Page 72 of She, Wolf, Him.

The crowd is at her gate. Twenty souls, maybe more, and more coming up behind me. Nobody has brought tools this time. At the edge of the press a man holds a torch, lit and burning, three good hours before dusk, in a daylight so plain the flame hardly shows. The smoke off it shows, climbing the cold air alongside her hearth-smoke, and my mother's counting-lesson comes out of its story and stands grown at an old woman's gate.

Another man's hand is on that gate. Resting there, not opening it, learning what the wood weighs. The latch would give to a child. Everybody standing here knows it. The hand stays where it is all the same, and that's the only mercy on offer here, thinner than the frost.

They aren't shouting. The pitch of it is worse than shouting, voices overlapping low, evidence passed along the row and growing as it goes.

"Forty years up here and no man ever once crossed that sill."

"Herbs for the fever, herbs for the flux. Who taught her? Out of what book, when she can't read a one?"

"Every house in this parish has washed somebody or buried somebody since the summer. Not that house. It's not once come near her."

"A woman answers to somebody." This from a mild man, a man whose youngest Pétronille pulled into the world feet-first and breathing. "No husband, no father over her. If she answers to no man under God, she answers to one somewhere lower."

"My mother swore by her," a woman says, and gets talked over.

"She told my uncle his beast would live," a man says, from the back, not loud, "and it's living yet. That's how it is with everything she sells."

Nobody answers him, but nobody shouts him down, either.

"She sold my sister a remedy for—" another woman starts, and stops, because none of us is supposed to have bought.

And there it is, said, and nobody unsays it.

The yarrow that drew the poison out of Gaspard's arm came from under those eaves. She pressed it on me in the dark, unpaid, told me to boil the cloth first, and went back alone into the dark they now say she's in league with. This village knows all of that.

Pétronille stands in her open doorway through all of it. Small, bent, her weight stacked on her stick, the white hair bare to the cold. She takes them in the way she'd take in weather. She doesn't plead, and she doesn't cross herself to show willing. She gives them nothing to take hold of, and I know the price of that stillness better than any of them. I've worn it at gravesides and under the weighing eye of a priest who wanted me afraid.

My hands have closed on my shawl hard enough to feel the weave. Twice this season I've stepped out of a crowd and spoken for somebody the village had already chosen. Both times the village let me. A woman's name only spends so many times before it stops being coin and starts being rope, and mine is light in the purse already. I unlock my jaw to spend it anyway.

He gets there before me.

I don't see where he comes from. I hear him, boot-heels coming fast over the frozen ground, and then the press of them opens to let him through, men stepping back who lately helped rope him to a post. He walks the gap they've made for him with the crossroads still stiff in his shoulders, the rope-burn still on his wrists. He doesn't stop until he's standing square between the crowd and her gate, his back to the old woman, and gate, garden, and woman all seem his to defend.

His face is white about the mouth. A stranger could read it for fear. I've studied that face by firelight since the leaves turned, and what's in it is fury, old fury with years on it, let all the way up for once.

"I've watched this done." He doesn't shout. It's the show voice, pitched to carry to the last row of a fair, with everything warm scoured out of it. "Start to finish, in a parish like this one, to a man who'd harmed nobody. The count against him was as tidy as yours. Tidier. They put him to the question until he gave them the answer they'd carried up the hill with them. They hanged him on it, and the dying went on just the same, because the thing doing the killing was never his to stop."

"She's not stood in the church these thirty years," somebody offers, but it comes out thinner than it went in.

"Three days ago it was me." He turns as he says it, slow, giving each of them a share of it. "A stranger, abroad at all hours, and the dying began when I came. That was proof enough for you. You tied me at the crossroads on the strength of it. While I knelt there bound and guarded, it came into the village and killed the very man who'd tied the knots. You have run this argument once already. It cost the best farrier in the Margeride his life. Now you'd hang the same argument on an old woman because her hands know herbs and her house has no dead in it. Hang her by Sunday and see what it buys you. You can spend the whole winter hanging everyone the Beast has passed by. You will run out of neighbours long before the woods run out of Beast."

Nobody answers him. The hand has come off the gate somewhere in the middle of it, and its owner studies it as though it belonged to another man. The torch sinks by degrees until it's pointed at the frost, and then it's out, hissed dead in the white, and with the fire gone the whole gathering seems to notice the cold at once.

"Go home," Gaspard says, quieter, and the quiet carries further than the show voice did. "Bar your doors and leave the woman her herbs. You'll be glad of her before spring."

"And who answers for the next one," a man calls, going, sour. "When it kills again. Who answers then."

"I will," Gaspard says, to his back. "Same as I've answered all along. With iron."

They come apart from the back first, in twos and threes, every pair discovering an errand it had forgotten, and he stands planted at her gate while they go, never giving the going of them a glance. They haven't earned that courtesy.

Pétronille hasn't moved the whole while. Now she comes down her path as far as the gate, sets her stick, and studies the man in front of it with the eye that still carries any distance.

"There's comfrey dried, up under the eaves," she says. Her voice has rust on it. "For the wrists. Take it as you go."

That's all her thanks, and I'd swear it's also nearly all she has to give.

"They'll come again," she adds, to him, or to me, or to the herbs. "After the next one. They know the road now. You shouldn't have stood there. They'll remember it." A pause, the wind in the bundles. "Take the comfrey all the same."