Page 49 of She, Wolf, Him.

"You'll shoot from here," she says.

"When it comes. Might be three nights. Might be ten."

"Then you'll heal first," she says, in the voice she used on the yarrow, the one that isn't asking, and it's strange to be ordered about like a boy and find I want more of it.

We walk back down with the light going long and gold across the pasture, her matching her step to my slower one without making anything of it. "You did this for them," she says, at the pasture's edge. "Your father. The rope. All these years."

"I did it for me. They paid."

"The two aren't as separate as you keep them," she says, and leaves it there. The secret is hers now, and she carries it the way she carries the full vessel, level, nothing spilling.

I don't know whether that makes me honest at last or only a better cheat than I've ever been. But her eyes find mine in the last of the light, and I want to believe it's the first. Wanting to believe is a new country for me. I walk into it beside her.

26

HIS SECRET

AGNÈS

A secret shared is a chain forged. Who holds whose end, only time will tell.

— PROVERB, LOZÈRE ORAL TRADITION

The morning smells of other women's bread.

Mine is baked and cooling in the basket on my hip, done in the first firing, the dark hour nobody wants at the oven. I used to take that hour because it was the one they left me. Now I take it because the village gets its bread without deciding afresh what to do with its eyes when I pass, and I get the walk home to myself.

The bell doesn't ring. It hasn't rung since the morning they found the priest at the foot of his own steps, and the day still flinches where the sound should be. Every house crosses itself on its own hour now, raggedly, like a flock with no dog. The men go out to the pens in pairs with staves along. The women see them off from the doorways. In every mouth, the Beast.

It will come down with the snows, they're saying at the oven this morning. "It takes whom God marks," Berthe says, eyes down, the dead priest's sermon in her mouth with his name left off it. "It crossed the road before my cart at broad noon," a drover two parishes over swears, "and my mule wouldn't stir till dusk." "It's not natural, is all," one of the oven-women says, when he's gone. "Beasts keep to the woods. That's what woods are for." "My cousin in Malzieu parish swears it's been seen there," another says. "Gone south over the ridges. Perhaps it's left us." "It hasn't left us," Berthe says, eyes down. "It's never yet left a parish before the dying was done." They believe it the way they believe in winter, sure as cold and no use arguing.

And I walk through the middle of all that certainty with his truth under my shawl, warm as the loaves, and nothing about me shows.

There is no werewolf. Wolves, and a story men sell because a shapeless dying can't be borne. He said it under my own roof with his hands open on his knees, and I could hear the relief come into him as the truth went out of his keeping and into mine.

And under the trick of it, deeper, the rest of what he gave me, his father and the count that hanged him. Pascal is at the well-head again, telling our dead over on his fingers for anyone who'll pause to hear. "Five," he's saying, to a man who hasn't stopped. "Five since the summer turned, and not one answer to any of them." There was a time I heard that counting as grief hunting for order. I stand with my basket, my face shut, and hear it plain, strand on strand, the sound a rope makes before anyone has said the word rope.

Margot is in the line at the oven when I come back past it with the water.

Her family's loaves ride her hip, and my eyes go to her before any thought I could stop. They always have. I used to be able to tell where she stood in the line without turning round, because she hums at her work, under her breath, tuneless, half a song that never finds itself, and she's the only one in the parish who doesn't know she does it. The women around her have their ordinary silence. Hers is the wrong kind.

She sees me. Her face starts up its old lift, the light coming before the thought, and I watch the thought arrive and put the light out. What's left turned toward me is a face doing what mine has always done. Holding shut.

"You're early done," she says.

Her glance goes to my basket, and a jest rises in her. She used to swear I bake like a mason builds. It gets as far as her mouth and no farther. She puts it away, somewhere I'm not let any more, and settles the loaves higher on her hip. The silence where the joke should have been costs me more than the whole week's whispering has.

"They say he's mending," she says. "Under your roof."

She doesn't make a question of it, so there's nothing to answer that wouldn't be offering more, and everything I might offer stands too near what I can't. Time was I'd have told her all of it before the loaves went cold. She'd have listened with flour on her wrists, Denis's shirt in her lap, her father's supper waiting, and made room for me anyway. Half of what's true in my house now is his, not mine to spend. The other half has never been sayable in this lane.

"He is," I say. "Mending."

"Good," she says, and means it, and that's the worst of it, that she means it.

Her eyes come up. Hurt has only ever made Margot go quiet, never hard, and hers is the one quiet in the world I can't bear to look at long.

"I have to get back," I say.