Page 55 of She, Wolf, Him.

After, with the fire settled to its steady low burning, he sits with his back against the warm stones, and I sit in the circle of his good arm, my spine to his chest, a way of sitting we've never had the leisure to learn until tonight.

There's no hurry anywhere in him, and none in me. The strangeness of that is half the sweetness. Every touch we've had since summer has been stolen off the top of one fear or another. This one has the whole evening under it and nothing behind it chasing. He turns my hand over in his and traces the lines of it, slow, as though there were time enough in the world for each one. I turn in his arm when I want his mouth, and take it. He answers as he's answered me from the first, and lets me set the pace. We go no further than hands and mouths, and none of it is held back even so. We cross into it together, choosing as we go.

His mouth is at my hair, later, the fire down to coals, when he says it.

"We could have this."

"After what?" I ask, because there's an after standing in his voice, plain as a stranger at the gate.

He's quiet a moment. He has never dressed a hard truth up prettily for me, and he doesn't now.

"After I leave."

The words come with no surprise anywhere in them, and that's its own small grief, that I'm not surprised. He's a hunter. The hunt is over, or the village has decided it is, and the two come to the same purse. I've known it since the night he rode in, and the knowing has sat put by with everything else I can't afford. Hearing it in his own voice only takes it out of its keeping and sets it in the room between us.

The happiness doesn't break. It does what happiness has always done in my hands, shows me the crack that was in it from the firing.

There are questions I could spend the evening on. What comes after his after, and whether a road like his has room on it for a woman who's been three leagues past this well once in her life. I don't ask them. I want to stay here in his arm a little longer.

I pull him closer instead of answering, and he comes.

He goes back to the widow's at an hour when the lane still holds a few late voices to see him go. "Good night, King's man," somebody calls, from a doorway, and doesn't leer, which is new. "Good night, Agnès," another adds, after him, and means no harm by either. That's new as well, the leaving by the front door, with witnesses, and neither of us with anything left worth the hiding.

I bar my door out of a habit older than this autumn's fear and lie down in the dark of my own house. The quiet tonight is different from the siege's. That one leaned on the door with all the dark behind it. Tonight's is only a village spent with singing, gone glad to its beds. Down the lane the last two voices in Saint-Élie go home unhushed, out past any curfew there ever was.

Sleep ought to come the same easy way. It doesn't. I lie awhile sorting the day like a fleece, the good staple to one side and the burrs picked out to look at.

Two burrs.

His after is one, and it can keep till morning. It gave its notice, and a grief that gives notice is half-tamed before it arrives.

The other follows me down toward sleep. Margot's face has always been the one I could read across a field in failing light, and today I stood an arm's length from it and couldn't make out a word. There's no seam in the morning I can point to and say, there, that's where it opened. I put the wrongness by at last, as I'd set aside work I mean to take up again by daylight, and it goes down and doesn't go out.

When sleep takes me, it isn't the wolf on the wall I carry into it, and it isn't his leaving. It's Margot, going away from me through all that brightness with her basket on her hip, and the little word she left me to keep.

29

ALMOST

AGNÈS

There is no sin so grave as the sin of unnatural affection, for it corrupts the soul and turns the heart from God toward the abyss.

— SYNODAL STATUTE, DIOCESE OF MENDE, 1759

Margot's smallest brother brings me four words at my gate. "The hay-store," he says. "Before dark." He's off again before I can get an answer into him.

Four words, carried by a child too young to know he's carrying anything. Three weeks and more Margot's face has been shut to me, my good-mornings answered a beat late, her eyes settling anywhere mine aren't, and now this, a summons as bare as a knock. Margot doesn't send four bare words. She writes nothing, so everything she's ever needed me to know has come in her own voice at her own speed, which is to say at a gallop, with the ends of sentences left behind on the road. Four words through a child means she didn't trust herself to say it, or didn't trust her face to stand in my yard while she did.

I go. Of course I go. Whatever else has gone wrong between us, going to Margot is the one errand my feet have never needed telling twice.

The hay-store sits where it has sat all our lives, low and grey at the village's hem, past the last cottages, its door hanging askew where it's hung since we were girls. It's been ours so long I can't remember the claiming. Half the secrets I own were said first in there, in the dusty half-light, with the village a whole parish away on the other side of a plank wall.

Inside, the grey light comes down through the gaps in the boards, and the hay still smells of the gone summer. Margot is sitting deep in it with her knees drawn up, keeping herself warm, or keeping herself together, and her fingers are at a strand of hair come loose from its knot, braiding it, unbraiding it.

She doesn't get up. She watches me cross to her, and I sit myself down in the hay across from her, close enough to touch and not touching, as we've sat a thousand times.

"You got my message," she says, to the hay. "Four words. I counted them like they cost me by the letter."