Someone is throwing himself against her horse. Thump. Thump. Joan looks down; it is the first time she sees an Englishman up close. Dark eyes meet hers. A face full of hate; a long white scar along the jaw.

Men with scars. Men who are cruel. Men who don’t speak French. Was it you? she wants to ask. Do you remember Catherine’s face?

But her hand moves before her mouth can form the words, and she barely registers the flash of steel. When she lifts her sword, she sees the edge is coated with blood.

She has no time to think about what she has done. There, a few feet away, two men are wrestling as her brother wrestled the redheaded captain from Maxey. But in place of Jacquemin stands the burly La Hire. And Joan isn’t running with a stick anymore, clutched like a club; she is riding toward them with a sword.

A moment. When the Englishman’s head comes off, it flies in a perfect arc through the air. La Hire shakes off the body, now lifeless.

He looks up, recognizes her. He rubs a cut on his chin and narrows his eyes. “I didn’t need your help,” he says, though it seems he is trying not to smile, not to laugh at how events have turned. Then he spins on his feet and punches another soldier in the face.

How long does a battle last? She doesn’t know. In her head, a voice interrogates every man she cuts down: Was it you? When her sword pierces an opening in armor: Was it you? When her blade plunges through gambeson and her ears fill with the sound of tearing flesh: Was it you? The replies she receives: screams, groans, silence. Yet what she wants is a confession, even if there will be no forgiveness.

Here, too, is another scene she knows she has lived before. She is kneeling. Her gauntleted hand touches the side of a man’s bleeding head, his face for a moment masked by another face much younger than his own: that of a boy of seven. Though, she thinks, he is still young, too. Sixteen? Seventeen? Perhaps he is an elder Guillaume. She remembers him: this man she has named Guillaume. When she passed the camps, the groups of soldiers standing to gawk at her, he was among them. She’d given him a hard stare. What are you looking at? And he had cast his eyes down, as if ashamed. The moment felt like a victory, however small. This battle, too, has been a victory. But he has lost both times. She notices: The elder Guillaume hasn’t died with any weapon in his grip, so what had he been fighting with? His fists?