They were not always such good friends. When she was a squalling babe, capable only of kicking up her heels and mashing her fists against her gums, her uncle had paid no heed to her. He shrank away whenever her mother or one of her godmothers hauled her, screaming, into the room. He had no children and neither envied nor aspired to the permanence of settling down. How could I face the same hearth, he said when people asked him why he did not marry, the same roof and dirt floor, the same sad cauldron and sad-faced wife, day in, day out? How could I go against my own nature and sleep for decades in the same rotting straw bed, infested with the same nest of ticks? So, he doesn’t. Sometimes he does not sleep even two nights in the same place. The faces of his women are continually in flux. If they are ever sad, he is never around long enough to wipe away their tears.

This is how their friendship began: four years ago, when she was Pierre’s age, she had shot out the front door like a dog about to be whipped just as Durand Laxart happened to be strolling in the direction of her father’s house.

She ran hard, but her father possessed longer legs and was quickly closing the distance between them.

He saw her not so much running as tumbling to get away from Jacques d’Arc. Their eyes locked. Later, he would say he witnessed the precise moment when her fear turned to determination. She did not ask for his help. With one arch of her brow, one glance, she demanded it.

It was an instant of extraordinary beauty. When he recalls the memory, he can’t help smiling. The leap, so perfect, into his arms, and he, seeing her pursuer did not stop, had no intention of stopping, and looked as if he might thrash him, too, turned his back to Jacques and sprinted away. She’d tucked her feet up, each small hand clutching a fistful of shirt, like the reins of a chariot, as she stared over his shoulder. Then, several panicked heartbeats later, a light voice in his ear, as calm as if she were Hannibal crossing the Alpine pass, she said cheerfully, “We are far enough. You can stop, Uncle.”

He set her down, and they went to drink from a nearby stream. When the water touched their lips, cold and sparkling, it was as if to baptize a new union between them. He offered her a hand, wet and dripping, and she, smiling, still out of breath, took two of his fingers in her own, for that was all she could grip. She shook them, like a dog shaking a bone.

Now they are as two soldiers on an old campaign. The campaign is always the same: to avoid capture by the enemy; and the enemy is always Jacques d’Arc.