Page 70 of She, Wolf, Him.

A woman's voice, up in the village. It cuts off short, as a cry does when a hand claps over it. Then it comes again, and this time it doesn't stop.

Both men are on their feet. The younger looks at the village, then at me, kneeling where they left me, hands dead behind me and Bertrand's rope holding me to the seigneur's post. The older looks only at me, and behind his eyes the night's whole arithmetic comes out the other way. I've been in their keeping every hour of the dark.

"If it's took someone," the younger says, "and him tied to that post all night⁠—"

"Go," the older says, and the younger runs. The older stays, billhook across his knees, minding a bound man neither of us believes in any more. "You'll bide till dawn, like they said," he tells me, after a while, to the dark, not to me. "That's the law of it. What you are isn't mine to settle."

The village wakes wrong above us. Doors. Voices climbing over voices. Somewhere a dog going at its chain. I kneel in the frozen ruts and listen as I've listened since they tied me. This time the dark has an answer in it. I'd give the hearing back if I could. The sound that reached me in the smallest hours, short, done before I could give it a bearing. It has a bearing now.

It's a long hour before anyone comes for me, and I don't spend it hoping.

They come down in ones and twos with the light broadening, and not one of them can look at my wrists. The rope's marks sit there plain, a night deep, and every eye that touches them jumps away as if they burned. Their own post, their own guards, their own knots. I told them at the binding that mine was the wrong name. No man of them says so now. They don't own the words for sorry. A mob never does.

"Cut him loose." Pascal. He's grey as the light. Whatever stood him at the front of the torches last evening has gone out of him entire, and left a young man holding a boar-spear he'd plainly rather set down.

A knife goes through the lashing, and my arms come back to me from a long way off, burning at every joint. I get my feet under me and the ring of faces gives me room. When I have a voice again I ask it plain. "Who."

The man with the knife looks at the ground. "The farrier."

"Not him," somebody says, behind me. "Not Bertrand. He was—" Whatever he was, it doesn't get said.

My coat collar sits where Bertrand set it straight last night, with the whole crowd watching him tie me for a rope and him still finding that one courtesy in himself. I notice it the way I'd notice a debt, in the same breath I learn it can't be paid. Then I go up the lane on legs I can't feel, to do the one work I have left that's worth anything to anybody.

He lies in the open ground below the church, where the lane widens at the well, and the frost has had hours with him. It sits white in the folds of his coat and along his big scarred knuckles. No steam, no give in the limbs, the blood gone hard and black in the ruts. I don't need one further fact to tell me it happened in the deep of it, in the hour the world went quiet around my post and gave me nothing to name.

Five times this autumn I've knelt over a morning like this one. Bertrand makes the sixth kneeling, and the trade carries me through it when nothing else offers. Ground before feet spoil it. Wounds before the women cover them. The rest weighed last, and only what will bear the weighing.

The wounds are its wounds. I know their grammar better than I ever knew my catechism. Past hunger, past use, past any purpose a hunter's ledger has a column for. The strongest hands in this parish, and they never got the chance to close on anything. Eight paces from where he fell stands the well he'd have walked past a thousand mornings. "He stayed latest at the tavern," a man tells me, unasked, hollow. "Arguing the crossroads over. He never was one to call a tied man guilty." There's nothing to do with that this morning but carry it.

A woman is weeping somewhere behind the well, low and used up. Nobody has covered him yet. That falls to me, it seems, by trade and by default. It came into the village to do this. Through the lanes, past forty barred doors with families behind them.

Here is where a wiser man would stand up and preach. The proof lies in the frost with its beard gone white. But I've watched what proof does to frightened people, so I keep my mouth shut. I cover his face and let the morning read itself to them at whatever pace it can bear.

There's clean sign in the lee of the walls, where the shade has held the rime. The same stride. The same wrong span, four toes driven clear. I follow it because following is what's left of me this morning. No one offers to come, and no one stops me.

It goes along the backs of the houses, unhurried, deeper into the village, and I know its destination three walls before the frost fails. The sign gives out on the trodden clay where her lane opens, the stretch of ground I've stood over every night since I swore to it, the one piece of this parish that could have trusted me to keep it and took the keeping from me at rope's point.

Last night nobody stood here. And a bowshot down the slope a man is being carried into the church on a gate lifted off its pins, iron he likely hammered himself.

Her chimney is drawing. I make myself finish the ground before I let that fact go all the way through me.

The ring of this autumn's dead is no ring at all any more. Seen from where I stand, it's a noose, laid wide and drawn in, a hole at a time, and I could put my finger on the ground at the centre of it. It will go on sparing her up to the very hour it has been keeping her for.

The sum has one more line under it. I don't write it. I stop at the head of this lane, the same as I've stopped all autumn, and I go back down the hill to the living.

By midmorning the square holds everyone the night didn't take. Bertrand lies in the church with the women. The fear that spent last evening fitting me for a rope has lost its answer and kept all its heat, and nothing in my trade is more dangerous than fear with nothing left to hold. I stand at the well and let them see my wrists.

"He was bound." Pascal, flat, to the square at large, a man doing sums aloud because they won't come right silently. "Bound and watched. The whole night."

"Then he had help." A voice from the deep of the crowd, where such voices live. "What's a knot to the Devil's man. He whistled it in, and it came."

"Bound," Pascal says again, to no one. "I keep saying it. Bound and watched."

"Then what are we," a man asks, of nobody, of the sky above the well. "If not him. What are we, that it walks our lanes while we sleep."

"It took the best of us," a woman says, into her hands. "The very best man in this parish. What use is any of it. The watching. The barring."

I've heard that sermon preached to its last word once already in my life. The square goes very quiet, choosing.