Page 73 of She, Wolf, Him.

Her eyes cross mine then, over the dead torch lying in the frost, and hold there for the length of a breath. Two women the village keeps one story for. She's carried her half of it longer than I've been alive. Then she turns and goes up her path, and her door shuts with no more noise than a latch makes.

Gaspard's eyes find me last, across the trampled ground. Neither of us speaks where the lane can hear. We've a place for speaking, and it isn't here.

I go to him at dusk, up between the lit shutters, walking quick against the cold and the dark. He lets me in without a word and bars the door behind me.

The room is warm, the fire seen to, the rifle in its corner, and the man himself sits at his small table with the wine jug and two cups already out. Maybe he knew I'd come. He pours. The lip of the jug chatters against the cup, twice, before he gets it steadied, and that small sound says more than anything he said at the gate.

I sit across from him and wrap my fingers round my cup for the warmth of it.

"You've bought her till the spring, perhaps," I say.

"I've bought her till the next bell rings." He turns his cup without drinking from it. "They'll be back at that gate, or at another one, and the next time there mayn't be anybody fool enough to stand in front of it."

"There will."

"There'll be me," he agrees. There's no boast in it anywhere, and that flatness is what tightens my chest. "While I'm above ground, no woman in this parish hangs for the weather or the Beast. It's not the trade I came for, but I seem to have taken it up all the same."

"Will you go after it," I say, when the fire's burned low. "Now. Before the snow."

"It isn't waiting for the snow," he says. "Neither am I."

I reach across and lay my hand over his where it turns the cup. The tremor hasn't left it, fine as a moth's wing. He looks down at that a moment, lets the cup be, and turns his palm up under mine. We sit like that while the coals shift once and settle.

He told me about his father at my own hearth, weeks past, with his wounds not yet closed, in a voice I've not heard him use before or since.

"It wasn't only for her, today," he says at last, into the fire.

"I know it. You don't owe me the story twice."

His thumb moves once across my knuckles. It's enough.

"Agnès." He waits until I lift my head. "Today it was the old one, the one apart. I can't say whose turn the fear takes next, and no man can promise what I promised that gate and be certain of keeping it. But if this village ever carries its rope toward you, it will have to spend me first. Before God and whatever else is listening. Me first."

I know better than to believe promises made against the dark. I believe this one anyway, the whole way down.

A few mornings past I stood in front of the parish and gave him back his name. Today he stood at a gate and gave an old woman back hers. Sitting in his one poor room with my hand in his, I let myself find it good.

I stay while the candle burns down to its last inch, and his hands go quiet under mine a little at a time, the day's fury draining out of him slow. When I rise to go he takes my shawl from the peg and settles it on my shoulders, then stands in his doorway with the light while I walk down the lane, so that the first fifty paces of the dark are inside the reach of it.

The rest of the way is mine and the cold's alone.

My own fire has gone to grey by the time I'm in. I sit at the hearthstone raking the coals back to life, and while the raking does itself, ten thousand evenings deep, I lay the day out straight, the way I'd lay out a body, and make myself read what it says.

What they held against Pétronille, washed and set in order, comes to this. A woman grown old and strange, living alone with no man to answer for her. Herbs, and more knowing than her neighbours are easy with. And a house the dying has passed by, an autumn of graves in this parish and not one of them hers.

I'm not old. A widow before I was ever a wife. Alone in my father's house since the autumn took him. The village's dead have all but one of them gone into the ground off these two hands, Bertrand the last, three days past, and his were the heaviest hands I've ever folded. And in a year when the Beast has walked up nearly every lane in Saint-Élie, it has not once found its way to mine. Take away the white hair and the herb-bundles, and the account they read at that gate this afternoon reads just as well over my lintel.

I am Agnès. I have done nothing wrong.

I say it to the coals, twice, as I once said my prayers, and it sits as true as anything I know how to say. It keeps wanting company all the same. Pétronille has done nothing wrong either. This afternoon her nothing was answered by one stranger's voice and a torch put out in the frost. It was enough, this once, and every soul at that gate knows it needn't have been.

I cover the fire and bar the door. When I lie down in the dark, sleep is a long time coming. I've feared the thing in the woods since the autumn's first bell, and I fear it still. Tonight the fear has learned a second face. When it comes for me at last, it may not come out of the trees at all. It may come up my own lane in broad afternoon, carrying a fire the daylight makes almost nothing of.

39

MARKED

AGNÈS