Page 43 of She, Wolf, Him.

The square goes so hushed I hear the well-rope shift in the wind. Then every face in it comes round to me.

I've made my place at the edge of other people's looking. There's no edge now. It's all of it on me at once, the whole parish's eyes, a weight like wet wool, and under it I do the one work this life has trained into me past forgetting. I hold. I give them the face I gave the priest.

Nobody answers me, either. The talk drops away and picks itself back up in whispers, and the whispers have my name in them now alongside his. "Did you hear her," a woman whispers, near me, not caring that I hear. "Standing up for him in the open, and the Father barely cold." "Her own priest," says another. "Her own priest, and she defends the man he named." "Shameless," somebody says, at last, the word the rest of them were carrying, and once it's out it can't be gathered back. I knew the price before I spoke. I'd pay it again.

Across the square, Gaspard's eyes find mine. He gives the crowd nothing it can use. Only the look, held longer than he'd have allowed himself a month ago, and I take the whole cost of it in without moving. Three nights ago I crossed the dark to him and no living soul knew. Today the parish watched.

I haven't looked away from him, which is why I nearly miss her.

Margot has come up along the church side, a few strides off, near enough to reach. She's pale. She's still, and Margot is never still. Her hands, which always have work in them, wool or one of the children's sleeves, hang empty at her sides. She's been there long enough to hear all of it. The speech, the name I set down next to his. And in her face there's a hurt that's been living there a good deal longer than this morning.

I reach for her. A hand, only that, the smallest question I have.

She turns from my reach. Unhurried, already elsewhere. She goes up the lane without once turning, and the name I keep for her stays where it has always stayed. It has never had so far to go, or so little chance of arriving.

The distance between us has been growing since the hunter came, weeks of it, and I've kept telling myself it was the season, the deaths, the fear working on everyone alike. Today she made it a fact, in the open.

Behind me, low, a woman's voice I don't stop to place. "Pétronille knew he'd die. You mark me. The herbwoman always knows."

Pétronille isn't even in the square. It makes no difference. The fear is loose now, trying names for fit, and today it wears his. There's no law anywhere that says it can't wear mine tomorrow.

I take up my basket from the church wall and walk home through the middle of it, and the looking comes with me the whole way.

By dark the square has emptied itself into the houses, and I sit at my own hearth with the bar across the door and the fire down to its low red. The quiet in this house used to be my father's. Before that it belonged to the three of us, the whole aching family of it. Now it's mine alone, one more inheritance I never asked for and can't give back.

My own voice keeps coming back to me out of the day. I don't know where a voice like that has been living all these years in a woman who has been the quiet at the edge of the room.

And under all of it, all day, the other feeling has kept rising, the one from the church. I washed his blood from under my nails last night and slept sound. I've tried to be sorry, as I once tried to mourn Thibault, working at it like a lesson set me. It won't come, and I've left off pretending it will. I press it down flat with the rest, where everything I've ever felt out of turn has gone. It knows the road by now.

There's one reckoning the square hasn't thought to whisper yet. I'm a grown woman. I know what can follow a night like the one I took, and what it would mean by spring for a woman this village already calls widow, with no banns left to cover her. I'd reckoned it before my knuckles ever met the wood, and I knocked. If it comes, it will have come of the one night that was mine. I'd knock again.

The dread hasn't left me. It's been with me all autumn, wearing one shape after another. Tonight, for the first time, it has names.

The men brought their tools to the square today, and nobody told them to carry the tools home again. Gaspard is the name the fear keeps reaching for. Mine sits beside his now. And Margot. Margot turned from my hand where the square could see her do it, and hers is the wound I keep taking out and turning over again tonight.

I could have borne her angry. Anger is a fire that wants tending, and tending is work I can do. Margot goes still and silent when a hurt has sunk past words, and I put it there. The Beast didn't do that. The priest's dying didn't. I did, in the open square, with my hand out toward her and my voice already spent on the man the village wants to hang.

My hands lie in my lap, steady. Steady hands are the whole of what this village has ever asked of me. Tomorrow it will ask for them again, whatever else it decides by then that I am.

There's water to draw at first light and bread to set before that, and wool waiting on the spindle, the trade that pays a woman's way alone. I get up and see to what a house asks at the end of a day, the pot scoured, the jug filled, and I leave the feeling where I pressed it. Turning it over any longer wouldn't change a grain of what's coming.

I bank the fire. Tomorrow the village wakes and remembers what it saw me do. There's no calling it back. I find I wouldn't, even so. Of everything I've ever been seen to be in that square, the widow, the layer-out, the unlucky one that death follows, what they saw today is the first of it I chose.

23

THE WOUND AND THE GLIMPSE

GASPARD

The huntsman swears he saw it plain, a wolf, but wrong. Too large, he said. The eyes too knowing. But a man who has lost much blood sees many things.

— DEPOSITION FRAGMENT, LOZÈRE ARCHIVES, UNDATED

The pack crossed the beck an hour ahead of me. Water hasn't finished seeping back into the prints on the far bank, five sets, one heavy, laid plain in the black mud, and I stand over them in the grey afternoon and put the gap at an hour. The gap's been an hour since first light. They feed as they travel. I follow, and the wood takes the both of us deeper by the league.

Honest prints, these. Four toes and the prick of a claw above each, the stride paid out even, wolves going about a wolf's business. Not one of them is the print I keep meeting at the margins of this country, the broad impossibility that walks through my mornings and ends in air. That one walks alone. It always has. These are plain working wolves, and plain working wolves are, for once, what I want. Any one of them, dead across my shoulders, is an argument the square can understand.

No one came up with me. I didn't ask. I left before light through a village of barred houses, every shutter a held breath, and the only farewell Saint-Élie spent on me was a bolt going home somewhere behind. One voice did follow me, at the top of the lane, an old woman's, through a shutter-crack. "God go with you, monsieur," it said, so low I might have made it up. The only blessing I've had off this parish that didn't cost me coin to buy. Word goes down to Mende with the next cart, Anselme told me, and what's written in it isn't settled. And yesterday a woman stood up before the whole parish and set her name down beside mine, spent her good word on a stranger like the last coin in the house. It bought me a day, maybe two. A carcass on the church wall is the only answer left me that fear can hear, so I've come up to fetch one or stay on the hill.