And, she thinks, I would inherit the several weaknesses of man’s nature: his lust, his boundless aggression, his desire to tame all that he touches—the beasts of the field, the earth, women. For a man cannot see anything in the world without wishing to wear it like a trophy on his back, to call himself master over it. To her, this is what it means to be a man.

She vows she will not be this way. If she will flatten, then she will also nurture. She will kill, but she will heal. She will shout at her men in battle and shame them so they can find their strength and do better, but she will sit by the beds of the sick and the dying to tell those too ill to stand that their city has been liberated. Their souls will journey to the land of Purgatory as free men of the kingdom of France.

“Ah, so you don’t have a cock?” La Hire asks, brightening. “Then I have won my five livres, and Dunois had better pay up.”

“Give me half?” Now she is talking like her father.

“Not a chance,” he says. “Make your own wager.”

A chuckle, then: “I once had the tip of a sword cut me here.” He shows Joan the scarred flesh at the bottom of his eye. “I thought I was a dead man. ‘It is over, La Hire,’ I told myself. ‘You have had a good career, not the best, though it has been long and occasionally worth your while. But you are done for and your soul is the devil’s to claim.’ Yet I lived, and now when I have nothing to do, when I find myself sitting in a chair and dangling a boot from my toes by the fire, I say, ‘La Hire, it is time to find a war again.’ And I go off running. I ask my neighbors, the ale brewers, the serving wenches who for some reason can never keep their hands off me, ‘Where is there a war happening? For I must go there.’