When he speaks, his voice is strangely at ease. “Joan,” he says, and the sound of her name lands like a dull blow to her skull. She almost steps back out of habit, though she hopes her face registers nothing. “You will regret this.”

A pause. She feels her fingers loosen their hold on the torch. Her arm thrusts forward, and with it, the fire spins toward her father’s chest. She hears him scream an oath and the other men cry out, as if they, too, had been burned, though this is impossible. She turns and runs. The man from Maxey bounds after her. He is close at her heels.

She doesn’t remember when her legs give way and she falls, tripping over a root. She is never tired from chores, from running around the village and climbing trees. But she is tired now, her energy spent, as if the act of rebellion has drained her.

She feels arms close around her body, lift her up and up, and she is aware that she is moving again, though her legs are limp. The man from Maxey is carrying her. They move faster and more nimbly than she thought a man of his size would have been capable of. Around her, the dark flies past; she loses consciousness. For how long she doesn’t know, but when she wakes, they have left the woods behind, and she can see the sky above them.

He sets her down, and his expression seems to say, The world is small but not this small. How have we run into each other once more? Then he peers at her with narrowed eyes. He catches the resemblance. “Ah, you are that man’s child,” he says finally.

They are in Maxey now, enemy land, but for him it is home, a dirty cottage with a low roof, three children, and a wife only a few inches taller than Joan and who stares, like an unblinking owl, when Joan appears on the threshold. The children, tawny owlets, blink, glance at one another, communicating in the unspoken language of siblings; they don’t know what to make of their guest.

She watches the man lift the youngest of his children, his daughter, and kiss the crown of her head. She watches him pet the heads of his sons, though the whole side of his own head is bleeding and he hasn’t had time to wipe the blood away. She thinks, Perhaps I am dead and don’t know it. Or the Burgundians love their children more than the French do. His wife is still staring. Her eyes pass back and forth between Joan and her husband. She says, in a voice barely above a whisper, “What has happened? Thieves? Brigands? Where does the child come from?”