“My mother should have been a nun cloistered in an abbey. She lives in fear of my father and subsists off prayers instead of food and drink.”

“Yet you are well built.” It is not a description, she thinks, that would flatter most of her sex. “To be so tall, you must have been well nourished or, at the very least, well fed.”

For a moment, a memory washes through her and she forgets herself, where she is, who she is speaking to.

“My uncle used to joke to strangers, ‘Joan must eat a whole heifer to sate her appetite.’ ”

“And did you?” The Dauphin’s expression is serious.

“No, I ate bowls of pottage and black bread, like everyone else. And when the harvest was bad, we would skip a meal and go hungry. I was no different.”

Another rumor: His Majesty cannot pay his butcher’s bill. No more credit will be extended to the castle at Chinon. Even the battles of the household, of the kitchen, are ones he cannot win these days.

The Dauphin settles his head on his fist; the glow of a ring, a bright ruby, makes it look like he has a boil on the point of his chin. He seems to contemplate what has been laid before him, as if a scribe had written on scraps of parchment her various attributes: tall; young; female; well built; claims she can fight.

So, it seems a continuation of his thoughts when he says, “Then tell me what you know of war.”

This is the question for which she has been waiting.

“Majesty,” she says, “I will tell you what I know.”

She tells him about a room. It is the room she and her sister slept in. She describes the slanted, low ceiling, the shuttered window, the air that is musty and old because no wind or light is permitted to enter. And next to her, Catherine’s shape in the darkness. The sounds of quiet weeping. She recalls the dust motes like fairies, lit by splinters of sun filtering through the shutters’ gaps, and the spider webs, which grow and widen with the hours and the days, spinning miniature gray curtains in the corners of the room.

“It will be no news to you,” she tells the Dauphin, “to hear the English burned our fields, which were ready for the harvest. It may be no special thing to you that I picked up the black stalks of ruined wheat, and under my fingertips I felt the grain crumble like ash. I saw a child’s straw poppet, which she had dropped, crushed in the center of an Englishman’s boot print, and a woman enter her home not through the door but through one side of her cottage, for a whole wall had been battered down.” Because she knows that His Majesty prays often, she tells him about a saint’s statue: defiled.