Page 35 of She, Wolf, Him.

"And if he doesn't bring it down," a third man says, "then what. We're out our fear and our coin both."

"I would have you account for yourself," Reynaud says, and lets it sit. "Four graves since you came to us, monsieur, a fifth man torn with only God's mercy holding the breath in him, and now the Beast at a shutter in the village lane, a child a plank's width from its claws. The Beast was here before you, the village will say. So it was. But it fed slow and it fed seldom, and then a stranger rode in off the Saugues road with a King's paper no man here can read, and the dying quickened in his wake." His fingers settle on the wooden crucifix at his breast, and he swings from me to them, the half-ring of grey faces at his back. "I am an old man and a simple one. I only ask who profits when a village bleeds. The widow does not. The orphan does not. The hunter is paid by the head. He stood in your tavern and promised you the Beast on your church wall inside a fortnight. I ask only that the parish keep his count with him."

It's well made. I'll grant the old serpent that, the same as in the survivor's yard. He's taken the rigged count, the first man already days dead when I crossed the valley, and laid it down so the arithmetic does the accusing for him and leaves him clean of it. I've talked clear of worse-fed mobs than this. The trade says be easy. Give them their wolf and walk out with the morning still mine.

"The dead are dead by the Beast, Father, not by me. I've put its kind in the ground in the north, in the Vivarais, and I'll put it in the ground here. Ask me what I profit when your wolf's hung on your wall. A hundred livres and my name. Ask me what I profit while it's walking. Nothing. Your arithmetic runs backwards."

That's when he brings out the pouch.

He has it ready in the breast of his cassock, a small purse of stitched leather worn soft with handling, and holds it up so the gathering sees it pass between us. "Then take this," he says. "I had it of the curé at Saugues, who had it blessed at the shrine. Lead, monsieur, only lead, ball and shot, but lead that's lain a night on the altar under the Host." His dark eyes don't leave my face. "Silver would be the surer thing against what walks here. We're a poor parish with none to spare a hunter. But this much grace we can give. Carry it. Load it. If your beast is only a beast, you've lost nothing but your pride, and if it's the other, you'll have the one shot in your gun that can end it."

The square goes quiet around the offer, every stare gone from the priest to me, waiting to see the King's hunter take God's help and be one of them, or refuse it and be the thing the priest has spent a month teaching them to see. "Take it, monsieur," an old man says, from the side, not unkindly. "What harm can it do. Take it, and God with you." "Take it," another joins in. "What manner of man says no to help."

And I can't make my arm go out for it.

The reasoning's sound enough. A blessing is a word said over metal, and a word changes nothing in the metal. I could swallow that long enough to pocket the pouch and keep the peace. What I can't swallow is older and lower, coming up the back of my throat with a heat I've not let myself feel in years. I've stood in a square like this one, before a priest like this one, watching a soft leather pouch held up just so while a man I belonged to was put to the question because he had no answer the blessing would take. My arm stays at my side.

"I'll not load your blessed shot," I tell him, level, which costs me more than he'll know. "Lead is lead. I bless every ball I fire with the only prayer that's ever worked, which is that it flies straight. Keep your altar grease for men who need a story told over their dying." I make myself unclench. "I've watched what a village does when it trades a beast it can hunt for a devil it can only blame. It stops looking for the wolf. It starts looking at its neighbours."

"He won't take it," a woman says, out loud, in the middle of the quiet, half in wonder. "He won't take God's own blessing on his gun."

"He's right," a man says, half under his breath. "The blessing didn't keep the shepherd." He's hushed at once, from three directions.

"A man says no to the Church," an old voice says, from the back, "in this parish, in this year. God help us all."

"Keep your blessed lead, Father," I say, and turn to the ring of them. "And keep your count. When I've brought your Beast down off the mountain, you can count what's left of the dying. None. That's the only tally I work in."

What moves behind his eyes is worse than anger. He's satisfied. I've shown him the heat under the refusal, and a man like Reynaud lives on heat the way other men live on bread.

He lowers the pouch and doesn't put it away. He lets them look at it.

"You hear him," he says, soft, to all of them. "A man who'll not let God near his gun." The pause again, the weapon of it. "Perhaps it's not only a wolf we ought to be hunting."

The square takes it in without a shout. Whatever the stories say, it starts quiet, a shifting of feet, heads coming round. "What does he mean by that," a man near me says, and his neighbour answers, "You know what he means." I've felt it from the inside, the thickening of the air, a press of frightened people becoming one animal with one hunger, casting about for the throat that'll quiet it. The faces it wears are familiar. The men who fed you. The one who stood you a cup when you first came, who'll have somewhere else to look. The boy you paid to mind your horse, seeing a thing and not a man. It isn't here yet. It's a week off, maybe a death off. But the priest has shown them where to set their teeth on the night they can't bear it sober, and they won't forget.

"Go in to your Mass," Reynaud says, gentle, to all of them, when he judges it soaked in. "Pray for the hunter. Pray he prospers, or that we learn why he must not."

"Amen," says the crowd, or most of it, and it isn't a prayer.

She's at the back of it.

Agnès stands a little apart from the well-women, a basket on her arm. The new ugly question has turned every head in the square except hers. She stands as she stands over the dead, giving the morning nothing. She gives me her attention plain and without the hunger the rest have caught. I don't let my attention stay on her, because the cost of being marked this morning isn't one I'll make her pay by answering it where the priest can see. I take the bare warmth of it, that one of them isn't hunting me, and carry it out of the square unexamined, with everything else about her I've no time to weigh.

I don't hurry. A man who hurries from a square like this hangs himself in it. I walk out the bottom of the lane, the village riding my back the whole way, and behind me the bell begins to toll for the Mass that'll let the priest finish what he's begun.

The tavern's barely a tavern, one low smoke-blackened room with a fire that gives more light than heat, but it's not the square, so I take the corner bench with the wall at my back and the door in sight, as I always sit, and gladder of it than usual this morning.

The keeper brings the wine unasked and sets it down with his head bowed over it. "There's no charge," he says, "for a man doing the parish's work," and is away before I can argue it. He means no slight by it. He's afraid. Afraid in front of a man the priest named an hour past, and the two go ill together. A pair of drovers at the far end are talking when I come in. They stop. "We're away, then," one says to the other, loud enough for the room. "Long road. Best be past the Crouzet place before dark." Halfway through my pouring they discover their business is done and go. A month ago I'd have had three men at this bench after the Beast's story for the price of a cup. The priest has been thorough.

I drink. My hand's steady on the cup. It's the rest of me that won't keep still. The keeper collects the empty jug when I've poured the last of it. "The wine's better than the talk it'll keep," he says, low, wiping the wood. "I don't set store by steps-talk. They've been in before, some of them, talking the same way they're talking today. I told them the till was empty and the fire was out." It's the nearest thing to a friend I've had all morning, and it's a man not meeting my eye.

They're doing it again. The thought comes up hot and whole, as the heat came up on the steps. The stranger. The convenient back to lay a village's terror across. The count that proves nothing and persuades everything. I've kept to the road all these years so I'd never stand in a square and be the one the arithmetic points at, and here I am, the same sum, the same priest, the same soft pouch held up to a crowd.

The same as the day they took my father.

I don't go far into it. A flash is all I let myself. The square in the other valley. The torches lit though it was daylight. The men who'd drunk with him all their lives unable to meet his eye while the priest read out what he was. Somebody counting. The deaths laid in a row like proof. He had no King's paper to hold up, no trade the village couldn't do without. No road out of it at all. They were so certain, every one of them, so righteous and kind to each other after. He's in unmarked ground in a place I couldn't find again if I tried, because a parish doesn't mourn the devil it's just been delivered from.

I push the cup in a slow circle on the wood and make myself think it through cold, as I'd read a trail. Reynaud has the village half-turned. One more bad night, one more body, and he'll have it whole. The wolf's up in the high firs being a wolf. I'm right here.