She looks up over his head to the sky, to strike a bargain with her God as she had done that day in the field in Domrémy. But the sky is gray, and the clouds hang heavy with the gathering strength of an unleashed storm. Her own stomach groans. For days, she has eaten nothing. There is no God to listen to her here.

In the hours before dawn, it begins to snow. A hard wind descends on their camp, howling like the cries of the dead. She does not sleep, and her thoughts turn, too, to the dead. The sapper who saved her at Paris; his own wife would not be able to tell who he was, his corpse was stuck with so many arrows. She saw bodies missing limbs, like the stumps of trees with their branches cut off. She saw corpses exhaling their last breath. On the cusp of death, they still possessed the strength to pull apart a few blades of grass. And when she closes her eyes, she sees Catherine.

She steps outside, into the dark. The wind beats her as though she were a flagellant, each gust of air a whip across her face. But she tucks her head down and pushes against it until the hole in her leg burns as if a torch is being pressed against her flesh. Her knee buckles, and she falls in the snow.

She crawls toward a cannon, using it to anchor her body in the storm. Even the artillery has let her down. Most of their store of gunpowder has been ruined by the wet weather, and she has had to contend with thievery on her own side: food and tools pilfered, cases of slow matches and crossbows gone missing.

Another irony dawns on her: you go to war so that you can forget what true pain is. Now she knows: it isn’t for glory that the knights-errant go off on their quests. Who would slay a dragon for a mere chest of treasure? But one might risk death to escape memories too perfect to describe, that can never be relived again. It is the loss of such moments that can drive a person to madness. For her, it’s the memory of walks with Catherine through the village, of falling asleep together beneath the Faerie Tree, her dreams of cinnamon before she ever smelled or tasted the spice. And later, much later, a day of strolling through a garden, thinking she was on top of the world. Orléans saved. Jargeau, Meung, and Beaugency retaken. Goodness is just as capable of torment; it thaws the heart and fills up the soul, then leaves in its wake a pit so deep it can never be whole again.

She knows she is testing God by kneeling in the cold. “Are you still here? Were you ever here?”

There is no answer.