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Back Joan Save as PDF
Chapters (43)
  1. Cover
  2. Epigraph
  3. CAST OF CHARACTERS
  4. Map
  5. Part One
  6. I
  7. II
  8. III
  9. IV
  10. V
  11. VI
  12. VII
  13. Part Two
  14. I
  15. II
  16. III
  17. IV
  18. V
  19. VI
  20. VII
  21. VIII
  22. IX
  23. X
  24. Part Three
  25. I
  26. II
  27. III
  28. IV
  29. V
  30. Part Four
  31. I
  32. II
  33. III
  34. IV
  35. V
  36. VI
  37. EPILOGUE
  38. afterword
  39. Dedication
  40. acknowledgments
  41. By Katherine J. Chen
  42. about the author
  43. What’s next onyour reading list?

He is patient. Only when her tears have run out, when her body shudders away from him and her arms fall to her sides, does he step back.

“We have known each other a long time, haven’t we?” he says, and she nods.

She thinks, as he smears her tears and snot away (who else would do such a thing, touch her tears and snot?): We are soldiers on a campaign that has come to an end, and though we are both alive, we have lost almost everything.

He smiles at her, his eyes shining, and she can’t tell what he feels: whether he is pleased to go or grieved. But his smile says, The world is large, yet it can also be small. Our paths may cross again. I am not worried about you, and you shouldn’t worry about me.

He turns from her, chewing on the wafer. It is his last lesson to Joan: how you should approach life when its fists are pummeling you. Head up. Shoulders back. Your heart may be breaking, but you don’t let it show, not on your face or in your eyes. You walk with a spring in your step toward a destination yet unknown. And your next warm meal may be hours or days away, your next bed in an inn or in a wet ditch, but in your mouth is the taste of cinnamon. The past is the past, and the dead, buried in their shrouds, must always be left behind.

IV

Supper. A slip of the hand. The bowl that teeters before it breaks. And pottage, like the droppings of a large bird, spills across the floor. Without a word, her mother hands her a cloth. She doesn’t meet Joan’s eye, and Joan wants to tell her, If it were my child that was dead and less than a month gone, I wouldn’t take it as quietly as you do. But at the edge of their vision, her father has already stood and is stamping in her direction.

If her shoulder flinches, it is because Jacques is jabbing it and bellowing oaths into her ear. The oaths, the curses have not changed since she was a girl of ten. He bawls, as from years ago: Why don’t you go drown yourself? If only he could find a sack big enough to fit her. There might have been a sack big enough, she thinks, when she was ten. There isn’t one now.

But then she stands. For a moment, his eyes flick over the whole of her, which takes a moment. She is a full head taller, and her shoulders are just as broad as his, her chest flat, her arms and legs longer. And she does not have a paunch like he does.