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regained consciousness, and squeezed the little girl fit to stifle her against her heavy woolen cape.
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    That evening the men were summoned to the farm. The women made dinner, and they waited for the father, who had put in a brief appearance earlier (in addition to bringing two hares and the promise of some fine cuts of wild boar) and heard the others tell of the day’s extraordinary events. Consequently he had gone away again to knock on a few doors while the women laid the table for fifteen. Ordinarily they would have supped on soup, bacon, a half-cheese per pair of feet, and a smidgen of Eugénie’s quince jellies, but instead they were busy preparing a stew and a chanterelle pie: they’d just opened three jars from that year’s harvest. On Maria’s plate was a big pear drowned in honey fragrant with the thyme the bees had frequented all summer long, and she was silent. They had tried to ask her a few questions, but they’d given up, worried by the feverish gleam in her dark pupils and wondering what she had shouted to the gray horse of the mist. But no one doubted Angèle’s story, and the supper began in a great hubbub, talking of rosaries, storms, and days in late November, and through it all Angèle had to tell her story in detail half a dozen times, making it a point of honor not to change a single thing.
    An elaborate story, but not altogether complete, or so Maria noticed as she sat unspeaking and thoughtful, eating her pear. She thought Angèle gave her a sidelong glance as she was about to begin a certain part of the story, when the black smoke formed long thin arrows, and when you looked at them you knew they were deadly. You looked at them, and you knew, that was all there was to it. And Maria noticed, for a slew of reasons that offended Angèle’s love of truth, that the auntie said nothing of the horror etched in her breast by the baleful vision. All she said was,
And the smoke went up to the sky like that and exploded all of a sudden up there and the sky turned blue again
—and then fell silent. Maria went on thinking. She thought that she knew many things these fine folk knew nothing about, and that she loved them with all the strength a child of eleven can place in a love born not only of early attachment but also of an understanding of others in their moments of both greatness and unspeakable misery.
    If Angèle chose not to speak of the deadly force of the black arrows it was in part because she feared her words might turn into a prediction, and in part because she did not want to frighten the little lass—because she didn’t know whether the child had seen what she had seen—and in part, too, because once upon a time she had been a fiery woman. While now her auntie might look like a dried-up walnut who fed on immaterial prayer alone, Maria could see—because since her tenth birthday she had acquired the gift of knowing the past through images—that in years gone by Angèle had been a pretty firefly, and that her body and mind had fated her to the winds of freedom. She could see that she had often crossed the river in her bare feet while staring at the sky, daydreaming; but she could still see time and destiny, vanishing lines which never vanish, and she knew that Angèle’s fire had gradually retreated inside her, reduced to a point long forgotten. But the discovery of the little girl from Spain on the steps to the farm had revived the memory of the ardor that had once flowed in her veins: now in its second life it was ordering Maria to be free and fiery. Angèle was afraid that if she spoke of the arrows of death, others might think it best to restrain the child in her everyday life, but Angèle thought she could protect her—or at least she hoped she could, keeping the child from being shackled, a child whom one afternoon spent shut indoors would kill more surely than all the arrows a simple rosary had managed to