Page 40 of She, Wolf, Him.

"No." I draw the shawl around my shoulders. "If we're seen, it's my name they feed on, not yours."

He studies me, then nods. No argument. No promise asked for.

I go back and kiss him once. His rough palm cups my jaw. He doesn't try to keep me when I draw away.

At the door I turn back. "You'll tell it," I say, half a joke. "Somewhere down the road, in some tavern. The night."

"Some nights I don't tell," he says, and I believe him.

"Bar the door after me. The widow talks."

"The widow would sleep through the Flood itself," he says.

Outside, dawn has hardened the lane white with frost. The black firs stand above the roofs, and the first smoke lifts from a chimney near the well. I walk downhill through the waking cold. A shutter opens at the far end of the village.

I'm past it before anyone sees me.

21

LAST RITES

GASPARD

The curé of Saint-Élie, aged sixty or thereabouts, found at dawn by the church steps. The body much savaged. A rosary clutched in the remaining hand.

— REPORT TO THE SUBDELEGATE AT MENDE, OCTOBER 1766

First light comes and the bell doesn't ring.

I'm awake for it on habit alone, braced before the silence has a name. The Angelus has rung at first light every morning since I rode into this valley. Frost or burial, terror or feast, the bell has rung, because the man who orders it rung has never doubted his right to order anything. I lie in the borrowed bed and listen to a silence with a hole in it. Then the lane fills with boots and voices. "It's past the hour," a woman's voice says, out in it. "Where's the bell." And then the pitch I've come to know better than my own name here. I've heard it four times since summer. A village sounds one way over a fire and another way over a body.

I dress and leave the rifle standing in its corner. A man half this parish would like to hang shouldn't walk up armed to whatever's waiting.

What's waiting is at the church. The crowd has gathered at the foot of the steps, not at the door, a half-ring of grey backs with their breath going up in one cloud, and no black figure presiding over them from the top stair. That absence tells me most of it. The smell coming through the woodsmoke, copper and cold meat, tells me the rest.

They part for me. It's the parting a crowd gives what it won't touch. "Let him through," somebody says, at the back. "Let the King's man see what's come of it." Nobody meets my eye, the murmur drops away, and I hear my own boots on the frozen mud the whole distance to the front.

Father Reynaud lies at the foot of his own steps with his face to the sky.

It has been at him past need, past sense, past anything I've a trade word for. The cassock is opened from collar to hip, cloth and man together. The throat is gone. The chest is furrowed to the bone, rib showing white where anything shows at all. His left arm ends above the wrist in a wet fray the frost has stiffened black. The right hand is whole, and around its fingers the rosary is still wound, tight, the beads driven into the flesh with the force of the grip. His wooden crucifix lies an arm's length off, snapped from its cord, face down in the ice. The blood went out of him in the night and froze where it pooled, black ice feathered white at the rim, a full stride of it. His face is untouched. The eyes are open. The last look he wore has set on them as weather sets on stone, and terror is only half of it. The other half is the look he gave me from these steps two mornings past. Judgment, caught halfway out of his mouth.

A warmth comes up in me, low and quiet, and I recognize it at once. I've stood over four of this valley's dead and grieved none of them honestly, but this is the first I've been glad of, and gladness is the coldest thing a man can feel over a corpse. I don't pretend it away. I keep my lies for paying customers. The man spent his last fortnight on earth building me a gallows one plank at a time. I weigh that warmth, what it's worth, what it would cost me if the square saw it, and I put it away whole.

Then someone behind me makes a sound that isn't a word, and I follow the crowd's turning heads to the door.

The church door is oak, iron-strapped, black with two hundred winters. Above the handle the wood shows pale where it's been opened up, four furrows to the set, set twice, deep enough to sink a finger to the first joint. The topmost begin above the height of my head. "The door," a man says, faint, behind me. "Mother of God. The door." The men who see them stop speaking, one after another, the quiet going through the crowd like cold through wet cloth. "It's the same as the Berthou shutter," somebody says. "Four to the set. Higher than a man." Bertrand the farrier studies the scores a long while. At the Berthou byre he stood on a log butt to lay his palm over marks like these. He keeps both hands at his sides now and steps back off the bottom stair, giving up ground he'd claimed. Berthe kneels in the frost with her shawl pressed over her mouth, rocking. "Oh, Father," she's saying, into the wool. "Oh, Father, what are we to do." Nobody says the word the whole square is thinking. I sold them that word myself, a month gone, dressed in a showman's certainty. Now it stands written on their church in furrows.

"He accused you." Pascal says it, the young one who farms the lower strips, grief gone to a hard set about his mouth since the killing started on his kin. He doesn't say it loud. Low words carry farthest in a quiet like this. "On those steps. Before God and all of us, he stood up to you. And now he's lying there. Say that's chance. Say it."

"And I was up at my iron past moonset, with no living soul to swear to it." I say it plainly, because the arithmetic will run with me or without me. "I know how the count goes, Pascal. I taught half this village to count that way." I go down on one knee beside the body instead, in the blood ice, because the work is the only answer I own that's worth a sou. "If I'd killed him, would I be on my knees in what's left of him, reading it?"

It sinks like a coin in mud. Nobody answers.

"He'd not have done it," a woman says, small, from the back. "He's the only one hunting it." They hush her. "He'll see it avenged," she says, stubborn, under the hushing. "You'll see."

"He christened me," a man says, hollow. "He christened my whole house. Who does the words over him now."

"They'll send a new priest," another man says. "From Mende. A young one, like as not, who doesn't know us."