Page 8 of She, Wolf, Him.

I should leave. I've told him what's useful, and the bucket's full. There's nothing left here but the thought of being heard, which has crept up while I wasn't minding it and now asks for a place I can't spare. He's near enough that I can smell the road on him, leather, gun-smoke, dust, and under it a warmth that's only his. I keep my jaw shut on how badly I want him to keep asking. I'm good at that, at least. I lift the bucket onto my hip. Water slaps cold over my wrist, and I'm grateful for the cold, the plain honest fact of it.

"You'll need the old herders for the rest," I tell him. "Not me. I keep to the village."

"You keep to the dead." He says it without weight. His eyes sharpen, the hunter in him coming forward with so little show I nearly miss it. "Lonely place for a young woman to spend her days."

"It's quiet there." I'm already moving. "Nobody asks the dead for anything."

"And the living," he says, to my back. "What do they ask."

"Everything," I say, and don't turn round. "Or nothing."

"Agnès."

I've not told him my name. I don't turn round to ask how he came by it. His gaze follows me across the square. I don't give him my face again. It's the only discipline I've left and I spend all of it getting myself round the corner of the church before what I'm feeling can put itself on the outside where the whole village would read it.

Margot is waiting by the trough. Of course she is.

"He talked to you." She falls into step, her arm coming through mine, easy, as it's been since we were girls. Her hand settles over my wrist, rough and warm, the grip sure, and the familiar weight steadies what the stranger has unsettled. "The whole square saw. Berthe's already decided he's the devil come courting."

"He wanted the bog paths."

"Of course he did." She's smiling, but it's the careful smile, bright and measuring. Her hair's half out of its knot, as it gets by midday, a smear of curd on her sleeve from her father's house, and she smells of wool and woodsmoke, of the cheap floral soap she hoards and won't admit to. "And did you?"

"I told him to ask the old herders."

"The old herders." She laughs, quick and low, and squeezes my wrist. "God help the man. He'll be told the shale three ways and none of them alike." She tips her head, the bright going out of the smile. "He watched you cross the square, after. I saw it from the cheese-house. He watched till the corner took you."

"Berthe thinks the soup's come courting if it steams at her," I say. "You're as bad. He wanted the ground. There's nothing in me a man like that wants that the old herders couldn't give him better."

"No," she says, mild as milk. Then, "When are you up there next. The hill. I'll come with you."

"You hate the hill."

"I hate you on it alone," she says, "which is not the same thing."

For the length of the square I'm allowed it, the one warmth in this place that wants nothing back from me but my company. I could tell her. Margot is the one person in the world I could tell and not be punished. But the truth has too much shame in it. A stranger looked at me like I was a person and I want him to do it again.

So I say nothing, and she lets me say nothing, which is the truest tenderness she's ever shown me and she's shown me a great deal. I don't let myself ask why the not-telling her should sit heavier than the telling would with anyone else alive.

We come out into the open of the square and there's Thibault.

Thibault is across by the smithy, sandy head bent with the other men over whatever they're making of the dead. He feels us before he sees us. His head lifts. No smile. He only gives me the flat settled look he reserves for what belongs to him, then that small tip of the chin. Mud has dried in the creases of his knuckles. A torn edge of nail catches black where he has worried it with his teeth. I think of those hands at my table, on my linen, on the children everyone has already counted out of me. I picture those hands stilled.

Margot's arm tightens in mine. She's seen him see me. She doesn't say anything about it.

The cold of it goes through me clean. One man has me as a thing he's already paid for, waiting only to be delivered. The other wanted to know what was behind my eyes. I've no right to the second kind. I've the banns going up, a room he's cleared, a life already measured out to fit it. And I've a stranger's grey attention lodged now like a stone in my apron, to take out when no one's near. I'm ashamed of how much I'd rather have the stone than the room.

I lift my chin back at Thibault, the proper inch, the dutiful inch. He goes back to his men, satisfied. He's easy to satisfy. That's the worst of him, almost. He'll never know there was anything in me to disappoint.

By evening the house has taken its due from me and I've given it badly. Bread left uncovered. Ash spilled on the hearthstone and swept aside with my foot. My father's cup set too far from his hand. He doesn't complain. He hardly lives near enough to the room to notice. Every unguarded thought returns to the well.

His scars come back first, four pale marks I'd no right to study as closely as I did. Then the questions. His voice follows last, the dry drop of it around So did I. I let myself have all of it in the firelight, because it's mine for as long as no one knows.

Nobody has ever asked. I've been needed, yes. Promised, prayed over, chosen as you'd choose which ewe to keep through the winter. Then a stranger rode in with blood-work on his hands and asked. I went up like the straw I am, so hungry for it the shame can't get a grip.

The shame is there. I'm a promised woman, the shepherd's barely cold, and I should be on my knees thanking God for a man who won't beat me. All of it's true. I've recited it until the words know their places without me. The wanting hears them and stays.

Other nights I'd have it out of sight before it finished rising.