Page 5 of She, Wolf, Him.

"Where I can."

"The widow at the lane's end lets her back room," Reynaud says, to the square as much as to him. "She could use the coin. We keep our guests where we can see them, here. It's an old parish custom."

His eyes move over us while Reynaud talks. I can see them now, pale, grey, the flat cold grey of the sky before snow, and they go across the crowd as his hand went over the horse, counting, weighing, not stopping. The widow weeping at the church door. The men with their jaws set. Reynaud. Then me.

And they stop.

I haven't stepped forward. I'm at the edge of it all with Margot, standing where women can stand without being noticed while the rest cross themselves or press in to gawp. The edge of the crowd fails me as a hiding place. He holds there a beat past what's polite.

It lasts no time at all, a blink, maybe two. But I've spent my whole life learning how not to be looked at, how to be the pair of hands and not the woman, the one who does what nobody else will before going home unseen. To be found like that, by a man who doesn't know my name, my use, my shame, is more than I have armour for. It's alarm and want together. For as long as it lasts I feel like a person instead of a place.

A good woman, a promised woman, drops her gaze. I don't. I stand under his gaze and let it rest on my skin in the cool of the evening, and I want him. Plainly, the way I'm not supposed to want anything, and the wanting is mine even if nothing else in my life is.

Then Thibault.

He sees as a dog sees, slow and certain, only what's put in front of him, but he's seen the stranger find me and seen me not look away. He comes through the crowd to my side and lays his arm across my shoulders, heavy, a lid coming down. The whole village takes note of it. There. Spoken for. Reynaud's small nod from across the square says it too, blessing the match again as he blessed it a fortnight back. And the stranger's eyes take in the arm and the man it belongs to, then move off me, done, having seen what I am.

Which is owned.

The fury comes up fast and total. My face stays still. I leave Thibault's arm where it is and think I'd trade a year of my life to be a woman a stranger would hold one instant longer. Then I swallow the thought.

Margot's been beside me the whole while, close as she always stands, and when Thibault takes his arm back at last and drifts off to talk dead sheep with the other men, she says nothing about him, or the stranger, or my face. She only shifts the half-step that sets her shoulder against mine and stays there while the square breaks up into the blue dark. She saw. Margot sees everything in me the village doesn't. Tonight I can't say whether that's my greatest mercy or my worst danger, and I'm glad, for once, to be let off the saying. I walk home carrying two stolen comforts, the stranger's grey attention and Margot's shoulder, neither of them belonging to the man I'm promised to.

At home there's bread, the heel of the cheese, my father in the chair he's hardly left since winter. I do the small evening things, the fire and the setting-down, and none of it needs my mind, so my mind goes where it likes. It goes to the stranger.

The stranger saw me like I was a question. Thibault treats me like a gatepost he owns and means to lean on.

I know what this is. It's want, the ordinary kind, the kind the songs are about and Reynaud keeps a special voice for. I'm promised to a good-enough man, and I've gone and felt it for a stranger with blood-work in his hands, the shepherd barely in the ground. Shame is the proper answer. I am ashamed. It doesn't lay a finger on the wanting, though. They sit in me side by side, not arguing, two women who've agreed to share a bench.

And under both of them there's Thibault's arm coming down across me. Reynaud's nod. The fury, banked low and red. I press it down until it lies flat.

The ladder to the loft is right there, the warm dark over the goats where most nights the day can't follow me up. Tonight I don't climb it. I bank the fire to its red coals, then stand a while in the low room with my father asleep in his chair and the house gone still around us. I've made myself small enough for the space the village leaves a woman like me. Tonight I don't fit it.

3

THE MANDATE

GASPARD

He called himself a King's man. He carried a paper with a seal. He said he had killed wolves before, and worse than wolves.

— FROM THE DEPOSITION OF JEAN-PIERRE FAURE, FARMER, SAINT-ÉLIE

The body's fresher than the last. That's the first fact this place gives me, before a soul says a word. They have a Beast. It's hungry. It doesn't wait long between meals.

They found him at dawn in the lower pastures, or what the dawn left of him. A man, this time. The last was a shepherd up on the high ground, three or four nights back, before I came. I've heard about that one a dozen times since I rode in yesterday, the village worrying at it like a sore tooth. This one's only hours old. The blood's still tacky where the dew hasn't reached it. I crouch over what's left, let the village keep its distance, and do the part of the work that counts, which is the reading.

Near the back of the crowd a woman is keening, his wife or his mother, a sound I've heard over a hundred kill-mornings and long since stopped truly hearing. I've a job here, and the job doesn't weep.

Call it a wolf-kill and you'd be calling a shambles a supper. The same parts, in a worse order. The throat's gone. The belly's open and most of what was in it lies a yard off in the grass. One arm has been carried clean away. An animal eating to live doesn't do this. This is killing for the love of it, the kind of damage wolves can do, now and then, in a hard winter, in a big pack, when the blood gets up in them. But it's late summer, and I cut no pack-sign worth the name on my way in. A lone wolf will do this, mind. An old one, sick, driven off its range and half-mad with it. I've seen the like. There's print, too, in the soft ground at the wood's edge, and I read it where I'm crouched. Big. Bigger than any wolf I've stood over, and I've stood over some that made a yard go quiet. But size is only size. A wolf grown old and strange in good hunting country can be a brute, and this is good country for one. So I write the whole of it down under big wolf and leave it there, because the only other word for it is the word these people are aching to hear, and I don't give that one away for nothing.

The priest works the whole time I do, down on one knee in the wet with his Latin, pitched loud enough that I'm meant to catch every syllable. "Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam." An old man, narrow, in a black gone green at the seams. He prays at the corpse like the corpse is who he's performing for. I don't need the Latin. He's already telling them whose glory this is, and it isn't mine. When I stand, he stops. We take each other's measure. I've met a hundred of him, the man who owns the souls in a place like this and means to go on owning them, world without end. We'll get along about as well as you'd expect.

When the praying's done, I give them the answer nobody sent for and everybody's wanted since I came up the track. I let my voice up. I tell them I've come under the King's own warrant to put an end to what's been feeding on them, and I let the seal show in my hand while I say it. I tell them I've hunted its kind before, in the north, in the Vivarais, and that I can do the work. Then I give them the word. Loup-garou. I leave it there.

It does what it always does. A word every one of them knows and not one will say in daylight. And now a stranger's said it for them, over a fresh body, a King's seal in his fist. "He said it," a woman whispers, behind her hand. "Out loud. Over him." Half of them go grey where they stand. The other half straighten up. I'm not proud of it, and I've never stopped doing it. You name the fear. Then you sell yourself as the cure.

The priest doesn't care for the cure. He waits until the word's loose beyond calling back, then speaks, not loudly, to the village and not to me. "The Beast is a scourge and an instrument," he says. "God sends such things to villages that have earned them. No King's man with a gun will lift what only repentance can." We understand each other now, the priest and I. He needs their Beast to belong to God. I need it to belong to me.