“I give you supplies: grain and livestock and salted fish to feed the people of the city of Orléans…”

She takes another page.

“I give you weapons: barrels of arrows, bow strings, battering rams, crossbows, war hammers…”

The final page.

“And I give you an army…”

“What?” Joan nearly drops the pages.

“You are an instrument of God,” Yolande says, laying a hand on Joan’s cheek. She has to lean forward to reach. “The moment I heard of you from the Duke of Lorraine, I sent my messenger to seek you out. I know now I was right to do so. I believe that God shows Himself not only in holy words, prayers, and sermons, but in…genius. I have been told that after the pages watch you fight, they are silent as if they have just been read a lesson. And when a servant of mine asked a boy no more than seven or eight years old why he was so quiet, the boy said he did not know such things were possible, and he was sorry you had spent so much time polishing armor and working in the stables. He had felt ashamed.”

Yolande’s hand falls away; the crush of rose petals recedes.

“I am no one,” Joan says. She offers the pages back to Yolande. “No one will listen to me. You forget I am nobody.”

Her host considers. “Yes…yes, you are no one, and no one will listen to a peasant, it is true. A poor, unlearned woman who has run away from home with no family to protect her. What is she? Nothing! But everyone will listen to an instrument of God.”

Joan looks down at the pages. For all she knows, these could be love letters.

She thinks back, back to Domrémy. She thinks, My biggest wish used to be that I would grow large enough to pummel my father. In church, I closed my eyes not to pray but to rest. It was the only place my father held his temper, so I slept during sermons. When I think of my mother, I feel only disdain…impatience. She wore her piety like a new dress, and she was vain about her devotion to God. But piety didn’t save her eldest daughter, and God must have missed my mother’s prayers. Just think, a whole lifetime’s work: wasted.

To her, it doesn’t make sense. Holiness is for the people in the priest’s book of saints. It is for the women who rub ashes into their wounds, for monks who pray until their voices grow hoarse, for nuns who fast and grow so weak from hunger, they see angels. It is for people who suffer and suffer quietly.