Outside, her brothers are waiting to prance around her and pull more faces. She lets them. None of them were friends with Guillaume, and what her father thinks, they think, too. The boy was weak. He should have taken better care to defend himself. He should have fought. She has not told them about the unthrown rocks. She does not want to shame a person after he is already dead. But in the hour before supper, she had heard a sniveling sound, like a mouse scratching the wall, coming from the next room. She had seen Jacquemin alone and crying into his fists. When he’d caught her staring, he had told her to get out. So, they did not talk anymore about it. But he must have recovered, because now he is jumping and smirking: his usual self.

On Jacquemin’s forehead, there is a bump the size of a small egg, smooth and pink, from when he butted skulls with the Maxey captain. If this is what Jacquemin walked away with, she’d like to see the welt on the other boy’s face. Jacquemin has a hard skull, filled, she thinks, with rocks. The three boys sidle up to her and jostle her; they ask if she has lately eaten figs and sweetmeats, which are known to be the cause of lice; they touch the remaining stubs of her hair and pretend it stings their fingers. When they say she was ugly before but now she could be an ogre’s wife, she no longer scowls at them. She doesn’t pummel them with her fists or kick her feet like a bucking horse but shoves each of her brothers aside to make her way past them. When she does, her touch is uncommonly gentle. Though she will never admit it, she doesn’t want any of them to trip and fall and crack their skulls. She doesn’t want any of them to end up like the boy who is now dead.

Death, war, hatred of Burgundians—these are all temporarily forgotten. People gawp at a new Joan making her rounds of Domrémy. When she shows up at the church to sweep the floor, the priest stares. His face twitches. He is calling on the strength of the archangels, the minor angels, the saints, the many-faced cherubim and the many-winged seraphim, on Christ and the Holy Virgin, and the saved residing in the valleys and gardens of Paradise, to keep him from laughing. So, his face continues to twitch, and at one point, he covers his mouth with both hands and coughs, as if he is trying to smother himself.

Hauviette has heard of her misfortune. She arrives armed with a chain of snow-white daisies, which she throws with a giggle over Joan’s bowed head, ready to receive the benediction. “There,” Hauviette says. “Better now?”