Page 79 of She, Wolf, Him.

Reynaud, at the foot of his own steps. And what rose in me over him, whole and warm, wide awake, that I buried the next morning under thank-you and a face with nothing in it. I called that feeling relief for a month. It had its own name. It was joy.

Bertrand, who bound a good man to a post with the gentlest hands in the village and wouldn't look at his face while he did it. I stood that night behind my own barred shutter with a fury I couldn't spend, and I pressed it down, as I've pressed down everything since I was old enough to be told what women keep, and I went to my bed proud of how flat it lay.

And Margot.

Margot behind the hay-store in the dark, her hair come loose of its knot the way it was always coming loose. That very evening we'd stood at the treeline and she'd told me the truth about myself, the small truth, the human one, and walked away from me. And I folded what I felt away small, and walked home calling the folding a virtue.

The wolf doesn't fold anything.

I killed her. Not a thing in the woods. Not the dark. These hands, this mouth. I laid her out after. When I touched her face, there was no first time in it. I said over her body the one word I'd kept behind my teeth for twenty years, and it cost me nothing. I believed at the time that the costing nothing was the worst of what I'd ever have to learn about myself.

I open my mouth and there's no scream in me. The air comes in small broken mouthfuls, like water got from under ice. I've watched women howl at gravesides and wondered where grief found so much breath to spend. This is the other kind. I'm inside it, and it goes down past any floor I can find.

It goes still around me and hangs there, like weather.

I don't know how long I kneel in it. Long enough for the light to come up off the snow, and for the fall to begin whitening him over again, doing what I can't, while I watch.

The pain in my chest arrives like a neighbour who only heard this morning.

There's a hole in me, high, under the collarbone, the width of my own thumb. The hole a ball makes going in. I've washed the men such holes let out of the world. The leaving kind of hole is familiar too, and there isn't one. His lead is still in me, under the bone. It will go where I go now. Lead keeps.

I sit back on my heels and wait to die of it. I want to die of it. If deserving decided anything, the cold would have me already.

Dying is the country I've worked at the border of, and I can read how it comes up a body, the way evening comes up a valley. It isn't coming. My heart goes on, strong and even, in no hurry. The cold lies on my bare skin like a hand with no strength in it. And the hole under my collarbone itches, deep, the itch of a wound in its third week. When I put my fingers to it the bleeding has stopped, and the rim of it is shining and new, the pink of a lamb's ear.

By the time the light has gone from grey to white, it is a scar.

What am I.

There's no one left to put the question to, and no need. The rhyme already answered it. There are women the wood takes and does not give back. My grandmother sang it over the carding, and my mother after her. I thought it was a rhyme about fear, as all their rhymes were about fear. It was a rhyme about me. And the last verse, the one about what ends such women. No iron, it says, and no lead. Only a blessed thing in a priest's hand. The lead I can answer for myself. It's closing under my fingers.

He stood on the church steps this autumn, the parish looking on, and the priest held out a little pouch of blessed shot. He wouldn't put out his hand for it. I thought, there stands the one man in this country who won't buy his comfort with his own reason, and I loved him for it before I had any leave to call it that.

That refusal is why the snow this morning is dressing him and not me.

He was never wrong about anything a man can track, weigh, or skin. He was wrong once, about one creature, in one particular, and everything true in him paid for it. The particular was me.

And under all of it, under the grief and the shame of being alive to feel it, the morning has put more in me. I won't lie about it out here. There's no one left to perform for.

Strength. Strength past any use a woman's day could ever have found for it. I close my hand and the fist that answers is a stranger's, a fist that could hold a gate shut against a bull. I've carried water since I was six years old, and I've never been less tired in my life. I'd thought a monster would feel like being lowered. This feels like being made too much for the life I was given.

And an appetite I've called the wanting, that I kept small and taught patience. It was never small. And now I've learned what my wants do while they wait.

And a lightness that shames me worse than the appetite does. Thibault is in the ground. Reynaud is in the ground. My father lies beside my mother, God's own doing and none of mine, the one death of this black year that was ever plain. The banns, the blessing, the life laid out for me like tools on a bench, every hand that ever held my days. Gone, all of it. I can name what took it. The naming should crush me, and underneath it, banked and alive, there's this. The cage I was born into is ash, and the burning of it was me.

I don't want to die.

There it is, the plainest truth in me. I'm kneeling bare in the snow between the man I loved and the scar of the shot he spent to keep me safe from myself. I want to live.

There's one reckoning left in me that I've no way to settle. I made it in the autumn, the night I crossed to him, and I crossed anyway. My courses have been nothing to reckon by since my father died, and they've answered me nothing either way. I don't know whether I carry anything away from this clearing but myself. If I do, God help us both, I've no notion at all what it would be, or what it would come to want.

I could go down.

I try the thought one foot at a time, all my weight held back. There's a road from this ridge to the square I could walk in the dark. I could take it as I am, red to the wrists, stand where I stood the day I spoke for him, and tell them what their autumn was. That the thing they barred their doors against slept among them and passed them the bread. And they wouldn't believe me. The mildest woman in the parish, the one who washes their dead. Or they'd believe me all at once, because frightened people believe the worst fastest. Then it would be rope, and when the rope didn't answer, fire. I've seen what their fear nearly did to an old woman over a basket of herbs. The proof of me is a scar under my collarbone and a clearing full of blood. They'd have to try, and try again. I'd heal in front of them, and there'd be no end of it ever. The rhyme wants what a priest has blessed, in a steady hand, and I put the only priest we had into the cold under his own church.

There's this too, which I'll say once, to myself, and carry alone. Whatever I am, it walks where I walk and it feeds where I sleep. Every grave with this year's date on it lies within a mile of my own door. Take me out of the parish, and the parish keeps the dead it has. Going is the one mercy left in my gift. It has the same shape as running away, and there's no soul alive I could ever tell the difference to.

I do for him the little that's left me to do. I can't lay him out. There's no water up here but snow, no linen but what he's wearing, and that office was never mine to give him anyway, not with these hands. But his eyes are still open to the snow, and that much I can mend.