But she shakes her head. “I only meant, should I be paid what the dog boy or stable boy receive each day in wages?” She wouldn’t mind a few pennies in her purse. “I am doing the same work as them.”

They thought she had come to put up her feet and eat supper by a comfortable fire; that she would complain about working long hours and being fed little more than the beggars at the gate. This is something else they can’t understand: We feed her almost nothing, the bare minimum, and give her the hardest work. So why doesn’t she weaken or complain of a sore back, of aching limbs? Why does she never tire?

In the evenings, le Maçon visits her. He holds a perfumed square of cloth to his nose.

“You smell, Joan.” But his face isn’t without concern. Has she had enough?

Dog shit from the kennels. Horse shit from the stables. She gives him a look: What do you expect me to smell like? A garden of roses?

The hour is late, but the door of her room flies open with a bang. Here are three men. Two of them are in La Trémoille’s employ; the third she recognizes as the messenger who traveled with her from Vaucouleurs. They expect to find her asleep, but she was awake at the first sound of footsteps.

They escort her outside to where there are four horses and a boy watching them.

Before they mount, she asks, “Where are we going?” In her pocket: her uncle’s knife. At her side: Sir Robert’s second-best sword.

The men tell her, smiling and not blinking an eye, “We are going to kill a dragon in the woods.” Only the royal messenger looks away when they say this.

She knows that to refuse would be to fail. The report would fly straight to the Dauphin’s ear. But if they lay a hand on her, even by accident, she will kill them.

The whole journey La Trémoille’s men talk about the dragon, which stirs only at night. It is over fifty feet long. No, a hundred, the other says. With scales hard as diamonds and teeth as large as a man’s head. One of them glances back at her. A laundry maid went into the forest; it was said she was meeting her lover. Well, after some searching, she found him, all right: his body torn in strips by the dragon’s claws, his face burned to a cinder.

“Then how did she know it was him?” Joan asks. She keeps her own face still, like a face of stone.

They ignore her and continue talking. The huntsmen have found deer ripped to pieces. “No work of a bear or a wolf,” they say to her cheerfully as they reach the woods.