She slips out and, crossing the lane, decides to spin back toward her own house like the funnel-shaped storms she has heard about that can splinter church steeples and halve great oaks. By the time she reaches her threshold, she is dizzy and light-headed. Anything to try to forget. Anything to dispel the ache death has left behind. The pain she feels is dull, not bright and fresh like a cut. She squats down. The men have left the door open so a cooling wind can enter, and she can hear movement within. A glance, and she counts six of them, not including the priest, who no one really wants there, for he is standing on one side of the table while the others are crowded together at the opposite end. Still, even Jacques d’Arc draws the line at throwing out clergymen.

The men are restless. They are making fists and unmaking them; they are rubbing their faces, kneading their thighs as they sit, and some cannot remain sitting for long; they push back their chairs, just short of kicking the furniture, because it is Jacques d’Arc’s furniture, and pace up and down the room. Luckily, someone has had the sense to remove, from the tabletop, the pair of shears used to cut Joan’s hair this morning. Her father’s friends look angry enough to stab anything, even themselves.

“Well?” Jacques is first to speak. This is all he has to say. He does not need to add, We need a plan; he does not have to explain, All my plans are schemes, traps, tricks, and snares, and I have a few in mind already, so which shall we try out first?

When no one answers, he offers, as if it were a bowl of delicious stew, “Or shall we attack?” He adds, “This is now a matter for men, not boys.”

The priest throws up his hands. “Wait, wait…This is what I feared. We cannot…” He stumbles, then speaks slowly, as if he is addressing children: “We must take this matter to the nearest court…”

Her father is ready for this. It is as if the priest is in a play and does not know that he has just performed his part to perfection. “What?” her father answers him. “Court? This has gone beyond the court. We’ll find no justice there.”

The priest flushes with anger. “The Lord says, If anyone insults you, does you injury, assaults your honor—”

“Yes?” her father cuts in. “I should turn a knife in his ribs, yes? I should beat his brains in? For this is my interpretation of what the Lord says.”

A sound interrupts their argument: a third voice. For a moment, she thinks she has missed a woman in the room, because the voice is high-pitched. Then she realizes what she hears isn’t words but a wailing.