Page 34 of She, Wolf, Him.

Then the words come in broken bits against Margot's shoulder. A noise at the shutter. A scrape, low down first, then up high. Higher than Papa, she says. Breathing, slow and big, on the other side of the boards. Not the goat, she says, when a man offers her the goat. The goat was screaming. She watched the crack between the planks, and the dark in it moved. Then it didn't. The goat went quiet. She was too frightened to come out, even when her mother's voice came calling. The words are small. Nobody offers her the wind.

Reynaud thanks God as though God crawled behind the faggots with the lantern. "Te Deum," he says, over the child's head, and no one answers it. The Berthou woman takes her child back, sobbing, scolding, kissing the same small head in a single breath. "Never again," she's saying, over and over. "Never, never, do you hear me. Never again." The men stare past one another toward the yard they didn't want to cross until a woman went first. "We should have gone out first," one of them says, to another, and gets no answer. Now that the child is safe in the light, two of them take a lantern out to it at last, bolder for the rescue. The bolder one stops being bold. He comes back to the byre mouth without the swagger he went out with. "You'd best come and look at this," he says, low.

The woodpile along the Berthou wall has been dragged half out of its stack, the split logs strewn without care. Up the wood of the shutter the child hid behind there are scores, four to the set, fresh and pale as new-sawn pine, deep enough to lose a finger joint in. And high. Bertrand the farrier, who can pull a cartwheel off its axle on his own, has to stand on a log butt to lay his palm over the topmost of them. He steps down quickly and wipes the hand on his coat, as though the marks had got onto his skin. "Four to the set," he says, to no one. "And the top of them past my reach." Nobody says the word for it. Reynaud's fingers find his cross and stay there.

The child hadn't invented the scrape, then. Whatever stood at that wall in the dusk while a mother barred her hens stood there long enough to pull a woodpile apart, unhurried, a thumb's width of pine from a child's held breath. Nothing drove it off. "Not one dog," one of the men says, low. "The whole lane of them, and not one barked." "They'd have barked at a wolf," another says. No one has an answer for that. They keep at it a while, low, trying to wear the strangeness out by saying it. A wolf you can starve out or trap or kill. Nobody knows what to do about a thing that chooses.

Margot stands and brushes straw from her skirt.

She starts to reach for me.

Then she remembers the lane full of eyes, the priest at the threshold, the hunter somewhere beyond the square, all the world arranged to tell us what a touch may mean. Her arm falls. The warmth remains, banked and stubborn.

By full dark the village has shut itself like a fist.

I drop my own bar across the door and build the fire high because a high fire is what you do on a night like this, and because ordinary work is a comfort when nothing else is. Across the lane I hear the Vidals' shutters drag to and the bolt go home, then another, then another, the whole hamlet sealing itself against the night and what it's supposed to bring. In the Berthou house, the youngest starts crying again and is hushed at once, fear taught to keep its voice down after dark.

I sit with all of it shut outside, and the bar buys me less comfort than it buys the rest of them. The village learned the measure of what hunts it tonight, laid out plain in four pale lines set higher than a strong man's reach. I feared with them in that byre, for the child, for every small soul out of its mother's sight. That fear is honest, and I have it yet.

All day the village wanted hands. Mine, Margot's, any woman's that would search under carts, lift straw, hold a trembling child while the men gathered courage in pairs. It asks for my labour, my silence, my decent grief over its dead. Thibault wanted a wife to keep his house, warm his bed, bear what he'd get on me, and any biddable girl would have served as well. My own father, God keep him, wanted a daughter to mind him to the threshold. I have never once in my life been wanted. I have been owed. Owed, owed, owed, passed along like a debt no one ever pays off.

Margot has known me since we were girls and held me like the better part of her world. Today she put a lantern in my path and trusted I would come. She put her fingers under mine and answered before remembering the life we are allowed.

Being wanted asks for the self I've kept small so long I'm not sure it would know how to stand if I let it up.

The Berthou child goes quiet at last. The village does not. Silence can be louder after a scare, full of shutters, prayers, the little breaths of people listening past their own walls.

Margot's lamp is the last I see across the lane. It burns a while after the others have gone out, a small yellow square held against the black, and tonight I can't see it as I've always seen it, a warmth I'm shut out of. Tonight it's one lit window on a lane the Beast walked up at dusk, easy as a neighbour going home. Her door has a bar like mine. The Berthou byre had its latch too. I watch her window until she pinches the lamp out, and then the lane is only night from end to end, with her on the far side of it. I don't lie down. I stay where I am by the low fire, the bar set, the night on the other side of it, and I keep watch on a dark I can do nothing about, for a woman I can't go to.

19

PRIEST AND HUNTER

GASPARD

A stranger has lodged among us since the summer turned, and the dead have not ceased since he came. He profits where we bury. Let him be questioned, and let the parish be kept.

— DENUNCIATION LAID BEFORE THE SUBDELEGATE AT MENDE, UNSIGNED, 1766

I've walked the girdle of this village twice in the dark and found no trail worth the name, and now the priest is waiting at the foot of the church steps at first light, which is its own kind of sign.

Reynaud doesn't keep the steps at dawn. He keeps the warm side of his own stone until the bell calls his flock in to him. He's come out into the cold ahead of it, planted himself at the foot of the grey stone stair where the lane funnels everyone abroad into the square, dressed in his full black with the surplice over it for an audience that hasn't gathered. Whatever he means to say to me, he means them to hear.

"You were out last night," he says when I'm near. He doesn't trouble to make it a question. His breath goes out white and unhurried.

"I was."

"A fine night for it. Clear. Good light for the work." His voice is mild. "Did the work prosper?"

"No." I give him the truth because a lie would please him more.

"No," he repeats, gentle. "You've gone up into the dark night after night to prove me wrong about your wolves, and come down with your coat torn and your proofs thin. Strange trade, monsieur. It prospers you and no one else." His voice is low and it carries, the trick of the pulpit, pitched to fill a stone room and louder for never being raised. "As you are most nights. The nights the Beast walks, the hunter walks. I've wondered at the neatness of it."

"That's the trade." Behind him the square is filling as it fills on a market morning, only there's no market. Berthe with her shawl pulled high. The Vidal men. A clot of women by the well who've stopped drawing water to watch. Word's run round that the priest is on the steps, and the village has come to see what he wants with the stranger. "What hunts at night gets hunted at night. You'd have me do it at noon to spare your suspicions?"

"Let him hunt," a man says, from the back. "I don't care when he walks, so long as he brings it down."

"Let him," says another, and is hushed by the woman beside him.