How does a battle begin? Which side will strike the first blow? Or does it commence all at once, like the meeting of hands for prayer? This is a question she and her uncle Durand Laxart have turned over during his many visits. Despite his low birth, his lack of learning, her uncle is a thinker, a teller of stories, a wanderer who has lived the life of a dozen men in his forty or fifty years. No one knows his precise age. When he smiles or laughs, showing off his good teeth, each one intact, not chipped or missing or a blackened stump, he could easily pass for thirty. He says he has been a ship’s boy, a cook, a tanner’s assistant, a one-hour, one-day, and one-month laborer, in the fields, on the docks, even, he claims, on the scaffold as the hangman’s helper.

So, how does a battle begin? He has told her stories of battles, legendary battles, that start with a song. A scream. A curse. A prayer. But on this fine summer afternoon, on a good-sized plot of neutral land wedged between their two villages, the battle starts with a question.

“Who is that?” the leader of Maxey asks, pointing in her direction.

She answers before Jacquemin can: “Are you talking to me, Burgundian filth?” Perhaps it is the rocks concealed in her skirts that make her bold. Or the stick she knows is lying within reach of her foot, which she can roll into her hand at a moment’s notice.

Jacquemin shoots her a death glare, a look that says, Go before I tell Father you were here, and then you’ll be sorry, just as the enemy captain spits on the ground. He spits with such force, you expect a front tooth or two to roll in the grass. He is a safe distance away—his spit lands nowhere near her—but Joan is startled. Usually her voice alone is enough to ward off her brothers, to make them shrink back. She moves closer to the tree, anchoring herself against it. “Armagnac cunt!” the Burgundian captain shouts, and a rock is tossed in the air—she can’t tell from which side. Not necessarily thrown, she observes, at any particular target. She hopes, for the boy Guillaume’s sake, that he hasn’t wasted his prize with the sharp edge so soon.

Stones fly, launching themselves through the air like angry, whizzing birds. Every time a rock hits a target, a shoulder or a stomach, there is a yelp of pain.