Page 50 of She, Wolf, Him.

She nods once, having heard the answer before I gave it.

"Mind your fire," she says. Any woman's goodbye, said a dozen times a day the parish over. From her, this morning, it's all I get.

In the square, before the parish, it was Margot who turned from my hand. This morning I'm the one who walks away first. All the way up the lane I carry her not-watching me between my shoulders, and I couldn't say which of us is paying the other back, or in what coin.

By midday the frost has given, and I go up to the high pasture with fodder across my shoulders and a pail besides, because a trap baited with a living creature has to be kept living. He'd have gone himself. He was one arm into his coat before the colour left him, and I put the coat back on its peg and told him a man who means to sit out whole nights in the frost can spend one more day indoors. The argument held because it was true. He gave me his instructions, and what he sent with them was near kin to thanks, whatever he'd have called it.

The wether hears me before I clear the last rise and sets up its crying, thin and even, carrying a long way down the open ground. That's its work now, to be a voice in an empty place. I tip the fodder where its rope reaches, break the skin of ice on the pail, pour it fresh. It strains to the stake's far side the while and cries on after I've stepped back. It will cry half the night, a lame beast staked under a treeline with winter coming on. The Vidals took a good price for it and asked nothing, which passes for wisdom this autumn.

The blind sits where we built it, low in the bracken with granite at its back, woven so close to the country that a stranger would walk past it. Nothing has moved on the cleared line. The wind holds from the north, on my right cheek, as he said it must be. I don't linger at the stake. Wolves do their walking at dusk, and I mean to be down among houses long before the light turns. That much fear is only sense. Still I stand a moment at the top of the pasture, because the quiet up here is half of what I climbed for.

No one can see me from the lanes. At this distance a woman at the wood's edge is a shape and a shawl, too far off to be worth a name, and the wood at my back has no opinion of my face. I let the face go loose. No confession in it, no whisper, only a tired woman standing in the wind letting her jaw unclench, and the ease of it goes through me like the first mouthful of soup on a fasting day.

I grew up on the loup-garou, as every child this side of Mende did. The man who runs on four feet when the moon calls him, the neighbour with the devil under his shirt. Reynaud preached it all autumn with the relish of certainty, and I knelt with the rest and gave back the responses. Under the kneeling, the story never held. I've washed what the killing leaves since the first of it. Teeth made every wound I've bound or shrouded in this parish. Hunger made them, and hunger is no sin out of a pulpit. Judgment doesn't chew.

I never said so, to anyone. A woman who doubts out loud in Saint-Élie is a woman asking to be looked at closely, and I've arranged to be looked at as little as a living body can. The doubt went down with the rest of what I don't say. I carried it like salt got past the King's men, hidden and dear. And all those years there was another of us on the roads, selling the very story he'd never bowed to. Now he mends at my hearth, and his rifle stands against my wall.

Two of us, then. Two in a believing parish who know what the Beast is not. It shouldn't warm anything, a truth that can't be spent. It warms me all the way down.

The beeches are letting their leaves go a few at a time, no wind asking it of them, copper coming down slow through the black of the firs. Behind me the wether cries and cries at nothing. I go back down to the believers.

By dark the house smells of broth and gun-oil.

I feed him first, because the broth won't keep and he will. Barley, the knuckle of mutton the Vidal woman put in my basket after her men had named their price, without a word said, and my mother's pot to boil it in, which is mine now and feels borrowed yet. He eats at my father's table with his left hand, badly, the spoon coming up at an angle it was never meant for, to spare the shoulder, and he's ashamed of it, which I hadn't known he could be. I cut his bread. I don't make anything of it. The dead don't eat, and for the last year the only other soul at this table was one who'd stopped speaking.

He's taken his meals standing, in doorways, at fires that weren't his, and it shows. He eats fast, half turned to the door. Then he catches himself at it, slows, and looks at the bowl as if it had asked him what the hurry was.

"What," I say.

"Nothing. It's hot." He turns the spoon over. "I've not eaten at a table with my back to a wall and nothing to listen for since I was a boy."

"Listen for the broth, then. It'll be gone."

He nearly smiles. He finishes it, and the bread down to the heel. I fill the bowl again without asking. He lets me. A second bowl in front of him, broth on his chin, a man fed at my fire. He wipes it off with the back of his bad wrist and winces.

"Sit," he says, when I get up for the pot. "You've stood all day."

"I've stood since I could carry a pail."

"Then sit for the length of a bowl," he says, "and eat where I can see you do it."

I sit and eat.

After, he has the rifle across his knees at the pallet's edge, working at it in the fashion he's invented for one sound hand and a bad arm, slow, all patience, the rod drawn through and through the barrel. The gun was clean before supper. He'll clean it twice more before he sleeps. The firelight finds the old white rake-marks on his left forearm, and the linen on his right where the new ones are still knitting.

I have my mending, and tonight the needle even moves.

We don't talk much. The not-talking bears no likeness to the silences I was raised on. My father's had grief in it like damp in a wall. Thibault's asked no questions because there was no part of me he cared to ask after. This one is the kind that comes when what needed saying is already said, and it sits easy in the room with us.

His eyes are on me while I sew. I feel it without looking up. Every glance this village has laid on me lately came asking an answer to a question nobody had the courage to say out loud. His asks no answer. It stays on me, patient. In the spring I'd have dropped my gaze and found work in another corner. Tonight I go on sewing and let myself be looked at. The pleasure of it is so simple and so new I could laugh.

The wanting is in the room too. It's been in the room since the night I went to him unsent, and the blood and the fever pushed it to the wall for a while. Now it sits with us again, fed, in no hurry. I remember him whole. He'll be whole again. There's a strangeness in the thought that there could be time, time past tonight, with more in it of what I want. Nothing in my life has taught me how to trust such a promise. I let it lie, and the needle keeps moving.

"The wind's stayed north," he says, to the rifle. "It'll sit there a day or two. That's the wind we built the blind for."

"And your arm?"

"A rest takes the rifle's weight. You wove that into the blind yourself." He runs the rod through once more. "Tomorrow night, or the one after. An old loner doesn't leave a lame wether crying long."