Page 32 of She, Wolf, Him.

"He didn't fight it off," her man says, quieter. "It left him. That's not the same."

"He stopped his own bleeding," an old woman says behind me, to her neighbour and not to me. "His wife told it. Wounds that shut of themselves. My grandmother would have had the bedding burned."

"Who here has slept a whole night through since this started," I ask them, over it. "That's what a dead wolf on your church wall buys. Sleep. And I'll buy it for you."

"What if it comes back," a woman says. "To the farm. To finish it."

"It won't," I say. "It got what it—" I stop. It didn't. "It won't," I say again.

"What did he see," a man calls. "The farmhand. What did he see of it?"

"Fever's got him," I say. "He'll live to tell you himself."

"And if he dies of the fever before he tells."

"Then you'll have my account instead," I say. "Which is worth more, and you'll like it less."

The priest is at the edge of it, of course, in his black, letting me finish before he sets his hook.

"A great mercy, that the man lives," Reynaud says, pitched soft and carrying, as he does. "We shall pray for him. And yet." A pause. "The trail ran to the trees again, did it not, monsieur. And ended there. As it ended for the drover. As it has ended every time you've followed it." He turns his dry regard on the crowd, not on me. "I only wonder how many trails a King's hunter may lose at one treeline before we ask what manner of beast leaves none."

He's good. I'll grant the old serpent that. He's named the one rot at the centre of my whole account and dressed the naming as a prayer. And he's done it so I can't answer without answering to them.

"Wolves go to cover, Father," I say, easy, the showman's ease, while the question shifts under the words. "Ground goes hard at a treeline where the roots drink it dry. You'd know the natural world better if you spent less time on your knees." That gets a laugh, a hard one, from the men who'd rather a hunter than a homily, and it buys me the square. It doesn't buy the rest.

She's there past his shoulder. Agnès, at the back, her shawl drawn close, watching me as she watches everything. After the well and the walk up her lane I'd half expected the sight of her to come warm. It doesn't, not here, not with the priest watching the square. What comes up instead is wanting, plain and ill-timed, the feel of her cold fingers under mine on the bucket handle, the whole quiet hour of that walk, and no place in a morning like this to put any of it. It'll keep. It has no choice but to keep. I turn from her before the wanting can put itself on my face where the priest would read it.

I walk out of the square with the bounty as good as in my purse and only cold where relief should be. A man lived. I should be glad of it. The trade wants me glad of it, a survivor to point at, a wolf made mortal. Instead I keep hearing a broken voice in a bloodied yard saying stood up, stood up like a man. I call it a wolf. I have to. The day I stop is the day I start asking what else walks a man's fields on the feet of a beast and leaves on no feet at all. And a man who can't quiet that asking has one way left to do it. He goes up and proves the wolf.

The village bars itself at full dark, and I walk out through the last of it, up the sheep-runs toward the high firs with my rifle and an unlit lantern. This is the work I'm good at and never let them see, the patient half of the trade the show's a coat over. A man who knows wolves doesn't drive them with dogs and shouting by daylight. He goes where they run, and he waits, cold and still, till they come to him. I've done it a hundred nights on a hundred hills and never been afraid on any of them.

I take my stand above a run they've been working, downwind, granite at my back so nothing comes on me from behind. The moon's not up. The stars are hard and close over the black wall of the trees. I mark the runs by their light and the pale scars of the rock, and I wait for the pack to come down its own road as a pack does.

It comes. I hear it before I see it, the soft business of bodies in the bracken below, and I bring the rifle up slow, because this is the part I've built a life on. Then the sound is behind me.

There's granite at my back. Nothing crosses open rock without a man hearing it, and I heard nothing, and it's there anyway. Another off to the side. One more below. I understand it only when there's no taking the step back. They haven't come to my road. They've come to me. They've watched my fires and cut my trails a fortnight. They've learned the shape of me and let me sit down in the middle of them, thinking I was the one who hunted.

It's a man alone on a black hillside with one ball in the barrel and a knife, and a ring of them closing, taking their time, sure, as sure as I've always been of what a wolf will and won't do.

I don't recall deciding to move. I'm up and backing along the spine of rock, and one comes in low and fast out of the dark on my left. I fire. It goes down screaming. The rest break off the shot. I use the gap to wedge my back into a cleft where they can come at me one at a time. I get the knife out. I stand there with my pulse loud in my own ears and wait to learn whether I'm to die on a hill I climbed to make a point.

For a while the dark is full of soft movement that never quite shows itself. A shape crosses between me and the pale of the rock, gone before the eye can fix it. Below me the shot one screams, drags itself, screams again, and the sound does what no lantern could. It maps them for me. One settling on my left. One above me on the spine. Patient, spaced, waiting to learn what I'll do with an empty gun. They know it's empty. I'd stake my life they know, and I am.

They don't press it. A wolf's no fool. One of theirs is down, and there's easier meat than a man set in rock with iron in his fist. By and by the screaming stops and the dark empties out. It takes a long time. I listen to all of it, wedged in rock with the knife out in front of me, and I keep the cleft a long while after the hill's gone silent, because my legs won't yet do as they're told. When I come out at last the sky's going grey, and my fingers have set so hard round the knife-grip that I have to unbend them one at a time with my other hand. Below, where the shot one fell, there's a dragged smear going down into the trees and no wolf at the end of it. The pack has carried its own off, as they will in a hard season. Ten livres, hauled away in the dark.

The truth I carry down in the grey before dawn is worse than the torn coat, the wrenched shoulder, the blood along my arm that isn't mine. Raw animal fear, the fear I've spent fifteen years selling myself as the cure for, the fear of the shepherd in his last pasture and the child behind its bolted door.

I make it small. Carelessness. I set my stand against my own good sense, tired, rattled by a raving man's story, and a bold pack in a hard season did the rest. It won't happen twice. What I met tonight was wolves. Only wolves, cleverer than I'd allowed, and no more than wolves for all of it.

I believe that almost to the village. After that I only tell it to myself.

18

RESTLESS

AGNÈS

The moon came full and the village did not sleep. Doors were barred against it. Prayers were said. And the beast walked the dark outside, unseen, while honest folk lay listening.