One more moment. One last prayer. Joan shuts her eyes, though it isn’t a prayer that comes to her but a memory, like a feather floating from a dove’s wing. It is a scene of peace in the house of white stone, her sister still alive and mending a shirt. Her uncle stood over Catherine, watching her quick hands. He said something that made Catherine laugh. At their feet, Salaud ran in circles. But when Joan entered the room, they looked up. Salaud rolled out his tongue, ears crooked. “I can’t stay,” Joan told them. “I promised to mend the priest’s gate.”

“That man should pay you,” her uncle said. “But I suppose all his debts are paid by God.”

“Our Joan,” Catherine said, as the needle dipped and rose through the cloth of the shirt. “She is always coming and going. She can never keep still. We never know where she is or where she will be, whether she may be found in the woods or in some neighbor’s field. One time, when I called out her name, her voice came from above my head. She was in a tree eating an apple.”

Durand raised his hands in pretend helplessness. “What can we do about it?” he asked.

Catherine looked at her thoughtfully. Turning back to the cloth, she shook her head. She was always the picture of loveliness, her sister. “Nothing. Nothing can be done, and why should she change? She is our Joan.”

When Joan opens her eyes again, she is greeted by the world as it is.

Her heart is the drumbeat that accompanies her to war. Over her shoulders, she hears the flutter of the banner that will signal her arrival in battle. A light wind cools the sweat running down the sides of her face.

As she passes the cathedral of Orléans, she mutters a prayer, a final word to God, but a figure catches her eye. Beside one of the doors, on a pedestal—is it her imagination?—she sees a statue, its hand poised above a wheel. She has seen this face before, first in a book and then in a dream, and its eyes are watching her. Even when she looks over her shoulder, the eyes seem still to be watching.

As she rides closer to the fighting, men are already running from the battle. They hold their wounds, leaving bloody trails as they stagger. Their faces are frozen in pain like masks.

Her last thoughts are these: The people who once stood in that room, in her memory, are all gone. There is nothing left to her but this.

She feels she is moving through time. Overlying this battle: a clearing. Men are replaced with boys. Swords and poleaxes replaced with stones. At the edge of sight and hearing: a boy screams and falls. What is the difference? Grown men make more noise. There is more blood.