Page 67 of She, Wolf, Him.

And under the ache of coming down empty-handed there's a gladness I don't have to be ashamed of. No sign means no new dead. No bell tonight, no linen. Whatever else this day refused us, it refused the Beast a body too, and I'll take that and call it plenty.

Then a branch goes, sharp, up the slope at my back.

For a breath, there's only listening. The wood and the fog narrow to the width of one sound. I stand with both hands hard on my stave, and if the ground had asked me my own name I couldn't have given it.

"Agnès." Old Vidal, hip-deep in bracken above me, one arm raised. "Line's turning. Come in now."

Only an old man. I climb to him on legs gone unsteady and keep the unsteadiness out of my face, the one hiding I've never yet failed at. We walk in together, the light failing, the fog climbing the slope at our backs.

Doors I've known to stand open are shut with colour still in the sky, and the lane down to the hamlet's edge is only me, my own steps loud on the frozen ruts, and the seams of firelight in the shutters to say Saint-Élie is living at all. "Who's abroad," a man calls, from behind his shutter, sharp. "Agnès," I call back. "From the line." "God keep you," he says, and the bolt stays.

I go on down to the hunter's door. He opens it before my hand reaches the wood. He's learned my step, then, the same as I've long known his. Only days ago I knew his through a shut door and didn't rise. He hasn't asked. He won't.

He stands back. I go in. Neither of us has spoken yet, and it isn't a silence that needs mending.

The room is small, and everything in it is stowed. One candle, a low fire. The rifle stands in the corner with the oiled cloth laid by it, and the rest of what he owns would go on his back in the time it takes to lace a boot, a life packed to leave, always, from everywhere. I've known that about him from the first, and tonight I can't afford to feel it. Tonight I'm only glad of the fire.

"Eat," he says, and there's bread and a bowl of something hot set ready, as if he'd known. "Then sit."

"Did you—" I start, and don't know how to ask whether he waited up for me.

"I heard the horn," he says. "Twice. And nothing after."

"You were listening for it."

"I was listening for what comes after it," he says. "The bell. It didn't come."

We don't speak of the line, nor of who wasn't asked to walk it, nor of what hangs on the church wall, the lie he paid his shoulder for and I helped him sell, that was meant to buy this village its winter and bought Margot nothing at all. It sits in the room with us regardless.

We reach at the same time. Practice, of a kind. The only kind this autumn's given us.

He holds me more carefully than anything as tired as I am needs holding, one hand at the back of my head, the wool of his shirt rough under my cheek, and the day I've carried since first light goes out of my legs so fast I'd sit down where I stand if he weren't bearing half my weight. He smells of powder, smoke, the cold he's been out in. I don't ask where. He doesn't say.

"I'm afraid," I tell his shoulder. It's easier said into wool. "Of the next bell. Of the square, and what fear's making of it. Of the dark coming earlier every day, with more in it than dark."

"I know," he says. He doesn't tell me not to be. He's never insulted me that way, and there aren't three men in the Margeride who'd have spared me it.

"There's more," I say. "I went up today to find its sign for her. For Margot. There wasn't any to find. And I was glad, and the gladness—" I can't finish it.

"I know," he says again, and this time it's for that.

"She never got this," I say, after a while. "A warm room, and nobody watching, and someone who—" The rest won't come. "She never got it."

He doesn't answer at once. "She looked at me like she could see the whole of it," he says, at last. "Every time. I minded that, and I minded it wrong."

Then, into my hair, "Whatever it is, it doesn't reach you. It'll find me in its road first, and I've been a hard man to kill since long before you knew me."

There's no showman anywhere in it. I've heard him sell a roomful of men their own fear back at a profit, and this voice is the other one, the one he counts his powder in. No man alive could be certain of keeping such a word. That's true too, and I believe him all the same, the flat way I believe in frost. It's the strangest gladness this day has offered me. I take it.

There's a guilt in taking warmth she can't take any more. It came in with me and sat itself down at his table, patient as a creditor, and I haven't the strength tonight to turn it out. So it stays too. Everything stays.

Sleep takes him first, between one breath and the next, a trade's trick, taken where it's offered. His arm goes heavy across me. The candle drowns in its own wax, the fire settles, and the village beyond the shutter has gone so quiet the fire's settling is the loudest sound left.

I should go home. I don't.

I lie in the crook of his arm and let the fears speak, since they won't sleep even where the body might. The thing in the woods. The village, whose fear has been to school all autumn and is nearly done learning. The two of them are twisted into one cord now, wet-spun, and the grief runs through the middle of it, the strand that won't break.

His arm lies warm across me. It shuts out nothing, no more than a latch stops winter, and I stay under it even so. Sleep finds me there at last, in the one warmth this parish has left me.