Page 46 of She, Wolf, Him.

The last time I took a shirt from him, he lifted his arms to give it. I've undressed the dead this way a hundred times, cloth too stiff with blood to be worth saving, and I go about it the old way, steady and quick, no wasted pulling. My hands know this work. It's the rest of me that has to learn it new, because the chest under my knife-hand moves, and every time it moves I have to stop and be glad.

The wounds come clear one at a time. The left shoulder is the worst to look at, torn and bruised black where jaws had him and worried him. I laid my palm flat there the night I chose him, when it was whole, and mine. A thought with no place at a wound-dressing. I let it stay. The right forearm is the worst that is, bitten to the bone, his own neckcloth, knotted over it, soaked through. The left side is a long raking tear below the ribs, ugly and shallow, the kind that bleeds a man weak without letting him die. Teeth did all of it. Several mouths, by the spacing.

The other thing's work I'd know at the first look, wounds no needle has an answer for. This isn't it. These are wolf-bites, mean and honest wounds, the kind a living man gets to keep. The other thing leaves nothing for a woman to bind. The relief that comes up in me is so strong it shames me, and I name it to myself while I wring the cloth. He is living through them, here, at my fire.

The deep of the shoulder and the worst of the forearm want closing before any linen goes near them. I sew them shut with waxed thread, small stitches, as my mother sewed before me, and he holds still for the needle, only his breath telling what it costs him.

I warm each length of linen between my palms before it goes on him. Habit, from the other work, where no one ever feels it.

He can. The breath goes out of him the first time the warmth touches the torn shoulder, and his eyes come to my face and stay there while I work, grey gone dark, following my hands as if they're the one fixed point that keeps the room from tipping.

"What happened," I say. Not a question so much as a place set at the table, if he wants it.

"Wolves."

"Your pack."

"My pack," he says, and there's a breath in it that's nearly a laugh, gone grey at the edges. I wait. The fire ticks. The water moves in the pot. He looks at the wall past my shoulder, and his jaw sets. Nothing else comes out of him at all.

I could press, and I don't. While I'm cleaning the forearm I understand the shape of his quiet, because I've worn it. There's more under the word wolves than he means to hand me, tonight or maybe ever, and it's his to keep. God knows I keep mine.

"Hold still," I say, when the yarrow goes in and his whole arm turns to wood. "This will burn. Burn's better than rot."

"I've had worse."

"Then stop pulling away from it like a boy."

What he lets out is a true shred of a laugh, the first human sound he's made since the lane. I go on working and don't let him see what that one shred does to me.

"Where did you learn it," he says, through his teeth, when the worst of the burning's past. "The burns and the rot."

"My mother," I say. "And hers before her. And Pétronille's packet, which you watched me take."

"It was a winter like this one," he says, after a while, to the beams. "Elsewhere. A pack that had lost its fear of men." He doesn't say the rest of it. I don't ask.

"How far did you walk," I ask, "after."

"I don't know," he says, honest as the fever. "Downhill. There's only the one way off that hill."

I bind the forearm last, over the yarrow, snug as I'd swaddle a child, and when I knot it off, his good hand comes up and closes over both of mine. Not holding me back from anything. Just holding, hot and shaking, which his face would never admit to. We stay like that, the fire loud, neither of us with a word to put on it.

He never says thank you. I've said it to every man who ever handed me my own days back short. He pays in a different coin. He holds still under my hands and lets me do the work, as though my skill were past question, and there's no man in this village who's ever paid me that.

"Sleep," I tell him. "You're no use to anyone tonight, yourself included."

"There's the hunt," he starts.

"The hunt can keep a day," I say, and blow the lamp down to a coal's worth of light.

He's under before the fire needs wood.

The night goes long and I keep all of it.

He sleeps like a man dropped from a height, flat, graceless, his breath ragged at first and then slower. I sit on the stool with the mending I'll never touch and watch the fever try him and fail. Toward the middle of the night he sweats and mutters what's left of words, none I can make out and one I don't try to. I lay the warm cloth to him and he settles. "There," I say, low, though he can't hear me. "Settle, now. I've sat up with worse." When the fever lifts him half up I get my arm behind his shoulders and the cup to his mouth. "Drink," I tell him, and he drinks, and doesn't wake. "There. Good." And later, to the sleeping shape of him, because it costs nothing to say it to a sleeping man. "They don't know you. They know the rifle and the coat. I know the man who watched me lay out this valley's dead and never mistook my silence." I leave the rest unsaid. There's no one to finish it for. Whatever's turning the fever back is Pétronille's herbs, or his own mule stubbornness. Both, likely.

The house is so quiet I can hear the frost working at the thatch. My father's stool under me, my mother's pot on the fire, a man asleep on the pallet where I've watched this family's dead lie waiting for their linen. Since I was a girl the village has sent me what was past saving. I've been good at the dead so long that nobody ever asked, me least of all, whether the same hands could hold a life in the world instead of seeing one out of it. He might yet be taken. Everything I've kept pressed down these long years has come out to sit at the fire and be afraid with me, and I let it. There's no one left to see.

The dread comes too, in its turn. It's been my companion since the summer ended and has found this house. Tonight it doesn't wear the Beast's shape, or the mob's, or even the dead priest's. Every door in Saint-Élie saw me take him in. Whatever they've whispered about the widow and the hunter until tonight, from tomorrow it has a hearth and a name. There's no unsaying it. And I find, checking myself over as I'd check a wound, that I don't want it unsaid.