The blacksmith says to her, not quite laughing, but not trying to hide his smile either, “If I had the material to spare, I could make you a helmet.”

The blacksmith is her friend, but Joan still glares at him. Beneath the soot and grime of his face, he turns pink. He passes her a hammer: a silent apology. She takes it, and his giant finger points at a pair of horseshoes. No words are necessary. She thinks of water that turns red, blood that when dried feels like a second layer of skin on one’s hands. The body buried. How everything, one’s limbs, one’s bones, one’s blood, returns eventually to the earth, to nothing. She thinks if one’s skull is soft, better to wear a helmet.

Her arm is strong, never sore or tired. She beats.

It is already past the hour of Vespers, eventide, but these summer days are long, and the light does not go without a fight. The sky is splattered blood orange and blue and violet and, in certain parts, a crisp leaf green.

She sees these colors through a perfect square, an unshuttered window, not in her own home but Guillaume’s. The women have gathered here to console, to pray, but mostly to commiserate. They are more serious than the blacksmith and the priest. They look at her, noting the rough terrain of her head; with sharp eyes, they take in her dress, which has lately been washed, as if to search for traces of blood. There are none. Catherine is thorough.

Something has happened, which is why the women are gathered here in Guillaume’s cramped cottage while the men sit in Jacques d’Arc’s house of white stone. In Maxey, a demand for reparation was made and turned down. Not only dismissed but thrown back in the face of Domrémy’s men: among them, the father of Guillaume; among them, Jacques d’Arc.

Guillaume’s mother, who has always looked old and tired, looks older and more tired. Joan scoops up Guillaume’s cat, and Salaud, at her feet, instantly begins to fuss. When the women stare at her, as if to say, Christ, Joan, who cares about the cat, she turns away from them. The women shift their focus back to one another, but Joan gazes out. Her vision is filled with the changing colors of the sky.

The truth is, she doesn’t have the heart to face these women, still in the throes of grieving. Not that they are crying. None of them, not Guillaume’s sister or grandmother or any of the rest of the women, are crying. They are whispering among themselves, and whatever language they speak is as incomprehensible to Joan as the rustling of wings, the murmur of a breeze.