This is a work of fiction. It is important to stress that the Joan who appears in these pages is a Joan intensely personal to me. I’ll say first what this Joan isn’t. She isn’t visited by hallucinations in her adolescence, by visions of the archangel Michael and the saints Margaret of Antioch and Catherine of Alexandria. She isn’t told by these visions what to do, which is to leave Domrémy and the protection of her family for Vaucouleurs. The Joan of these pages has a complicated relationship with her God. She is a practical young woman: efficient, hardy, as protective of the few people she loves as she is quick-tempered with those who try her patience or belittle her. The historical version of Joan, as she is commonly portrayed in biographies and in films, is a kind of holy woman, one might even say a religious fanatic, who hears Mass multiple times a day, who decries whoring and gambling in her army (she once broke a sword across a prostitute’s back) and encourages her soldiers to confess their sins. She is more or less a spiritual cheerleader to the fighting men—that is, the “real” soldiers. The historical Joan does not shed blood. She does not fight, though she puts on an expensive suit of armor, is skilled in riding, and carries a sword. The historical Joan prefers to hold her banner and rally her men without wounding or maiming a single enemy soldier. I admit: I have never wholly bought this story. Joan did see plenty of action in battle, enough to endanger her life on numerous occasions. In Orléans, she was shot in the neck. The story goes she extracted the arrow with her own hands and then returned to battle after pig fat was applied to the wound. At Jargeau, she was knocked down from a ladder when a rock hit her helmet. She was shot in the thigh outside the walls of Paris. These accounts are all true.