Page 41 of She, Wolf, Him.

"He'll know us," a third says, dark. "They tell each other, priests. We all go down in the letters."

The women come up with a sheet at last, and Agnès is among them, because the village keeps her for its dead even while it mutters over her luck. She doesn't push to the front. She stands at the well-side with the folded linen over her arm, steady in the middle of all the crossing and the weeping, waiting to be of use, giving the steps nothing at all. I don't let my eyes rest there. Two nights past I learned what that steadiness holds under it, and in this square, this morning, that knowledge could hang the both of us.

When I stand, the frost has soaked through and my knees are wet with him. The crowd gives me room to work in, the room a hangman gets. Room, and no company in it.

He was killed crossing from his own door to God's.

The presbytery stands thirty strides from the church, its door open on a lamp burned dry on the ledge inside. He made that walk alone before light, every morning of his priesthood, at a fixed hour by a fixed path, while the rest of the parish lay behind bars and prayers. Fear was for the flock. The shepherd walked out in the dark he'd taught the village to dread, sure to his boot-soles that heaven watched his back. Anything that had watched Saint-Élie for a week would have known where to find him, and when.

The wounds tell the same crooked story the others told, and tell it louder. The strike came at the foot of the steps, close and fast. There's no ground taken out of him and no drag worth the name. The fight lasted a breath, an old man's strength spent all at once. Claws and teeth did all of it, and did more than any hunger needs. Then nothing fed. I keep a tally of kills in this valley that don't add as kills. It's longer now than the tally of ones that do.

The door I read twice, because the first reading won't serve. The furrows are fresh, cut in the dark hours, the opened grain still bright as a new fence rail. A big wolf rearing against that oak might set its fore-claws at the height of my chin. These begin above my head and rake down. I stand on the top step and reach, and the start of the topmost sits above my fingers' ends. Whatever made them stood at the oak and worked at the wood before the priest came out to it, or after he was past caring. Either way, it stood at God's own door in the middle of a sleeping village for as long as it pleased. The Berthou shutter carried the same four-to-the-set. I told myself a tale about that one and half believed it. The half-belief won't stretch to cover it.

I walk the lane it came up. Between the church and the last house the mud holds prints where the frost spared them, four-toed, deep, the pad broader than my spread hand. The big one. I've met that print at every margin of this country since summer, at the treeline, at the granite, at the lip of a sheep-run. This morning it walks up the middle of Saint-Élie like a parishioner late for Mass. Past the pens. Past barred houses with dogs behind them. "Did yours bark," a man asks another, as I pass them. "Mine never woke." "Nor mine. Nobody's. Nobody's, the whole lane." I've stopped setting store by dogs. A bad enough season breaks them the same as men.

Where the lane gives out, a thin line of blood-beads goes with it, dark on the frost, thinning as it goes, the animal carrying off on its coat what it wouldn't eat. The drops run as far as the pasture wall. Beyond it the frozen grass takes no print, and beyond the grass there's only granite and the firs standing over their own dark. I stop at the wall. I've walked this trail to its no-end three times since summer. It ends as it always ends. It doesn't.

Since the night on the rocks, an empty back-trail hasn't meant I'm alone. I turn. The lane is empty, the houses shut, a village pretending not to watch me from behind its shutters.

Going back up, I stop at the scores once more and work loose what's snagged deep in the longest furrow, caught where the claw split the grain. Hairs, coarse and long, dark at the root and grizzled at the tip. Twins to the one I lifted off the granite above the betrothed man's trail at summer's end, and have carried since like a debt with no name on the holder. They go into my pouch, and I tell no one.

In the high parishes, when a man dies with the ground iron-hard, they don't dig. They lay him in the charnel under the church and wait for the thaw to bury him proper. I keep a charnel of my own for what this valley hands me that no grave of reasoning will take. The oak scored higher than my reach. The lane walked in silence. The meal not taken. In they go, laid straight, laid with the rest. The ground will soften some day, and I'll bury the lot of it with the right words said over it. It hasn't softened yet.

I come back up the lane with the firs at my back and every shutter in Saint-Élie marking me the whole way, the stranger walking in from the quarter the thing walked out of.

By midday they've carried him in.

Anselme the marguillier brought the keys, and the men bore the body up the steps past the scored door and laid it before the altar he served. The women went in after, with water and linen. Agnès among them. No other hands here are trusted with the dead.

The church stays shut after that, and the bell stays silent. There's no one left to say a Mass over the man who said the words over every soul this village has buried in living memory. "Who rings the passing-bell for the curé," one of the Vidal men asks Anselme, at the threshold. The old man eyes the rope through the doorway as if it were a snake across his path. "The bishop will send word," he says. The bishop is two days' ride away and doesn't yet know. Nobody touches the rope.

The square doesn't empty. They stand in their knots between the well and the steps. The talk runs low, and my name moves through it as water moves under ice. "He threatened him," one says, when he thinks I've passed. "On the holy steps, before all of us. He mocked God's judgment, and God's judgment found the Father." And beneath those, softer, the dead man's own words handed round like bread. "The nights the Beast walks, the hunter walks," another says. "He said it himself, God rest him. He knew."

It's Anselme who brings it to me at last, which is worse than Pascal's heat, because Anselme has never said a word his register wouldn't hold. He comes across the square with his hands folded, stops the far side of arm's reach, and takes my measure.

"Father Reynaud set questions on you, monsieur. Before the parish, on those steps." His voice is dry as his lists. "He'll not be withdrawing them now. You'll understand the parish will want the answers to them from someone."

"The Beast withdrew them," I say. "Or wrote them larger. Walk up to your church door, Anselme. Tell me a knife and a grudge did that. Whatever killed your priest is the same creature I've been hunting since summer. It's the only neck in this valley I mean for a rope. Would you have me stop?"

He studies me the space of three long breaths. In another man the pause would be Reynaud's old weapon. In Anselme it's only a clerk carrying a sum.

"Word goes down to Mende with the next cart," he says. "What's written in it isn't settled yet. I'd have it written fair, monsieur. That's all the warning I've a right to give."

"And if it settles against me."

"Then I'd not be seen talking to you after today," he says, and goes back to his keys and his dead.

The knots of them let me pass and close again behind me. No one spits. No one speaks. A month ago I'd have called that courtesy.

The church door opens as I cross the square, and it's Agnès, her sleeves turned down again, her hands clean, wearing the village face, still as standing water. She gives me one look across the whole width of it. The composure holds. What breaks through is fear for me, not fear of me, and no soul has spent that on me in longer than I can rightly count. Two nights past she crossed the whole black village to reach my door. Today twenty strides is farther than all of it, and every villager between us is a toll neither of us can pay. I give her back the smallest stillness I own and walk on, and carry the look away with me unspent.

The rest of it I can reason with. Reynaud held the leash of this village's fear even as he aimed it. The man who aimed it is gone. Fear with no shepherd doesn't lie down. It packs. It'll run at whatever moves, and I'm the thing in this valley that moves. He hated me with a purity I could nearly have leaned on, the one man in the Margeride keeping honest count of me. In a single night the Beast has taken my accuser and my reckoner both, and left me standing over the body with the motive in my pocket.

The bell never does ring for him. The silence where the tolling should be hangs over the square all day, like weather that won't break.

It should feel like justice. It feels like a trap going shut, and I've spent my working life on the setting side of traps.

22