He frowns when he sees the model of the Reliquary Shrine. “I wanted this from René years ago,” he tells her, stroking the gilded roof as if it were a cat’s head. “The miser refused to give it to me, not even for a wedding present. I received a book instead.”

“Then Your Majesty must have it now,” she says.

The Dauphin blinks, smiles slowly. He pretends something has flown into his eye and turns away to rub it. She has had a hand in this, too: His Majesty’s new happiness.

“I have lived so long with this weight that I am unused to this sudden lightness.” His fingers, the tips sticky from eating sweets, hover over his heart. “When le Maçon first brought me the news of Orléans, the guards saw me sway on my feet. They were forced to hold me up so that I could hear the rest of his report. And then when he had finished, I called for my queen. I told her to bring me Louis. I kissed my wife. I held my son in my arms. You have made such things possible again, Joan.”

Opening presents. Going to bed late and rising well after the sun has risen. The week after Patay are days when the hours of light are long and the air is sweet. Joan is walking through a garden. The castoff of Yolande’s eldest son has again been cast off, this time onto her squire’s shoulders. Now she wears no one’s castoffs. She is dressed in a shirt of gleaming yellow silk. Over this, a cream doublet with slashed sleeves, the lining the pink of a kitten’s tongue and the buttons silver, each engraved with a lion’s head. She wears hose that are parti-colored, one leg red, the other white, and calfskin boots not yet broken in. She has no mirror in which to admire herself, but she thinks the boots suit her better than they ever did that well-dressed idiot from Vaucouleurs, Sir Robert.

The world is smiling at her, the sun bright though not blinding. La Hire, Dunois, and Jean walk ahead, and laughter floats back to her on the air. From a distance, La Hire and her squire appear to be hugging each other; in fact, they are tussling to see who is the stronger, except they are giggling too much to exert any real strength. It just looks like they are both drunk and dancing.