Joan arrived. Imagine his dismay at this red-faced, kicking infant. A girl. For an hour after her birth, he walked around baffled, as if God had forsaken him.

“What a set of lungs,” the man who won the bet said to him good-naturedly before he took Jacques’s money.

“What fists! Look how she beats the air as if she hates it,” another added.

It quickly became a game. “What eyes, as beautiful as her father’s,” an old man cooed nearby. “What feet, or are those hooves?” others called. “What hair as black as devil’s spit.” “What arms as thick as the mooring rope for ships.”

And all the while, she was passed among the hands of the drinkers to be peered at like she was some oddity. But they were gentle with her; they knew how Jacques d’Arc held grudges, how he’d never forget either the money he had lost this night or this early betrayal, the blow Joan had, as a babe, already dealt his pride.

Then someone who’d drunk too much of her father’s ale, who slurred his words and could barely stand up without slouching right down again, shouted, “You haven’t really lost, Jacques. She’s a little bull, she is. Just the bull is a girl.”

His friends told the man to shut his mouth or they would shut it for him. But no one denied it. “Is there a female equivalent of Saint Christopher?” one man asked, genuinely curious. She, Joan, was a healthy child—and strong. Just a pity she wasn’t a boy. Even Jacquemin, when they cast their minds back, had really been a beanpole of an infant, hadn’t he? And Jean a stubby mite of a thing.

Now Joan wonders if every time her father looks at her, he thinks of the money he lost. How much was the bet, she wants to know. Two livres? Three? Though it’s probably not about money in the end. It’s about Jacques d’Arc being made to appear the fool. It’s about losing, which a man as proud as he is never likes to do. It’s about the definition of children being sons.

Above the Faerie Tree, Joan hears the susurration of wings, and a bird glides like a restless piece of night that won’t settle against the sky. She thinks of Guillaume. The soul is supposed to take flight when the body expires, only this, she has recently learned, isn’t in fact true. The soul doesn’t rise but, rather, sinks to a place called Purgatory, where the sins committed on earth are atoned for, and the soul is cleansed in purifying flames, both hot and cold. Guillaume is there now. She pictures him crouched in a cave, the floor engulfed in blue-and-white fire, all alone.