Page 45 of She, Wolf, Him.

Getting up takes longer than the fight did. The rifle comes to hand out of the bracken and serves me better as a staff than it served me as a gun. I put the last grey of the west on my left hand and walk. I don't look back at the clearing, not once, and I mark that too.

I don't remember the walk down in any order I could swear to. I remember cold past shivering. I remember trees that held me up and one that didn't, and lying against the one that didn't, watching my own back-trail, though nothing came down it. I remember reckoning, somewhere in the black, that the shot wolf will die tonight or mend lame, and either way there's no carcass in it for me. The only body coming down is mine, and it has to do its own walking.

The village shows itself a light at a time, low and red through the last firs, hearth-glow at the shutter-cracks, a valley barred in against the very dark I'm walking out of. There's one house in Saint-Élie that would unbar to me tonight. I've sense enough left to know I'll be at it before I've finished deciding to go. I say her name once, at the mouth of the lane, to no one, to hear whether it still sounds like a door I can knock at. It does.

By the mouth of the lane the lie has nearly set, and I've been laying it down all the way off the hill. A wolf, late, in bad light. Blood, fever, mist. Nearly. Under it, where no argument I've won has ever reached, the shape is still standing in the mist between the firs, the last of the light still going into its eyes and staying there. They rest on me yet.

24

TENDING

AGNÈS

Care for the wounded and the stranger, for you know not when you yourself may fall.

— FOLK VERSE, MARGERIDE ORAL TRADITION

The dogs begin at the top wall.

One first, the Vidals' old bitch, then the next house down, then the next, the barking coming down house by house through the village, and I'm on my feet with the mending still in my hand. Three nights ago the dark walked up a lane like this one and nothing barked at all. Whatever is coming now, the dogs have a voice for it. I stand in my own house with the bar across the door and listen to it come, and then I hear, under the barking, a man's boots. Dragging. Stopping. Coming on.

His step. Broken as it is, I know it, and I'm past pretending I don't. It stops again, longer, and I have the bar up and the door open before the pause becomes a fall.

The lane is black, one lantern showing up toward the top wall where the noise started, shutters cracking yellow along both sides. And there he is, twenty paces short of my door, propped on his own rifle. Even in the dark I can see what the dark can't hide. He's holding one arm to his body as though it belongs to a stranger. His coat hangs wrong, heavy on one side, wet where nothing should be wet. When he lifts his head into the spill of my firelight, his face is the grey of church stone.

Fear goes through me, cold and total, and it's the oldest fear this work has taught me. That he'll go down before I reach him, and that what I'll be doing on my knees in the lane is what I do for all of them.

I'm under his good arm before he can go down. Years of lifting the dead taught me where the weight goes, and I take his and nearly buckle. He's heavier than any man I've shifted, and hot through the wet wool, forge-hot. The dead don't help you carry them. He does, a little, proof he's still this side of it.

"You're seen to," I tell him, which means nothing and is all I have.

"It's not—" he gets out, through his teeth. "It's not the—" He can't finish it, and I don't make him. Whatever the difference is, he's been carrying it the whole way down the hill.

Half the lane is awake now, shutters back, lantern-light and eyes on both sides. Not one man steps out. Yesterday they carried tools into the square for him. Tonight they watch the widow take the hunter's weight, and the watching has a sound to it, a murmur going house to house, and I let it. "Is it him," a voice says, across the lane. "Is it the hunter." "What's took him," another. "Wolves, like as not," a third. "What he's been courting all along." "There's justice in it, if you like," somebody says, not low. "Hush," says another. "She'll hear." "Let her." "Should we—" a man's voice starts, at a shutter. "Let be," another says. "It's her trade, the wounded as the dead." They've seen worse of me this week.

Pétronille comes out of the dark at the lane's end as if she'd been standing in it ready. Bent small over her stick, shawl to her eyebrows, quicker than the whole rest of Saint-Élie put together. She doesn't ask what happened. She looks at how his coat hangs, at the arm he's guarding, with the flat look she gives a wound before she names it, and she pushes a wrapped packet into my free hand. It smells sharp and green over the blood, cut herbs and clean linen.

"Boil the cloth first," she says, low, in that voice like a gate that wants oiling. "Yarrow under the binding. The fever will try to finish what the teeth couldn't."

She's gone before I can pay her so much as a word. She doesn't offer to come in. She never enters any house in this village. Come morning half of them will say her name with a ward-sign. By night they'd crawl to her sill if their own children burned. I put the packet in my apron. Tonight the village can see me learn what she's known all her life.

"Can you walk," I ask him. He starts to answer and thinks better of it.

"Give me the rifle," I say. "Lean on me instead."

"It's the only thing on this hill I trust," he says, and keeps it, and leans on me anyway.

"My house," I tell him. "Now."

He doesn't argue. That frightens me more than the blood.

We cross the last of the lane together under every eye that's awake in Saint-Élie, his weight on my shoulder, his breath loud and short. I bring him in over my own threshold and set the bar down behind us. The sound it makes is the sound it's always made. It has never meant this before.

I build the fire high and set water on. Pétronille's linen I boil first, as told.

He sits where I put him, on the pallet by the hearth, and lets me cut him out of the coat and the shirt under it, because lifting his arms is past him. "The coat," he says, when I take the knife to the sleeve. "Save the coat. It's the second time this autumn."

"I'll mend it," I say. "I've mended worse off worse men."