, fetching strays, finding lost needles in rushes, getting younger children out from where they should never have crawled in the first place. The old work returns easily even if our mouths have forgotten how to be easy.

At the Berthou byre the air is close with hay, old milk, and the sour panic of penned animals. "She'll not have gone out the yard," Margot says, thinking aloud. "Not with the dark come down. She's in somewhere close, and too afraid to answer." Margot stands so near at the threshold that her sleeve brushes mine. The lantern shakes once in her grip. I close my fingers over hers to still it, just the one beat, practical as anything. Her fingers curl warm into mine and hold there a beat too long.

"Agnès," she says, low.

I let go.

The smallest sound comes from behind the stacked faggots by the wall. A wet little breath. Margot lifts the lantern higher.

The Berthou youngest is folded under the empty handcart, knees up, face hidden in both palms. The child is alive. At first, that is the whole world. Alive, shivering, too frightened to cry properly now that there are faces and light, the village pouring in behind us with all its fear made loud.

Margot gets there first. She goes down on her knees in the straw and makes her voice soft in a way that breaks me a little, because it's the voice she used with me when my mother was dying and I had forgotten how to be young enough to need it.

"There you are," she says. "There you are, little heart. Come out to me. Your mother's here. Come to the lantern."

The child scrambles out of the dark into her and clings on, mute at first, face buried. "I've got you," Margot says, into the small hair. "I've got you now."