But how is love weighed? She has heard Guillaume was born late to his parents and there is a difference of seven years between his elder sister and the son they wished for. From her pocket, she pulls out the smooth rock and runs her thumb along the edge. It is so dark she cannot see her own hand, but the rock is there. She feels it, how light it is in her palm. What has happened makes her sad. Not for the first time today, she is in danger of crying, when she thinks how what is warm and good isn’t enough to save a boy’s life—not a father’s protection or a mother’s tenderness—but beatings, a body hardened to pain, the ease with which one rolls a stick, like a club, into one’s hand and is willing to hurt another, might. Love, possibly, isn’t enough either, not in this world where nearly all the stories she hears from her uncle are about wars both past and present. Who has lost. Who has won. Who is maimed and how many are dead. She makes a promise, whispers it into the dark, imprinting it in the night sky as the boy’s face is imprinted in her memory. The promise is this: If she, Joan, has a choice, then she will choose to be a thrower of rocks. She will live.

III

There is a joke in the village: that Joan is welcome to rest at every hearth in Domrémy except her own; that Jacques d’Arc lives in the best house, a house built of stone, but one can count on one’s fingers the number of days in a year Joan sleeps under his roof.

There is always something to do in a village, and Joan’s day begins when her chores are finished. Then she is out the door before anyone (her father) can catch her. She will help load a cart bound for market, even if she barely knows the cart driver. She will coddle babies for the half hour that their mothers need to run an errand or rest their eyes. If she sees a hole in a cottage, she will gather sticks for mending it. She will slap on clay over the twigs, and the hole will be gone.

Some villagers find it amusing to guess where Joan will appear next, her shabby dog trailing her everywhere she goes. They’ll hear the bells ringing for Vespers or Compline, and they’ll chuckle and ask whoever is standing nearby, “Is that Joan banging away? Sounds like it.”

Last autumn, she had followed a group of farmers bound for the Bois Chenu, the woods in which her father owned land.

“What are you going to do there?” she asked when they noticed her trailing behind them.