Page 52 of She, Wolf, Him.

It takes me till midmorning to bring him in. Twice I sit down in the frost because the ground tips under me. Once I bleed a while into the shoulder binding and think what her face will do if I die downhill of a fraud, stupidly, in sight of the village. The dogs find their voices at the top wall, and the barking runs ahead of me house by house, the same wave that carried me to her door the night the pack had me. The village comes out to meet me as it never has.

The first of them stop short in the lane. "Saints and all the angels," a man says, at his own door. "Look at the size of it." "Is that it," a child asks, loud. "That's it?" "That's it," the man with him says, and swings him up to see. "How did you take him," a man asks me, on the drag, at my shoulder. "Slowly," I tell him, and the size of him answers the rest. I watch the size of him go through them, face by face, and I say not one word. I haul him the last hundred paces through a crowd growing at every door and let the poles down in the middle of the square, before the church, where this parish has stood all autumn counting its dead.

Somewhere on the drag down I put the showman on over the blood. He's a poorer fit than he used to be.

"There's your Beast," I say.

Flat and certain, the tone a man uses for weather. No patter, no coin going round. The blood does the patter. They come round the carcass in a ring three deep, and the murmur goes round it mouth to mouth. A woman lifts her child up to see. Berthe crosses herself at the carcass and then again at me, and I'd stake the pelt that the second one was nearer a blessing than a ward.

No hounds get this curée. The village does. They take it with their eyes first, then with their mouths, each villager carrying a piece of the kill to the next door. "It's dead," a woman says, to the child on her hip, and then again, "It's dead." "Say it again," the Berthou woman tells her, laughing, and she does.

An old man's voice says what half of them are chewing. "They tell it that such a creature, killed, goes back to the man it was."

"It dies in the shape it hunted in." I have the answer ready. I built the story that needs it. "This one hunted as you see him. Four legs and grey, and a season of this parish's grief to his name."

Anselme comes forward with his register under his arm, because he'd bring it to his own hanging. He looks at the carcass a long while, an old dry man totting up an entry. "The King's men showed the parishes a dead wolf once, monsieur," he says. "At Chazes. The dying went on."

"It did." No sense denying what every soul this side of Mende knows. "The Chazes wolf was shot out of a line of two hundred beaters, by a gentleman who never came nearer it than a musket throws. He never bled for it. He couldn't have sworn next morning that his wolf ever killed so much as a hen. I bought this one at arm's length." I pull my collar wide and let them see it, the old mauling and this morning's work laid over it, the forearm binding gone rusty at the edge. "Its country marked me five nights past. It marked me itself at sunrise. Count my price against the King's man's. Then fetch the oldest shepherd in this parish to stand here and say he's seen the like of this wolf in his life. Then find me the man who'll swear before God the Beast was bigger."

Nobody stands.

It's Pascal who comes out of the crowd instead, the young one who has counted our dead on his fingers at the well-head all autumn, as if counting would hold them down. He stops over the carcass with his jaw working. "This is the one," he says. "The one that did for all of them." He means it for a question and can't afford one.

"It's the one." The lie goes down as smooth as any I've ever sold. It costs more than the shoulder did.

He nods, and goes on nodding. Then he kneels and lays his hand flat on the dead king's ribs, the touch a man gives the door of a church. "For my cousin," he says, into the fur. Nobody answers, and he doesn't need them to. When he stands, his face has set down a whole season. I look away from what I've done to him. If it were only shame, I'd know where to put it.

It's Bertrand who fetches chain from the forge and hauls the carcass up the church wall one-handed, work that should take three men, to hang where every road into Saint-Élie can see it. He steps back, wipes his palm on his apron twice, and stands quiet a while. "Big," he says. All the speech of him.

Anselme sends a boy up the tower, and the bell rings.

The first time since its priest died. The sound comes down over the square in great slow rounds, and the village stands under it with faces upturned, drinking it. Women weep in the open. Men grip men by the arms and shake them. Somebody has already gone for wine. "Ring it again," a woman calls up at the tower, laughing and crying at once. "Ring it for the shepherd. Ring it for the Father." "Ring it for all of them," another says, and the bell goes on.

Agnès is at the well-head, at the edge of it all, her shawl close. Around her the parish is beside itself for joy, and her face keeps its own counsel, as it always has. To the village, if the village looked, she's only the still one, moved past showing. What I'm looking at is the one other person in Saint-Élie who knows the price of what hangs on that wall, and carries it level. She finds my eye across the crowd for the space of a breath. Neither of us nods. Then she's away up her lane with her pail. The bell goes on ringing, and I stand in the middle of my own false dawn and let it break over me.

The show was a coat I put on and took off, every working day of my life. This one I've sewn on. I'll wear it till the country itself unpicks it.

By dark they've built a bonfire in the square and broached wine that somebody's wedding was waiting on. Saint-Élie is drunk on more than the wine. Doors stand open onto the night. Children are out under the stars past any curfew, running the lanes, shrieking, and nobody calls them in. Over it all the king hangs on the church wall with the firelight moving in his pelt, and every soul in the village has gone up close to him and come away lighter.

Every third man in the parish has gripped my shoulder tonight. Half of them chose the torn one. I've smiled through it. "To the King's man," Pascal toasts, hoarse, and the cup comes round again. "And to the wolf," another says, laughing. "May he rest." "I always said it was a wolf," a man says, drunk and certain. "You always said it was the Devil," his wife answers. "I heard you." "That was before."

Anselme finds me with a cup in his hand and his duty about him. The report goes down to Mende with the next cart, he tells me, and it will carry a different last line now. He says it dry, all business. I thank him, and that's all the ceremony either of us wants.

She comes late, when the fire has settled into itself and the singing has gone from loud to long. She stands beside me at the edge of the light. She's had her look at the shoulder binding already and made me swear to sit for fresh stitching by daylight, so there's nothing left to say of it, and for a while we watch the village be happy.

"They'll sleep tonight," she says.

"They will."

"And us?"

"We wake earlier than they do."

She nods, once. Neither of us puts a number on it. There isn't one to put. Her shoulder settles against my good one, light as it was at the blind, and the crowd's noise hides us better than any dark could, two people alone in the middle of a feast. For one evening I let the lie be true. The fire's warm. The village is singing. She's against my arm, and tomorrow is keeping its distance till morning. I've spent my working life counting every good hour before it was done being good. Tonight I don't count.

It's late when she goes in. I stay by the dying fire, because in a village this happy somebody ought to keep an eye open, and it had best be the one who sold them the happiness. The square empties. The wine's gone. The carcass on the wall has stopped being a wonder already. Within a month they'll pass under him and never look up.

I look the other way, past the last houses, to where the forest lies black against the stars, ridge behind ridge.