Page 47 of She, Wolf, Him.

And under it all, in the low hours, Margot. The thought of her comes whether I ask it in or not. By morning she'll hear where the hunter slept, whose fire, whose hands. She turned from me in the square before the whole parish, and I've told myself since that the distance between us is the season's doing, the deaths, the fear. The old lie has worn thin, and tonight I've widened the distance by a whole house. What we are to each other has no word the village would let stand, and I've gone and given the village a word for me and him instead. The hurt of that sits where it always sits, too small for anyone to find. I'd have no skill for taking it out now if she asked me to.

He turns in his sleep and the pain turns with him, and I'm on my knees by the pallet with my hand flat on his chest before he can roll onto the torn shoulder. He quiets under it as the dogs quieted, one house at a time, hours ago. I stay there longer than I need to, feeling him breathe.

Nurse, they'll say, or worse. I have no name for what I am tonight. There was never a moment when I might have turned him away. That certainty should terrify me. The snow isn't far off. The village is fear from wall to wall. I fold that thought small, out of long habit, and it springs back open like a green branch.

The shutters go grey at last. The frost eases off the thatch. His breathing is long and even now, the worst of the fever broken somewhere in the small hours. The face on my pallet in the first light is only a man's face, tired and alive, mine to be afraid for. I put the last wood on the hearth.

Let the village wake and say what it likes. He lived the night, and I kept him through it. When he opens his eyes, the first of the world he'll get back is me.

25

THE CONFESSION

GASPARD

The loup-garou is a tale for children and fools. I have killed a hundred wolves. They bleed red and die the same as any beast.

— A HUNTSMAN OF THE AUVERGNE, PROVENANCE UNCERTAIN

Iwake reading the room, as I wake everywhere. The room reads back wrong in every particular a man could want. Light through shutters on the east wall where my lodging has none. A fire already tended. The smell of yarrow and tallow, and under them wet wool and something cold and green off the high ground, and under all of it, faint, her. My shoulder tells me the rest before I've moved it, and I lie still on a borrowed pallet in a widow's house and take the tally of myself. Two days. A forearm that will hold a rifle in a week if I don't ask more of it sooner. A side that pulls when I breathe deep, so I don't. Alive, in the one house in this valley that would have me.

She's at the hearth with her back to me, and I watch her work as I have since the first morning, over the first body, closer now than I've ever let her see. The steadiness of her. She kept me through the worst night of it without once making a performance of the keeping. This morning she moves through her own house the same, water drawn, bread set, and I understand that I've been reading that steadiness wrong since summer. I took it for stillness. It's more like the gait of somebody carrying a full vessel a long way, every step chosen so nothing spills.

There's mud dried along her hem and a burr caught in the loose hair at the back of her neck. A woman alone hauls her own water before light and pulls her own kindling out of the bramble at the wood's side, and she's done it two mornings with a wounded man's work added on top. Noting is the one trade I can still work lying here, and what I note, I set aside with the ordinary things.

Somewhere in the lane a dog comes sniffing along the wall, loud in its nose, as dogs get where blood's been, and when she crosses toward the threshold with the slop-pail it takes itself off at a trot and doesn't slow at the next house either. Powder, blood, the dead of a hard autumn on the both of us. This house would smell like a slaughter-shed to any nose in the village, and I let the dog be what it is, a dog, in a bad season, in a lane where a torn man walked dripping two nights past.

The rifle stands in the corner where she set it, clean, unloaded, waiting on me.

Because here is the arithmetic, and I've been running it since I could sit upright. Anselme's letter is on a cart somewhere between here and Mende. The square that saw her take my weight is the same square that brought its billhooks out for me three days ago, and her name is fastened to mine now in every mouth in the parish. A man under that much suspicion has one coin left that spends. A body. The village doesn't want the truth. It wants a carcass it can hate, hanging where the count can end. I went up the hill for one honestly and the hill nearly ate me. Honest has had its chance.

So I'll do what the King's own men did at Chazes, except I'll do it on purpose. The panic ends. The count ends. The letter to Mende gets a different last line. It's a fraud, and I can see the size of it.

But the trap I'm planning wants ground I can't walk yet and hands I can't spare. There's only one pair of hands in Saint-Élie that would come, and I can't put the show on her. Not her. She took me in torn and suspect with half the lane at its shutters, and if I let her help me believing the legend, I'll have made a dupe of her with the rest.

She turns from the hearth and catches me watching. She doesn't look away. Neither do I. That's new for the both of us.

"You should eat," she says, setting bread where my good hand can reach it. "You look like the wolf got the best of the bargain."

"Sit down a while," I say. "There's a truth I need to tell you, and I've never told it to a living soul."

She sits across the fire from me with her hands in her lap and waits. She's good at waiting. It's one more craft this village has never thanked her for.

"What I hunt," I say, "what I've always hunted, is wolves. Only wolves." My voice comes out lower than I planned, the showman gone out of it, nothing left but the man, and the man sounds tired. "There's no such creature as the loup-garou. No devil in a wolf's skin, no man that runs on four legs under a full moon. It's a tale. It's the tale I sell."

"How long have you sold it," she says.

"Fifteen years."

"And no one ever guessed."

"The dying stops," I say. "Mostly, that's what they're buying. The story's what they pay the extra for. No one asks a story to be true. They ask it to end."

Her face does what her face does, which is nothing a stranger could read. I'm not a stranger any longer. I watch her take it in as she takes in a wound.

I give her all of it. The trade as it truly runs, the legend worth ten times the pelt. Chazes, where the King's huntsman shot a great wolf, called it the Beast, and had it stuffed for Versailles. How the killing started again by Christmas and made a fool of him, which is why a plain wolf won't serve these people any longer and a showman must sell them a devil instead.

"You don't believe in it," she says. "Any of it."