She hasn’t yet reached the fight, but the branch tips out of her hand. She turns and stares in the direction of the noise, not knowing at first what she is looking at. Then she sees: in the midst of the fighting, there is a patch of silence. The quiet feels strange; it does not belong here. In a corner of the field where two boys should still be throwing fists and kicking, one boy has detached himself. The other is lying on the ground. She observes, even from this distance, the white terror of the moving boy’s face as he stumbles backward and nearly trips over his own feet. He covers his mouth, wipes whatever is there across the front of his shirt, as others, too, begin to look up from their pummeling. Her gaze returns to the boy who doesn’t move.

Already she knows who it is before her eyes can make out the face. Guillaume: seven years to her ten. The light that heats the back of her neck is the same light as before, but different. There is an edge to it now, like the point of a sharpened knife held against her skin. The boys step aside to let her pass. Perhaps they think, because she is a girl, she can do something to help.

Now the enemy is moving again: faces bewildered and pale, fleeing in the direction of Maxey, where they will close their Burgundian ranks and admit to nothing. No one calls out or runs to stop them. By the time she nears Guillaume, they are gone, cutting through grass and the shadows of trees as nimble as thieves in the night.

When she reaches him, she exhales with relief; he is alive. Then she kneels, and it is as if she has swallowed one of her own rocks. She tries to convince herself that the wound isn’t as bad as it appears, that a flesh wound, a clean cut, can release a surprising amount of blood. She sees that Guillaume’s eyes are open, that they are the gray-blue of clouded skies and fixed on a spot in the far-off distance.

Behind her, she hears Jacquemin swear revenge. She turns; this is not the time for blood feuds. Now it is she who gives flinty looks and blunt directions. “Get help,” she orders. Her brother makes a sound, a stifled cry like a dog that has been stepped on, and begins to run. Three of his followers tag behind him. Those who remain look like they might be sick. They turn their eyes away; the blood, she would guess, frightens them. There is so much of it.