Page 58 of She, Wolf, Him.

The village round the well is easy tonight in a way it forgot how to be all autumn. Shutters stand open to the blue dusk. Down the lane a man patches a sheep-hurdle by feel, whistling over the work, and nobody hushes him. Nobody watches the treeline while the light goes. A month now since the wolf came down the mountain on a pole, a month without a new grave to wash, and Saint-Élie has remembered how to let the dark come on without counting its children first.

She comes up the lane with the yoke across her shoulders, sees me at the well-head, and doesn't slow. That's what these two days have done. All the years before them, whatever she carried and wherever she was bound, Margot slowed when she saw me.

"Margot."

"I've my father's supper to get." She hooks the first bucket to the chain and lets it down, and the windlass runs loud, worked at a pitch the work doesn't ask for. Margot's hands have carried every feeling she's ever had.

"A word. That's all I'm asking."

"Not here." The bucket comes up streaming. She swings it to the lip, and the water leaps and slops across the frost at her feet. She stares at the spill, blame enough in the look for me.

"Then when? You've given me neither the road nor the well for two days."

"Not now." Flat as catechism. Then, lower, with her back to the women waiting their turn behind her, every one of them born with an ear turned toward other people's trouble, "You'll have your word, come on, then. There's one place we've never needed anybody's leave in."

She leaves the yoke and one bucket standing at the well for any soul to wonder over, takes the other, full, making a show of carrying it up to her father's ewes, and walks. I follow. Past the last cottages, past the chicken-runs, up to where the lane gives out into pasture. The frost has held all day in the shadow of every wall up here, and now the sun is done trying. Neither of us spends a single word on the climb. I've kept silences with Margot. They were the best rooms I ever lived in. This one has nothing at the bottom of it.

The hay-store comes up on our right, low and grey, its door hanging loose on the hinge. She doesn't so much as turn her head. She walks us past it, past the place that's been ours since before either of us could have said what ours meant, and she doesn't stop until the pasture runs out at the treeline, under the bare branches, in the cold that slides down off the heights.

She sets the bucket down. She turns round.

"You wanted to say something." Her voice is level in a way Margot's voice never is. "Say it."

I had it ready. Two days of threshing it out. I'm sorry. I was a coward in the hay-store. What happened there was true. The leaving was fear. You're owed better than the leavings I handed you. All of it threshed and ready, and under that level voice of hers it goes to chaff.

"I don't want it to be like this between us." That's what comes out instead, thin as whey.

"Like what?" She doesn't move. "Say what it's like, then. You're the careful one with words. I've heard you pick them for the priest, for the hunter, for every man in this parish who thought himself owed a piece of your face to carry home. Pick some for me."

"Margot—"

"You can't. Two days you've carried it round the village, whatever it is you think you've got to say to me, and I'll spare you the work of laying it out. You want him. That's all of it. There's no knot in it for your careful fingers. You want him, and you wanted him before you ever sat down across from me in the hay. And I was the one who was there." Her voice loses its level for the first time. "The one who's always been there. Handy as the stool by the fire."

"That isn't true." It comes out too fast, and sounds like a lie even though it isn't one. Or isn't all lie. "What I did in the hay-store, Margot, I did because I wanted to."

"And what you did after?"

I have no answer that helps me. I don't know what I want. I've had no practice finding out, and two days ago I wounded the surest love I had sooner than sit still inside the not-knowing. Say that aloud and it's only more of what she already can't forgive.

I put my hand out instead. It's the older language between us, the one that's mended everything words ever broke, since we were girls trading sorrows behind her father's wall. She looks at my open palm long enough for the cold to get into it.

She doesn't take it.

"No," she says, and the gentleness in it is the worst she's said yet. "That's how we've always mended it. Take the hand and let the saying-nothing do the work. Then you go home with everything put away neat inside you, and I go home and feed a week on whatever you've spared me. I've done it half my life and called it plenty. It isn't plenty. I'm done mending on those terms."

"Then tell me what terms." My voice is climbing and I can't pin it down. "Tell me what I'm supposed to do with what I only learned the name of two nights ago."

"Learned." The word cracks out of her, and somewhere behind the trees a crow goes up. "You learned no such thing two nights ago, Agnès. You've known as long as I have. You knew it every time you took my hand where nobody could see, and you knew what it cost me every time you dropped it where they could. You spent me like a well that couldn't run dry." Her hands go still at last, gripping the cloth of her apron. "I think I was the one you practised on. The wanting you could afford. Loving me never asked you to choose, because I was already had. Then a man rode up the lane with a price on him. Now you've found the kind that costs, and I'm the coin you're paying it out of."

"That isn't what you were to me. Margot. That isn't what you were."

"Then say what I was." She waits. She truly waits, hope coming up her face even now, even here, because she's Margot and hope won't stay in her fist. And I stand there with my mouth full of nothing, unable to tell whether I have no answer or one I can't afford. I watch the hope go out of her face again, as it went out of it in the hay-store. Both times my doing.

When she speaks again the anger has gone out of her voice, and what's underneath is tiredness, which frightens me more. I've seen her grieved and I've seen her wild. Tired is new.

"You ask what I think, so I'll say it and be done. You've stood at the edge of this village all your days hungering for the far side of those trees, and you'll die in sight of this well. There's more hunger in you than in anyone I've known, and you fold it down small before it can get you anything, every time, till that's the only part of you anybody's allowed to keep. They built you a cage, and it took. If every door of it stood open on the same morning, you'd stand in the middle of it and never walk through one." She picks up the bucket, already half gone. "And whoever loves you gets to live on the doorstep of that cage, waiting to be chosen. You'll go on wanting till it's all you're made of, and you'll never let it buy anything. It'll go to rot in you, Agnès. And you'll call the rot patience."

Then the anger arrives in me. It comes up through the guilt with no trouble at all, because she's cornered me with a truth I can't argue down and left me no place to put it. On another night I might bear the truth and ask her pardon on the spot. Tonight I reach for what will cut.