Page 63 of She, Wolf, Him.

The fire is still unlit. The bread sits on the table where I set it down at noon. I lie in the dark with my eyes open, my hand drawn back in under the wool, and the dark goes on a long time, until at last, far off down the lane, the first cart of the morning creaks toward the square.

33

NO MORE LIES

GASPARD

Antoine killed his wolf and took his glory. The Beast killed three more before the year was out. There is no glory in this work, only death.

— LETTER FRAGMENT, MENDE, 1766

The wind has gone round to the west in the night, and it brings me the king before I'm past the last house of the lane. He smells now of what he always was, an animal, and not of the devil I sold them.

I've come out before the light on purpose. What I'm here to do wants no audience, and the square gives me none. The bonfire that burned for him is a black ring trodden into the frozen earth, frost silvering the char. The king hangs above it on Bertrand's chain, nose down, the great pelt gone slack on the bones, and the chain gives one dry complaint whenever the wind leans in.

I stand under him and lay the measure.

I've owed it since the morning I shot him. I stood over the finest animal of my working life with the answer within arm's reach, and I chose the arm's reach and not the answer, because the answer wouldn't pay.

I put my palm to one great forefoot. Broad as my hand, as it was when he died, and my hand hasn't grown. I draw a fang out from under the lip with two fingers, a thumb's length of yellowed ivory. Hung as he hangs, he runs longer than I stand tall. Everything I told the parish about him is true. A king of his kind. The eighteenth wolf of my life and the best of them.

Then I set the other shape beside him. The one from among the firs, the evening the pack had me on the ground. I struck it out of my own account the hour I saw it. It comes up whole. I allow for the light, which was going, and for the blood I'd lost, which was plenty. I allow for fear, which paints. Make every allowance twice over and the shape among the firs still stands over this king as this king would stand over a spring pup. It was never him. There was no morning in this world it could have been him, and I knew it with my hand on his ribs while the parish rang its bell.

There's a rule I've hunted by since I first took pay. A man three parts dead sees what his terror shows him, and you don't enter a dying man's visions in the record. I used that rule on a fevered farmhand in his own yard, and I was right to use it. The man was three parts dead and raving. I was only bleeding. Then I turned it on myself the same week, with my own blood for ink, and being right had nothing to do with it. I struck what I saw because I couldn't afford to have seen it.

This morning I put it back. Every word of that testimony stands. The size of it, the stillness, the eyes that rested on me, priced me, and left me where I lay. I saw it. It was there. It's out there still.

My trade has run on two words since I was young in it. Wolf, and man. Every death I've ever been paid to read came down to the one or the other, and the art of the work is telling which. The Church has a third word for whatever it can't sell under the first two. I watched the third word close round my father's neck, because a frightened village needed it to fit somebody, and I've spent every year since seeing to it that nobody ever handed me that word again.

So here's where honest leaves me, under a rotting king in a cold square. Wolf won't hold what I've measured. No man alive leaves a four-toed print the breadth of a spread hand, or walks a living stride up bare granite and is nowhere on the far side. And the third word belongs to the men who hanged my father, and they can keep it. What's left is country I've never hunted. Sign I can read, pointing at a quarry I can't name.

The King's own hunters played this trick before me. A great wolf, dressed for court and carted off to be marvelled at, while the dying went on behind it like weather behind a procession. I used to tell that story dry, for coin, as proof of what fools believe. I'm the proof now. The peace I sold this parish held from the bonfire to the hay-store, and the girl who paid the difference lies in the church at his back, waiting for her ground to be opened.

Better a quarry with no name than one more morning of being wrong on purpose. I say it to the king out loud, since we're past lying to each other, he and I. "No more lies. Find what's true and kill it."

Somewhere up the lane the first shutter goes back. I leave the square before the village can find me standing under my own fraud, and take the morning up toward the high ground, where the dying started, to walk the whole of it honest for once. End to end.

The shepherd died highest. I never saw that ground fresh. He was two days buried before I ever crossed into this valley, and the parish had trodden and prayed the site flat long before I stood on it. It's the roof of the dead's country all the same, a shelf of grass above everything, and I stand up there in the wind and start the tally I should have started my first week.

The parish lies below me, grey roofs and greyer smoke. I read the autumn off it, kill by kill. The lower pastures, where the second man died the night I rode in. The pens where the betrothed man went down with a watch of five men two fields off. The hollow the drover never walked out of. The farmyard where the one who lived learned what his own fields hold after dark. Then the two I don't need height to find. The church steps, in the very middle of the village, every door around them barred for the night. And the hay-store, at the village's hem, a wall and a cart-track from the nearest sleeping family.

I walk them. All of them, the whole morning, high to low, old to new. The early ground gives me nothing, and I knew it wouldn't. Frost, sheep, and a month of weather have had those sites, and what's left at each is only what I carry to it in my head. That's plenty. It's the map in my head I came out to walk, and it has said its piece before I'm off the last pasture.

A wolf ranges. It's the first lesson of the trade and the deepest. A den, a country round it, the kills strung through the country. Plot the kills and you've drawn the range. Draw the range and you can dig out the den. I've drawn that circle in more valleys than I can name. Draw it here and the kills refuse to string. They come in. High grass, then the pastures, then the pens, then a farmyard, then the church's own steps, then the hay-store. Each one nearer the houses than the one before, autumn long. Say it straight, then. Everything this valley has buried since the summer turned was killed within sound of its own bell.

A beast dens at the middle of its range, for the plainest reason there is. It kills within reach of its own bed.

I stand a long time with that, in the cold, and I don't set it down. It beds close. Whatever I'm hunting sleeps near enough to Saint-Élie to hear the Angelus, and has all autumn, while the parish prayed the dark away and I collected my pay.

The hay-store is the last of the walk. The frost behind it hasn't given yesterday up. Her blood is a dark apron on the white, going nowhere. The tracks run where they ran, four toes and too broad by half, their easy line going up onto the granite and gone, the same trick the stone has played me since summer.

And on the second rail of the fence by the gap, a thread of wool I didn't find yesterday. I don't blame the man who missed it. Yesterday this rail had half a parish pressed against it, and the man reading the ground knelt in her blood with fingers he couldn't trust to a print's edge. I lift it off its splinter with two fingers. Grey. Coarse. Homespun, and half the backs in this country wear its like. It could be hers. She died an arm's length from this rail, and her shawl was wool. It could be mine. My coat's grey, torn twice this autumn and mended worse. I worked a full morning here on my knees. It could have come off any one of forty women who leaned on this fence keening while I worked. I twist it into a spill of paper and pocket it, and I promise it nothing. I keep it anyway.

I walk back into Saint-Élie carrying more questions than I carried out, and one thread.

Midday, and the village is at the work grief leaves behind. In the churchyard two men are opening ground with picks, and the frozen earth gives them back ring for ring, fighting the iron all the way down. "It'll take till dark," one of them says, at the pit's edge, and the other only answers, "Then it takes till dark." "Hard ground," the first one says, at the next ring of the pick. "Hard ground for a soft girl. It oughtn't to be so hard, putting her down." The sound follows me the length of the lane. The looks that come with it have burned past anger into a flat, waiting patience. A month ago I was worth hating, a fraud or a devil depending on the mouth. Today the men at the woodpile only watch me pass. "Hunter," one of them says, as I go by, a nod, not a curse. I don't know which I'd rather it were. "When do you go up again," another asks, not looking up from the saw. "Tomorrow," I say. "And the day after that." He nods, as though I've passed something. "Good," he says. "Good." Nobody spits.

One of them steps into my road. Old enough to be excused it, a billhook in his fist for whatever wood he means to cut, or for company.