She thinks perhaps he could not believe what he saw, as she herself sometimes cannot believe it.

She says to le Maçon, “Give His Majesty time.”

But le Maçon answers her quickly: “Orléans has been under siege almost six months. We are running out of time.”

IX

When Colet de Vienne next sees Joan, he smiles. A sheepish smile. And he looks a little afraid, as if Joan might pick him up and throw him across the room like a pile of sackcloth. “Just through here,” he says quickly, bouncing across the antechamber.

She is led to a scene straight out of her uncle’s princess stories. A woman dressed in kingfisher-blue silks sits in a chair like a throne, a dark-colored garment in her lap. As if enacted for the moment, her hand is poised with a single needle, the thread dangling. Encircling her, resembling a merchant’s display of finery, four ladies-in-waiting attired in rich greens and sumptuous yellows, sleeves trailing, headpieces glittering with pearls and studded with garnets large as ox eyes, sit on cushions. Two sift through an iron chest, laying out jewels on a platter. One bends over a headdress as large as a swan; another sews.

For a moment, Joan is breathless. The knights may have breastplates of steel and shirts of chain mail, but these women cover their hearts with ruby-studded brooches and star-shaped diamond pins. The knights have their helmets, but these women are horned. From their heads jut hennins like towers, and from each tower streams a flag of victory, a translucent, shimmering veil so fine one’s hand might pass through it like air.

Faced with such a gathering, Joan feels shy. She is still wearing the same outfit as when she left Vaucouleurs. Only now she notices an unsightly smudge on her gray tunic. It may be a grass stain, or the remnants of hound or horse excrement. And as le Maçon said, she smells. After she bows, she takes a step back; she doesn’t know what to do with her hands or her feet, which now feel unseemly and large. And she hopes the women won’t start screaming, that they won’t mistake her for a lumbering ogre.

The women seem to know what she is thinking. They look at her with a subtle raise of their plucked brows and smile discreetly.

But then: a flash of color. A sudden sweep of a kingfisher sleeve like an outstretched wing, and the ladies-in-waiting rise in silence from their cushions and shuffle out.

“Well!” Yolande of Aragon says, dropping the garment to the floor and rising. Le Maçon has told her, The woman you will meet is a lady of many titles. The Dauphin’s mother-in-law. Queen of Four Kingdoms: Aragon, Sicily, Jerusalem, and Cyprus. She is also Duchess of Anjou and Countess of Provence, though at one time she was regent of that fine place.