Page 6 of She, Wolf, Him.

The women come for the body while we're still circling. Most of them won't face it. They bring cloth and a board, keep their eyes up and their bodies angled away, do the work with their hands while the rest of them goes somewhere safer. "Easy," the oldest of them says, as they get the board under him. "Easy with him now." I've seen it in a dozen places, people carrying a corpse like it might still be listening. All but one.

There's a woman who doesn't step back. She comes the last few steps without slowing, kneels in the blood-wet grass like it's her own kitchen floor, and sets her hands to the worst of him with no more trouble in her face than if she were kneading bread. While the others flinch and pray, she works. One woman in the square last evening didn't lean toward the killing I promised them. This is her. I've read people longer than I've read sign. It's most of the job. She's no particular beauty, dark-haired under the kerchief and dark-eyed, her skin pale where the other women carry the summer burned into them, which tells me she spends more time under roof than they do. Tall for a woman here, and spare with it, the kind of frame the work makes and nothing softens. None of that's what holds me. Her face tells me nothing, and that, in a place where everyone's wearing their terror on the outside for the stranger, is itself worth knowing. She isn't performing anything. I can't place her, so I do what I do with anything I can't place. I set it aside to consider later.

By the time the sun's properly up, the word's done its work for me. I walk the village and the village watches me walk it, and that's right, that's the whole point of being seen. The long gun rides familiar across my back, the strap worn to my shoulder by years of roads. A boy trails me at ten paces, pretending he doesn't. A woman presses into my hand a heel of bread I never asked for. "For the road," she says, and when I tell her the road's done, "For the work, then," and is gone before I can give it back. A man stops me in the lane below the church and takes my arm. "You'll kill it," he says, his whole frightened face asking it over without words. "Say you'll kill it."

"I'll kill it," I tell him.

He believes me. I've made believing me my living. "Up on the high shelf, it took the shepherd," an old man tells me next, unasked, at my shoulder. "His dogs came down alone, and wouldn't be made to go back up. And now it's down among us."

"What will you have for it," he asks me, the only man in the lane to think of it. "For the carcass. When it's done."

"A fair price," I tell him. "It'll be the fairest work this parish ever bought."

It's a small place and an easy one to read. The church sits highest, stone and squat, the one building that didn't fall down the first hard winter, and the cottages crowd in below it like piglets at a sow. One track runs down out of it toward the rest of the world, a half-day to the nearest market and two days to anyone who could help. Above, the pastures climb bald and green to a black line of trees. Beyond them the wood starts and doesn't stop. A man could lose an army in that wood, let alone a wolf. There's my problem in full, and I walk it once end to end so my feet will know it in the dark.

What I don't tell the old man is that I don't believe in his Beast. I believe in wolves. I've killed enough of them to know their weight, their smell, the exact sign they leave behind. A wolf is what's eating this valley, a big one or a few. Give me a clear week and a cold trail and I'll have it. But a wolf is worth ten livres and a handshake. A loup-garou is worth a hundred, and your name carried into the next valley ahead of you. The legend pays. The legend always pays.

The priest watches me the length of the street from the church door. He doesn't need to follow me himself. He has the whole village to do his following for him. A dog I pass slinks wide of my legs, tail clamped under it, a growl running low in its chest. "He's never like this," its owner says, cuffing it quiet. "Not at a soul. I swear it." Dogs have never liked me. I carry too much road on me, too much gunpowder, the smell of other people's animals dying. I don't take it to heart. It's the people you have to keep an eye on.

Once, a long way from here and a long time ago, I watched a crowd much like this one decide that a man was a thing and not a man. They had their torches, their certainty, their priest along to bless it. I was young enough that somebody had to hold me back, and old enough to keep every minute of it. I don't think about it. I think about it now for as long as it takes to cross the square, and then I put it back in the dark it lives in, and go to see about a roof for the night.

They lay him out in the church, as they do everywhere. The dead are women's work, the same in every poor place I've passed through. I've no business inside, so I stand in the yard with my back to the wall and the door in my sight, and take what I can of it through the dark of the doorway.

The same one again. Of course it's the same one. The two old women pray and fetch what she needs. They leave the rest to her, the parts that make a strong man step back, and she does them like she's done them a thousand times, which I'd wager she has. A younger one works at her side, soft-faced and quick, flinching where the still one doesn't. "The linen's short," the black-shawled one says, in the doorway's dark. "It'll have to be the spare." The spare. As if there's a bolt of it somewhere, waiting on this. But it's the still one I keep coming back to.

The riddle turns practical. A hunt in country like this is half tracking and half knowing. Knowing the ground, the paths, who was where and when, which of the dead walked out alone and why. I'm a stranger here. I'll still be a stranger here in a year. But a woman who lays out every body the Beast leaves, who knows this land and these people, who doesn't come apart at the sight of blood, is worth more to me than the priest and all his flock together. I may need her on the hunt. I mark her as useful. Why doesn't she flinch? I've a hunt to run. I don't need to know what's wrong with her.

Inside, the work finishes. The two old women come out first, then the soft-faced one, and last the still one, drying her hands down her apron. She crosses the yard a few feet from where I stand, on her way to the gate. She doesn't look at me. She doesn't need to. I can tell she's known the whole while that I've been standing here at the wall. You can always tell. The rest of this village holds its fear up to me like a coin. She passes close enough to touch and shows me none at all.

My attention follows her to the gate. I tell myself it's the hunter doing it, weighing an asset. I'm a good liar. I taught myself the trade.

4

THE ONE WHO DOESN'T FLINCH

AGNÈS

They tell of a stranger who asked which of the women did not fear the Beast. The village named the one who washed the dead, and he went to find her at the well. The tale does not say what he found there.

— FOLK TALE, THE MARGERIDE

The water is the one task no one thinks to take off me, and on a morning like this I'm glad of it. There's a plain comfort in the rope and the full bucket, in work so familiar my thoughts can stray where they like. I've drawn twice and started a third when I hear the boots behind me. Wrong for this ground, too heavy and too sure. His tread gives him away. I take my time turning, because a woman who startles is a woman who's been thinking of you.

"You're the one who lays out the dead." He says it like a fact he's already checked and only needs me to confirm.

He's stopped a few feet off, the long gun home across his back, his coat still road-stained at the hem. By daylight he's less the stranger dusk made of him and more an ordinary man, taller than most, gone still, unhurried. The chestnut throws its shade between us and the church. Around the square the village goes on with its morning and pretends not to mind us.

"Someone has to," I say, and turn back to the rope.

"You did the last one. And the shepherd before him." He doesn't move closer. He doesn't have to. "I saw you yesterday. The other women kept their faces turned. You didn't."

"They have weaker stomachs." I set the bucket on the stone lip. "Or kinder ones. I've never worked out which."

That earns me half a laugh, gone as soon as it comes. When I risk a glance his eyes are already on me, pale in the brown morning. I hold his gaze because I've spent a whole night furious at being the woman a stranger looks past, and I'll be damned if I'm the first to yield this time.

He asks his questions then, and they're not the ones I expect. The men ask each other about fear and prayer, the talk that makes them braver. He's after the ground.

"The herders' ways up to the high pasture," he says. "Not the road. The ways they'd drive a flock."