She tells her young pages, When you complain about your exercises or feel sore from running, just think what it means to fight three hours without rest, without break, the smell of sweat and dust in your mouth. You can’t remember the moment of victory, but you remember all the other moments, little things, like how blood isn’t at all like water or even like wine, but congealed droplets that stick to your armor; you remember the crooked line of teeth that scatter like dried peas over the back of your gauntleted hand when you strike a man across the face; the strange way some men die as if they are trying to heal themselves, to hold together a split-open chest, a cracked skull.

She takes her pages by the hand. She asks them, her expression serious, “Are you sure the two of you wouldn’t like to enter the priesthood instead?” And they look at each other uncertainly. From his desk, her squire hides a smile.

“But?” La Hire shouts from his chair.

“But it is also a feeling like no other,” she says. “You are never more alive than when you are in battle. Once you have felt every vein of your body thrum, like the taut string of a bow, energy brimming to the very tips of your fingers—”

“The need to take a piss forgotten seconds into a charge,” La Hire adds.

“Once you have experienced all of that…” Joan trails off. She smiles. Such a smile would normally be bestowed on a newborn babe or a blooming garden in springtime. She shows them her hands. “My sword was no longer just a sword. I did not sense either the weight or the heft of it, for it was as though I were holding my own soul.”

La Hire leans forward from his chair. “Well, lads?” he asks the pages, who are both grinning. “What do you think of the priesthood now?”

They couldn’t just put Joan in a suit of armor and bring her to Orléans.

After her last meeting with the Dauphin, she was taken to a different city: Poitiers. There, eighteen clerics gathered by the Archbishop of Reims and vetted by Yolande interrogated her. It was not only the Dauphin who had lost his home. These men, too, had been displaced by the war. After Paris was taken, they lost their great university, they lost their sees and their sources of income, their comfortable and lucrative official roles. These servants of God were angry men. With their homes, they had also lost their sense of humor.