Page 78 of She, Wolf, Him.

The pain, which was everything, banks itself like a fire raked for the night, and the trade has a plain name for what that easing means. I've read it off enough faces in the snow. The cold goes wide and stops being cold. The snow has come back, small and dry, crossing the moon, and I can't feel where it lands.

Above the two of us the cloud stands torn open, and the stars sit in the tear, hard and near.

Her eyes hold mine. The stars go, the snow after them, the hill after that. The eyes hold.

Then nothing does.

42

INTO THE WOODS

AGNÈS

There are women the wood takes and does not give back. They run on four feet under a cold moon, and no iron bites them, no lead, no rope. Only a thing a priest has blessed, in a steady and a sorrowing hand.

— A SHEPHERD'S RHYME OF THE MARGERIDE

The cold wakes me, and for a while it's all there is.

Snow under my cheek, gone hard where my breath melted it in the night and let it freeze again. Grey light, early and low, no colour in it yet. Firs standing back all round an open ground, black under their loads of white. Above them a sky like washed wool. No roof, no wall. No fire anywhere in the world.

I don't know this place.

I lie still, because still is what I know, and I reach for the old comforts in the order I've always reached for them. I walked in my sleep. My mother walked in hers when grief sat too heavy on the house, and her mother before her, all the women of us given to the walking. I've woken wrong before, mud dried on my feet, my shift strange on my shoulders, and I put it away with everything else and went down to the milking. That comfort is thin as second broth, but it has always come when I called it. I call it now, lying bare in the open in a place I've never seen by daylight.

It doesn't come.

My hands are lying in front of my face. They're dark to the wrist, dark under every nail, and where I've slept on them the dark has cracked like mud drying. It isn't mud. I've soaked enough of it out of enough linen to be past mistaking it. And there's iron in my mouth, old iron, far back, down my throat, as though I'd spent the night drinking from a well nobody should drink from.

I sit up. The hollow I left in the snow is stained.

Across the open ground there's a long low shape half under the new fall, and a little apart from it, muzzle down in a drift, a rifle.

The rifle is his. I've sat across a low fire from it while it was cleaned and cleaned again, evenings when nothing needed saying. I'm on my hands and knees in the drift before the thought is finished. The snow goes over my wrists without a sting. I can't make room for that yet.

The snow has been falling on him half the night. It has laid itself over him to the waist, and it has left his face bare.

His face is whole. His eyes are open. There's snow in them, and they don't blink it away. Nobody has to tell me what that means. I've been closing eyes like that since the summer went.

One arm is opened to the bone. Below his jaw there is nothing whole left to speak of.

Gaspard.

I kneel over him as I've knelt over the souls this village has lost. It's my work. The one craft anyone ever let me keep. I wash what the thing in the woods leaves and I bind what can be bound. I've told the parish all autumn what made its dead. That work is mine now, more than any hunter's and more than any priest's. I could name the maker of these wounds by candlelight. I could name it in the dark, by the smell alone.

I name it.

It comes apart the way a seam comes apart. One stitch. Then the length of it at once.

The shepherd, the first. An old man's voice going up thin against stone, the dogs already gone, and under his fear a gladness in me with no bottom to it, a gladness I never remembered by daylight in a lifetime of confessing lesser sins. The taste. God forgive me, the taste, and how little it was like eating and how much it was like being fed, at last, after a hunger nobody had ever let me say aloud.

The man from the lower pastures, whom I never knew living and washed dead with these same hands.

Thibault, in the dark by the lower pens, the weight of his hand still on my shoulder from that morning, the weight that was to sit there the rest of my life. How easily the weight came off.

The drover, Jean, who smelled of salt and far parishes and never did me a wrong I can find, though I've been hunting for one since the memory came up, as the village hunted for reasons all autumn. There's no reason in him anywhere. That is its own kind of cold.

The one I left alive. I stood over him in the dark and let him live, and I don't know why. The not knowing is nearly the worst of it. Even there, even then, there was a choosing in me. The village named it, back in the autumn, and never guessed whose name it was saying. A thing that chooses. It was right.