Joan thinks of this now, what it would be like to find oneself in the belly of Satan, one’s only tool a wooden cross small enough to cup in one’s hand. She has seen the insides of animals before: the entrails of a sheep, the bladder of a pig. So she wonders, How did Margaret find her way out? Through guts and blood. Through a labyrinth of intestine and pools of sulfurous bile. The book of saints doesn’t go into details, how long it would take for a cross—perhaps Margaret had sharpened the ends on a piece of bone she found in Satan’s stomach, remnants from a previous meal—to cut through skin and serpent scale.

But she imagines the moment when the saint emerged, crawling out, drenched from head to toe and sputtering. She imagines the first breath of air, how she, Margaret, would have filled her lungs with the scent of topsoil, how she would have looked at the sky, a single passing cloud, a common sparrow flitting to its next tree, in wonder.

Behind Joan, the village grows smaller, until the outlines of the cottages become a patch of muddy brown. She glances back only once; the slope of gray hills and pale-yellow fields have covered Domrémy. It no longer exists. She, Joan, takes a breath: a first breath in new air. She pauses to shake a stone out of her shoe. She walks.

V

The day she leaves Domrémy is the day she finds her way back to the kitchen of Vaucouleurs’s garrison.

“I am here,” she announces to the cook, who remembers her. He gives her a friendly pet on the head and smiles.

“So, you still want to learn how to make blancmanger?” he asks.