Page 4 of She, Wolf, Him.

My head stays down with the rest. The shepherd's wife earned nothing. The shepherd earned nothing either, carrying me up to see the lambs. If there's a God keeping that kind of ledger, I'd like a quarter-hour alone with His book. I don't say it. I'd never say it. I say thank you to men like Reynaud. But the thought is mine and he can't have it, and some days the things I don't say are the only things I own.

Thibault's across the square with the other farmers, thick through the shoulders, sandy hair thinning early over a broad and settled face, watching me over their heads. When I meet his stare he doesn't smile. He only looks, the steady untroubled study of a man with a field he's bought and not yet walked. He lifts his chin at me. Mine, the chin says, and it isn't wrong. Reynaud blessed it a fortnight past. The banns go up Sunday. After the lambing there'll be a wedding, a house, a room he says he's cleared, and then the rest of my life, which I can see from where I stand all the way to its far end. His hands are folded in front of him, the nails black to the quick with dirt that never comes clean. I'll scrub those nails one day too, I think, when he's old and I'm older, and lay him on a cold table.

Margot finds me in the crush, as she always does. She doesn't say anything about Thibault, or the banns, or any of it. She knows there's nothing to say that I haven't already said to myself. She just gets her hand into mine where the skirts hide it, and squeezes once, hard, and holds on. My jaw's been set so tight all morning it aches clear up to my ear. She isn't smiling today, and there's nothing in this morning to smile at, but I can call up her whole face opening when she does, sudden and bright as a shutter thrown back on a lit room. Her hand is warm, rough, sure. I hold on, and for as long as the crowd lasts we stand there saying nothing, which is the one conversation in this village I've ever wanted more of.

Home is a low room, a hearth, not much else, and by evening there's only my father in it, in the chair he's mostly lived in since we put my mother in the ground last winter. He nods when I come in. He doesn't ask about the shepherd. He used to be a man who asked things. I feed him what's left, bank his fire, and that's how the two of us go on.

The loft over the goats is mine, and I don't mind it. The animals' warmth comes up through the boards, and above them I'm apart from everyone. I've come to want that more than I'll admit to. My hours are poor. They have been since I nursed my mother through her last weeks and learned to wake at every small sound she made, and the waking never left me when she did. I'm up before the light most mornings, out to the trough and back before the house stirs.

Berthe's words this morning, over the shepherd, come back to me while the fire settles. Even back. She didn't finish it, but I heard what she meant. There's an old harm the village knows about me and never says aloud. They step around it the way people step around bad ground. I hold it down where it can be carried, most days small enough not to feel. I don't take it out tonight. I've learned better than to go at it alone, with the fire low.

I recite the old litany. That I have a roof over me, a name, a man who most likely won't raise his hand to me. That other women have had worse and called it a good life. That I'm not unhappy. I say it until it's nearly true. I'm good at nearly true.

Then I go to the door before I climb up, though the Beast is abroad. The wind comes down off the high ground cold, green, wide. It smells of the woods, the granite, the long empty miles where no one has ever decided a single thing about me. And I want it. I want the track beyond the last cottage, the black edge of the trees, the cold enough to make every voice in the village small behind me. To walk up into it and not come down, maybe. To be something this village has no word for. To leave the door shut at my back and keep going.

I fold the wanting up small, the way I fold everything. Then I shut the door on the night and climb to the warm dark over the goats. I lie down. I let the day go.

2

THE STRANGER

AGNÈS

A man arrived at dusk. Tall, armed, muddy from the road. He did not kneel to the priest.

— FROM THE DEPOSITION OF JEANNE LAVAL, WIDOW, SAINT-ÉLIE

The stranger rides in at dusk, and before he's down off the horse I can tell he's going to be trouble. My trouble, whatever the rest of them make of him.

Word travels faster than a horse in a place this size, so half of Saint-Élie is already in the square when he comes up the track at a walk, the slow knock of hooves on packed earth drawing the rest of us out while there's still light to see by. There isn't much. The last of the gold is going off the top of the church wall, the grey coming up cold out of the valley. We're all of us out later than we'd choose now, with the shepherd barely in the ground and the dark that took him already gathering under the eaves, filling the lanes, waiting on the last of us to give it the square. A dog behind one of the doors barks once before someone hushes it hard. He rides into it and swings down like a man who trusts the ground to be where he left it, and stands a moment with his palm on the horse's lathered neck, the leather creaking as he shifts his weight, measuring us the way I take a body's measure before I start.

He's tall, lean in the build of men who walk everywhere and carry their own weight, a long gun slung across his back and mud halfway up his coat. His face is all hard angles in the failing light, dark stubble, a nose that's been broken once and set crooked. I can't see his eyes yet. I find I'd like to, and that's the first wrong step. I drop my gaze to the ground instead.

Father Reynaud goes out to meet him, because that's Reynaud, nothing happens in this village that he isn't the first hand on. He draws himself up. "The mercy of God on you, traveller," he says, in the voice that means to remind you whose mercy he speaks for here. "This parish has sore need of it."

And the stranger doesn't bow.

He doesn't refuse to, either. He just doesn't. He gives the bare inch of a nod you'd hand a farmer you'd never met, and Reynaud's mouth goes thin. I've known men who crossed Reynaud and paid for it slow. This one doesn't seem to know he's done it, or doesn't care to know.

"You've come for the Beast," Reynaud says. A statement.

"I've come to kill it." The stranger's voice is low and carries without trying, a voice built for market squares. There's a dryness under it, like the whole business is a joke only he's been told. "If it's the kind of thing that can be killed. Mostly it is."

A murmur goes through the square. Mostly it is. As though our dead were a sort of weather he'd ridden through before. "Mostly," a woman repeats, faint. "Mostly, he says."

"Strange thing," somebody behind me says, low. "A man turning up to kill the Beast the very week it finds us. Almost like he knew where to come for the work." "Hush yourself," a woman answers, sharp with needing him to be what he says he is. "If he kills it, I don't care what road fetched him." But the thought's loose now, and it won't stay down.

The men who put the shepherd in the ground two days back have lived a long while with a terror in the dark they can't fight. "Three months it's had the valleys below us," a man near the front says, to the stranger as much as to us. "The King's own marksmen come and gone with nothing to show for it. Is it the same one, monsieur? The one the drovers tell of?"

"They're all the same one," the stranger says, "until they're in the ground. Then it's meat, and the next valley has its own."

"Bless you, monsieur," another man says, and the words come out of him rough, like a cough. And here at last is a man who says kill flat, untroubled, work he's done before and will do again. Men who wouldn't meet his eye a moment ago lean toward him now. A woman crosses herself and stares at his hands, as if the killing might already be there.

The widow lifts her head at the church door. "God send you to it, monsieur," she calls, and the calling cracks her voice open again. "God send you to it before it takes another of ours. Before it takes a child." "God send you to it," others take up, around her, ragged.

By morning they'll have forgiven him the not-bowing, and they'd forgive him near anything if he means it. I don't lean. I've never been saved by a man who rode in promising to, and I've laid out too much of what the promising couldn't stop.

"We will speak, monsieur," Reynaud says, when the blessing's loose in the crowd. "You and I, when you've rested from the road." It's not an invitation, however it's dressed. "Where are you lodged," he asks, mild, as the stranger turns to go.