Page 75 of She, Wolf, Him.

I don't tell him about the square. The village will have told him. It tells him everything it won't say to my face. He doesn't tell me where he walks at night, and I've stopped asking. The unsaid lies about us thick as the hay-smell, and neither of us minds it.

"They've made me the next one," I say at last, into his coat. Saying it aloud empties the dread a little and leaves more room for the cold. "And the cruellest part is I can't fault their sum. Thibault. My father. Margot. Now Bertrand. All autumn they've gone from around me one by one, and a child could finish that pattern." His arm hardens across my back. "I think it comes for me next. I've thought it for days. Saying it out loud is the first time it hasn't made me want to be sick."

He's quiet so long I begin to think he won't answer. When he does, his voice has gone down to the register he keeps for me alone, plain as track-reading.

"A whole season of graves," he says, "and it has never once put a mark on you. I've turned that over more nights than I'll admit to. I've no answer for it, and I've stopped wanting one." He takes my chin and lifts my face up out of his coat, so the last grey light can get at it, and his eyes go over me slow, the way he reads ground. "I'm done waiting for it to choose. I'm going to hunt it. I'm going to kill it. And I'll end it before it ever comes near enough to touch you. I've sold comfort my whole working life. This is work."

I could tell him that no man can promise the dark. I thought as much only last night, at his table, and believed him anyway. Nothing since has taught me better. The dread in me doesn't lift. It moves over, the way a cow in a stall moves over, and makes a little room.

"Then come back from it" is all I say. "Whatever you kill or don't. Come back. I mean it. I've buried everyone else. You don't get to be on my table, Gaspard. You don't get it."

"No," he says, quiet. "I don't."

He doesn't answer the rest of it. I hear the not-answering for what it is, and I've no room to carry it tonight, so I let it be.

I reach up and bring his mouth down to mine.

It's a slow kiss, closed and cold-lipped at first, warming from the middle outward, and it asks for nothing beyond itself. There's no roof over us but a broken one, no bed but frozen hay. The cold holds us to just this, his mouth, my hands at his jaw, the small shared heat of it, and I choose it, as I've chosen every touch between us since the first. Two marked people, warming one fire between them, because it's the only fire the season has left us. When we part at last, his breath and mine stand in the air together, one cloud, and the wind takes it.

He walks me as far as the first lit shutters and stops where the gable shadow ends, and I go the rest alone with his eyes on my back the whole way, a weight I'd carry gladly all the years I'm given, however many those turn out to be. At my door I turn. He's still there, a darker shape against the dark, keeping his watch. I go in. I drop the bar.

The fire has kept its heart. I build it up and sit close. The snow goes on ticking softly at the shutter as if it has all night to be let in.

I'm afraid to die. There it is, plain, a fear as honest as hunger. I've washed enough of the dead to hold no illusions about what I'd look like on the board, or whose hands would fold mine. I want to live. I want spring, bread, that man's slow heart under my ear. I'm afraid I won't be given any of it, and there's nothing underneath that fear but more of it, the way there's nothing under this snow but more winter.

When death tires of walking beside me, it will not have far to come.

40

CIRCLING HER

GASPARD

The creature keeps a centre. Study what it circles and you study what it hunts.

— A HUNTSMAN OF THE MERCOIRE, 1766

The rifle was clean before the candle burned half down. I've stripped it and cleaned it again since, for the same reason another man says his beads, and now there's nothing left in this room to do with my hands but the one work I've been keeping them from.

The evidence lies out on the table, and it makes a poor show for a season's dying. The twist of grizzled hair. The knotted thong, cut to the width of a print no wolf whelped on this earth ever set in mud. The two grey threads that would answer for half the coats in the parish, my own twice-torn one first among them. All autumn I explained them away one at a time, and one at a time they went quietly. Set out together, by one candle, they've stopped going.

A clear line can still end in blood a man can't mend.

I've stopped arguing with the knowing. Wolf won't stretch to it, and devil I'll grant no man alive. Tonight the question can keep.

Past the shutter the snow has stopped, and the light through the joints has gone from black to pale steel. The moon is up, then, full, and the cloud is breaking. Fresh ground that will hold every mark laid on it, and light enough over it to shoot by. I've waited the whole season for this country to deal me both at once. It deals them tonight, and I mean to play them.

Night on night since I swore it I've stood the watch at the head of her lane, my back against a byre wall, and what has the standing bought. The one night the village took the watch from me and tied me at a crossroads, a man died two hundred paces from her door. A watch only answers what comes to it. Tonight I go up and meet it on its own ground.

There's a question an honest man would put to himself here, whether this is the trade talking or the woman. I put it. It's the woman, the better part of it, and knowing that shifts neither the moon nor the track.

I dress in wool to the skin and the coat over it, the knife where it always rides. Then I load by candlelight, the drill so old I could run it blind. Powder measured close from the horn. The patch, the ball, the ramrod sent home twice to be sure of the seat. Priming in the pan, and the steel snapped down over it.

The pouch on my belt holds lead and nothing besides. On the church steps this autumn a priest held a little bag of blessed shot out to me before half the parish, grace going cheap, and I would not put out my hand for it. I'd watched once what men do when they've decided God can be got into metal. I've kept my faith in powder ever since. A ball answers to the charge behind it and the hand behind that, nothing else in this world. Eighteen wolves have taken my word on it.

Whatever crosses my sights tonight makes nineteen.

I pinch the candle out and go down the stair into the cold.