Page 69 of She, Wolf, Him.

Every eye in the ring.

"No," I say. The easiest lie I've told all year.

"Do it now," somebody says, from the dark. "While there's the stomach for it."

"The dark's when it walks," another answers. "I don't want to be standing at a crossroads in it."

"And if it walks tonight," a third says, "we'll know we hanged the wrong man."

The word noose comes up out of the ring, and the rest take it up like a psalm they all know. Then Anselme comes down through them, at his own pace, the register under his arm like a writ nobody issued.

"You'll wait for the sun," Anselme says. "A hanging in the dark is a murder, and the Intendant makes no nicer distinction than that. It will be done at dawn, before the parish, in form, with the account written fair. Or the men who can't wait for daylight can give me their names for the book tonight, and we'll learn how they like the reading of them when Mende sends up its men."

None of them offers a name. The men holding torches look at the men holding rope, and dawn wins. Paper cools men faster than any sermon Reynaud ever preached.

"I'll have the names of the guards, too," Anselme says. "Two men, no more. The rest of you go home and wait for daylight."

Anselme would watch me swing at first light with the page already ruled for it. But a delay is a night, and a night is all I own now, so I take it.

They go off up the lane a few at a time, trading the argument in low voices. "He'll hang at dawn, then," a man says, sour, taking his torch. "Dawn," another agrees, as if it's a mercy they're granting. They leave me two men with billhooks and one torch between them. The guards keep it turn and turn about, one dozing while the other minds me, honester sentries than I'd have set over myself. "You shouldn't have made fools of us," the younger one says, once, when the older dozes, and he doesn't say it hard. "That's the whole of what you've done wrong, far as I can see."

"Was it you," the older asks, later, into the dark, not turning. "The Beast. Say it wasn't, and I'll hear it."

"It wasn't."

"There, then," he says, to the night, as though the night had argued. The crossroads goes quiet. What's left is the cold, the creak of the gibbet arm when the wind leans on it, and me under it on my knees.

I give Bertrand's knots the first hour. It's work, and work keeps my head from other work, but I'd as soon argue with one of his hinges. The rope is new-laid hemp and the man who tied it shoes oxen. My wrists will wear its writing for a week, if I have a week. I stop before I open the skin. I mean to be found innocent at dawn, not bloody.

My father has stood at the edge of the torchlight all night. Not a ghost. I believe in ghosts no more than devils. Only the shape memory keeps ready for nights like this one. He answered his parish with sense for three days, and then, under the question, with whatever they wanted said. It was the second answer they hanged him on. I've spent every year since making certain no crowd would ever get its rope on me. I believed the making had worked. My father at least was surprised. I can't even claim that.

I don't pray. My family has tested what praying buys at a rope, and I'll not run the trial twice.

Past the turn of the night the cold stops hurting my hands, which is the hands' way of lying. My knees have gone to wood. My teeth want to chatter and I forbid them, for no audience but my own.

And here is the thought the cold has been saving for me, the one that has nothing to do with hanging. Since the night I swore it, somebody has stood the dark at the head of her lane. Tonight that post stands empty, and the only post filled in Saint-Élie is the one at my back.

By her own lights the Berthou woman read the sign fair. An armed man where no man should stand, nights running. I've hanged wolves on thinner. If the thing moves tonight, it moves through a village where every able man is either up a lane arguing himself to sleep or down here guarding a tied man from his own gallows. I listen into the dark as the trade taught me. It gives back wind, an owl working the bottom pastures, and once, deep in the smallest hours, a sound with no edges to it, short, done before I can take a bearing. Nothing follows it. I spend the better part of an hour trying to make it into more than it gave me. It stays what it was. It goes with everything else this autumn has refused to explain.

Last night at this hour she was asleep on my shoulder in my one poor room, and I was awake and didn't move. I'd slept first, tired past pride, and woke to the candle long dead, her weight against my arm, her hands quiet for once. Before first light she stirred and would go home. I took her the length of the dark to her own door, stood at the lane-head till a light showed under it, and walked back colder and better paid than I've been in years. If the Berthou woman had her eye to the shutter for that as well, it never reached Pascal's account. It wouldn't have served it. A monster that sees a woman home.

What I want from the dawn is narrow and exact. That she sleeps late. That the crossroads comes to her as news, finished one way or the other, and not as a crowd she can still wade into. She stood out of a square once already and claimed me in front of the whole parish, and the parish let her once. A season like this one doesn't forgive it twice, not from a woman the dying already follows.

Overhead the sky wheels on, and I read the hour off it each time I surface. Each time it says the same. Not yet. The torches die one after another and nobody comes down to relight them. New frost grows over the mud the crowd churned, sealing their bootprints in, and the east stays black a long time.

I've read sign at first light for fifteen years and told any man who paid me what the day held. Kneeling at this post I can no more read tomorrow than the mud can. A rope, or a cut cord and a village too ashamed to meet my eye. Both hang on nothing I can reach. I keep my eyes east all the same. Whatever the light means to show me, I mean to see it coming.

37

HELD

GASPARD

At dawn we found another dead, and the stranger still bound where we had left him. God had answered, though not as we hoped.

— PARISH RECORD, SAINT-ÉLIE, 1766

The east moves at last. Grey climbs behind the firs, and the crossroads comes back to me piece by piece, the burnt-out torch stubs, the mud the crowd churned last evening re-frozen into a record of every boot that stood here promising me a rope. My guards have kept it the honest way, and the younger has just taken the watch when the scream comes.