Page 62 of She, Wolf, Him.

I said that to her. To Margot, who charged nobody for anything, who gave with both hands and looked ashamed if you tried to pay her back.

And her answer. The last of her voice I'll ever have, and I've turned it over so many times already the edges should be worn smooth. They aren't.

Live with it.

She meant it for the end of a quarrel. It has turned out to be a prophecy. Here's the living with it, laid out plain as washing. A fire nobody lights because warming one body alone isn't worth the wood, one chair drawn up to the table and the other pushed in square.

I've dressed wounds enough to know by the look of one whether it means to close. This one doesn't.

His step in the lane, middle of the afternoon. I know it without rising.

The knock is soft. Then, through the wood, "Agnès."

Gentle, and carrying a sorrow of its own. The village spent this morning deciding whose fault to make it. I heard enough of that with my hands still in the basin, and I haven't the strength to weigh any of it today, his share or mine.

I don't rise. I want to. I want the door open and his warmth in this unlit room, to be held up the way the old woman held me up in the square this morning, without one question in it. But opening the door means being a living woman with a face that answers. Comfort taken has to be paid back in kind, and there's nothing in the house to pay with.

"I'm here when you need me," he says at last, low, to the wood between us.

I hold still until his boots have taken him back down the lane. Then the want goes down, small and obedient, the last part of me that minds its training. The grief minds nothing.

And I'm grateful. That's the truth I'd tell a priest, if we had one. Grateful to be left alone in a cold house with her voice, while she lies up the lane going colder in a church I couldn't stand to stay in, and the man who'd sit with me walks back to a village that wants him gone. The gratitude shames me. I sit with the shame too.

I sit while the light goes. Somewhere past the treeline, beneath the firs, the Beast that opened her is alive this evening. It'll be alive tonight while the village kneels round her with candles. The Beast is breathing and Margot isn't. That sits in me like a live coal. I don't smother this one. I bank it.

They hold the vigil at candle-lighting. I walk up through a dusk already gone to iron, doors opening all along the lane, shapes coming out of them with small lights cupped against the wind. "Come along," a woman calls, to the house across. "Bring the child. Everyone comes, for Margot." The last time all Saint-Élie walked one way at nightfall there was wine at the end of it, and a dead wolf on a chain. Nobody sings tonight.

Inside, the church smells of tallow and cold stone, and under both, faint, of every censer ever swung here, though nothing swings tonight. Margot lies where I left her, in her Sunday blue, and the candles have multiplied round her the way loaves multiply in the story, out of nothing to spare. Tallow is dear this deep into autumn. They've lit it for her anyway, a village's worth of small dear lights, and that undoes me nearly as far as the washing did. I find a place at a pillar and let the stone do my standing for me.

No priest stands at her head. Nobody has stood at any dead's head here since the steps took Reynaud. Tonight the gap where the office should be has a shape to it, and every soul that files in looks once at the empty place, then away. Anselme comes nearest. He sets himself a full pace off from where a priest would plant his feet, careful even in this, and gives out the Pater in a voice better used to counting than to praying. "Pater noster, qui es in caelis," he gives out, and the village gives it back louder than he gave it.

Her mother is brought in last, between two of the boys, and set in the front pew. She keeps her eyes down the whole while. Her father isn't with her. They say he wouldn't come, that his cough would have filled the church.

"She always had a word for my littlest," a woman near me says, to her candle. "Always a kind word." "She gave my boy her own mittens, off her hands," another says, across the candles. "I've never forgot it."

The wax runs down and sets on my knuckles. I let it. The sting is small and quickly done, which puts it ahead of everything else I own tonight.

When the prayers run out, nobody moves to go. Then an old man near the front, one of those this autumn has already dug for, gets up slow off his knees, takes hold of the pew ahead, and turns himself round to face the rest of us. Facing the room isn't done, in church. He does it anyway. "I'm too old to fear anything the woods hold," he says, in the flat worn voice he'd use over seed corn, and it's the flatness that carries. "I've dug more graves this autumn than I ever meant to. A village that can dig graves can dig pits. Men who walk behind a plough all day can walk a line through the firs. The kneeling's done. Now there's work."

The church answers him. Low at first, a word here, an amen there, then less low. "Picks," a man says. "I've picks and a good bar." "Staves," says another. "Dogs," says a third, and is answered by the quiet. Women's voices too, and nobody hushes them tonight. It goes along the pews as a shiver goes through a penned flock. My own voice goes in with the rest, and I let it stay there.

"I'll help," I say. It comes out cracked from the morning, a stranger's voice, but it carries to the front. "Whatever it takes."

Heads turn. Some of the women make room around me, more room than a voice needs. Anselme studies me, then nods once, the nod he gives a column that comes out right.

And under my breath, hardly louder than the wax, "For Margot."

Under a church roof, with candles burning, a vow holds, witnessed or not. I've guided this hunt before and I'll guide it again. I know every fold and gully of this parish, every path the dead walked, and I've spent the autumn washing this creature's work from our dead. Let them run it to ground wherever it lairs. Let me be by when it goes down. I'll stand over it as I've stood over the ones it left me, and I'll say her name to it before the men take their due of the carcass. Nobody hears the words. They're mine.

Gaspard keeps to the back, by the door, careful how much room he takes. He doesn't cross to me, and I don't cross to him. Once, across the candled length of the nave, his eyes find mine and hold, and what passes is the same as what passed through my door this afternoon. It's a strange courtesy for a rough trade to have taught him.

We come out in twos and threes into a cold with teeth to it. At the porch the men talk low of picks against the frozen ground, of pits and staves, of the line they'll walk through the firs once she's in the ground. "And then we go up," a man says, after her burial. "Up and in, the whole line of us." "At least we'll be doing," another says. "I'm sick past bearing of sitting still and being taken." I walk home with my candle-end cupped against the wind. The vow goes with me, covered where nobody can see it burning. It gives the grief an aim.

That night I dream of the hay-store. Grey light comes down through the gaps in the boards, and the hay smells of the gone summer. Margot sits deep in it with her knees drawn up, as she sat three nights ago, and her hand comes up for my face, unhurried, sure of its welcome this time.

I reach to meet it. Close enough to feel the warmth coming off her palm, close enough that the scar at the base of her thumb is a breath from my cheek. They never touch. I wake with my hand out in the cold above the blanket.

Margot is dead.