Page 48

If it comes, Enora says the grandmother’s words to it. While it cannot move, I take it.

“And if the grandmother’s wrong?” Enora says.

“Then it is a thing in a yard with me, and I have never met one I could not carry.”

“You’ve never met this one.”

“No.”

“Stop arranging me,” Corentin says from the chair, “and get me something with salt in it.”

Katell has her rules before anybody has asked her for them. Nobody in after dark. Nobody answered by name, in any voice. “If it says it’s Nora, it isn’t. Nora’s in the yard where I can see her.” She says it to me, as though I am the one likely to forget.

“How late did it come?” I ask.

“Never past his bedtime,” Katell answers. “Not once. Dusk to when he nodded off, and then nothing till the next time. So the two of you stand out there till he’s asleep, and then the girl comes in and feeds him, and you can stand in the wet on your own.”

Friday night the dew comes up through the yard and into our boots.

Enora stands under the shop eaves with me and does not talk, which I have never known her do for an hour together. She listens to the lane. I listen to her listening. Nothing comes down it.

Near midnight Corentin wakes and asks for soup, and she goes in.

Nothing.

Saturday morning I read him again.

He is the same as yesterday. Nothing taken; nothing given back. The raw place is a day older. I say so.

Katell, in the door, lets out a breath she has been holding since Thursday. “Well. That’s the first good news this house has had since Easter.”

I do not correct her. I do not know that she is wrong.

Saturday night we move the lamp nearer the gate and stand where the light falls on both of us.

Every footstep in the lane, we stop talking and listen until it has gone by, and every one goes by.

“I have hunted this for a year and I have never seen it,” I admit in the quiet. “I know its work. I have carried ten of its leavings. I have never once seen the thing itself.” The lane is black past the gate. “I said at my own table that I was frightened. That was of a thing I could not see. This is worse. I am standing in the open with my wife beside me as the lure, and I put you there, and I am afraid of the dark for the first time in my life.”

She does not say anything to that. She puts her hand inside my coat, flat on my chest, and leaves it there.

I stay under the eaves after she goes in.

Twelve miles off, past Morlac, past Trevern, somebody is dying in the dark tonight, and the bell over my gate at Kerlann is ringing for a man who is standing in a yard with the dew in his boots.

I do not need the bell to know it. The bell is for the house. I know it in the line down my side.

I say nothing about it yet.

Three nights, and nothing.

The hunter has been quiet since we came, and I do not know what it is doing. I know it is not gone, and I know I cannot stand here forever.

ENORA

That night, when Riwal comes in from the yard, I light the second lamp.

My room is the one I grew up in, at the back of the house over the shop, with a bed that was too short for me at fourteen and is a joke with him in it. There are two lamps on the shelf because I used to read in bed. I light the second off the first and set them both where they will throw at the bed.