Page 60 of She, Wolf, Him.

"The treeline," she says. "Past the hay-store. The men have gone up. There's⁠—"

"Who."

Her mouth works and nothing comes. That tells me more than a name would have.

"The Berthou child," I say, because that's the fear I can say aloud. "Is it⁠—"

She shakes her head, and still can't give me the name. I start running before she finds a word she can bear to say.

The frost gives back the first grey of the light, the pasture faintly shining with it, and my breath burns going down. Above the last turning of the lane I can see them, a dark knot of people at the treeline where no one has any business standing at this hour, pressed along the fence by the gap as if the rail were the edge of deep water.

They make room for me without a word. I come through the gap and I stop. The morning stops with me.

The hair gives her to me first. Brown, shot through at the crown with the last of the summer, come loose from its knot as it was always coming loose. Margot. Agnès's Margot. The one who watched me across every square and lane of this parish as a shepherd watches a strange dog too near the lambs, and was not wrong.

I've knelt over four of these mornings in this valley, and the trade has a proper order for them. Read the ground before your feet spoil it. Read the wounds before the women cover them. Weigh what fed, and set the rest aside for later. The order is what I'm for. It's the reason a village that can't afford bread paid for me.

The order dies at the fence.

Hunger keeps accounts. Mean, but thrifty. Nothing spent past the meal, nothing broken that doesn't buy meat. There is no thrift anywhere on this ground. What was done under these trees went on long after any beast alive had got what beasts come for, and not one word of my own trade has any use in it. If a man had done this, I'd say rage, and start asking who she'd crossed. No man did this. The prints alone put that past arguing. So the word has no place here, and I set it down. It takes more setting down than it should.

Her face is untouched. Whatever else was wanted here, her face wasn't. Above the ruin the face is simply hers. Open. Margot's face never learned to close, and it hasn't learned now.

The women along the rail have begun keening, low, the sound this autumn has taught the parish the use of. Half the village is against that fence at my back. "She'd gone up to the hay-store after her father's supper," one man says to the man beside him. "Her mother says she'd taken to it these weeks. Sitting up there of an evening on her own." Nobody asks what for. Somebody has to be the man who kneels down in what's left and reads it, and the somebody is me, because I stood under a dead wolf and told them all it was finished.

There's nowhere to kneel that isn't in her blood, so that's where I kneel. This morning my hands have gone stupid on me. I set two fingers at the edge of the clearest print and can't hold them quiet enough to trust the measure, take it again, get another answer, take it a third time and stop trusting all three.

Mark it. Set it aside. Come back to it when it can be used. The habit has walked me through every dead man this valley has handed me, and I reach for it now and find it gone, a stair-tread missing in the dark. There's no later to send Margot to. Later was where I kept everything. It won't hold her.

The sign is the sign it has been since summer. Four toes, too broad by half, a stride I've stopped trying to fit to anything honest, walking easy, unhurried, out of the black under the firs and back up into it, and on the granite shelf above the pasture it simply ends, the stone's old trick, the one I've spent an autumn calling weather, luck, washed-out ground. I don't call it anything this morning. I kneel in a dead girl's blood and look at the plainest sign I've ever been handed, and what's left to read is myself. A man who has known since the first week, and paid himself handsomely not to.

Behind me, up the lane, a voice starts asking for Agnès. "Someone go for Agnès," it says. Then a second one, sharper. "Someone bring her." I keep my eyes on the ground and my hands at their useless work, because, of everything this morning is going to ask of Saint-Élie, what it asks of her is the one thing I can't stand to watch.

They carry her down at full light on a door taken off its hinges. A boy has the front corner of it, fourteen at most, the look of her about his mouth, walking his sister down past the parish with his jaw set so hard it shakes. Nobody offers to take his corner. "Easy," the bearers keep saying, under the door's weight. "Easy now." The crowd opens all the way ahead of them, and the bell stops. Nobody sends word to stop it. It just stops, as if the ringer looked down the lane and saw there was no more warning in it worth giving.

I follow as far as the square and no farther.

The king still hangs where the parish drank to him. The weeks have taken the king out of him. What swings on Bertrand's chain now is a long grey hide with winter in it, and the men who touched it for luck the first night now walk wide of it without seeming to decide to. They bring their dead past it, and not one of them says aloud the word that's standing in the middle of the square with us.

Pascal comes out of the crowd, and he doesn't hurry, which is worse than hurrying. "You said it was dead." He doesn't raise it. He sets it down in front of me like the one card that ends a game, and the square goes quiet enough that everyone gets to hear me not answer. "You stood under it and swore."

I could tell him the truth, that I killed the finest wolf I've ever put on the ground and knew before he was cold that he wasn't what walks this valley, and the truth would cost more than the silence and buy him nothing. So I stand under the chain and give the square my silence.

"You killed the wrong one." A woman by the well-trough, flat, worn out the far side of anger. Nobody hushes her. "My girl touched that pelt," a man says, to no one. "For luck."

Bertrand says nothing at all. He stands at his forge with his arms loose at his sides and studies me as long and level as he studied his own chain-work the day he hung the king, testing the join. Then he turns away.

Agnès is at the mouth of the lane.

An old woman has her under one arm and is bearing up a fair share of her weight, asking her nothing, which is the only entirely right act anyone has managed in Saint-Élie since the bell started. I've watched Agnès hold her face shut against this village for a season. There's nothing shut about her now, and I can't look at what's there instead for longer than a breath.

Wanting to go to her is simple, but having any right to stand there beside her, with my wrong wolf on the church wall and Margot dead under men's hands, is not.

I take two steps toward her. I make myself stop.

All those open doors. This whole parish walking out at dusk with no eye on the trees. Whatever met her out there in the dark met a girl who believed the peace was real. Agnès defended me once in the open square, when nobody else would spend a word on me. What has it earned her. The man she spoke for standing whole under his dead wolf, and her Margot carried past on a door.

I leave her the old woman's arm and keep my distance. It's the only gift I've got on me that isn't spoiled.