The top of Durand Laxart’s head just reaches Joan’s shoulder. She has grown and grown and grown and now towers over everyone: the women, her brothers, even her father. How did this happen? No one knows, but this bodes ill for Jacques d’Arc. He can no longer raise a hand to her. Strike her with a stool leg, and it won’t be Joan’s arm that breaks.

Jehanne jokes, “Did your mother betray her husband with a giant, Joan? It would explain a lot if she did.” Then Jehanne looks away, aware she has gone too far, but Joan takes her meaning. Time hasn’t made her grow fonder of Jacques. They still hate each other. Only the odds have changed.

Her uncle nudges her arm. They are standing a distance from the bonfire; the sound of a stream floats under the crackle of flames.

“What are you thinking of?” he asks.

She is quiet. “Nothing.” She glances at him. “Nothing,” she repeats. This is his sixth visit in as many years.

When he arrived, she had news for him. “You will hear about it from my mother, so I want to tell you first,” she declared as soon as she set eyes on him. “Earlier this month, to get rid of me, my churl of a father tried to marry me off. I refused. Then the fool, the man he had pledged me to, said I had promised him personally and broken my promise. We had to go to court. Me! In a breach-of-promise suit!”

“How did you get out of it?” Durand hesitated. “Or did you get out of it? Are you married, Joan, and I have missed the wedding?”

She shoved him, though she was smiling. “I made a speech worthy of Jacques d’Arc. It astounded everyone. My father looked like a ghost by the time I was finished.”

This is the most exciting thing that has happened to her in six years. That and three years ago, a band of Burgundian and English marauders drove off some cattle. “Lucky it was only cattle,” her uncle said at the time. “Lucky they left quickly” was her answer.

She doesn’t like war. She doesn’t like the stories she hears, the same ones she’s heard all her life: convents desecrated, churches plundered, wheat days away from being harvested reduced to cinders, livestock that the attackers can’t take with them slaughtered, blood and meat to feed the flies. It is bad enough that some years the crop is ruined by bad weather. Winter alone, she thinks, is sufficient to starve and to kill. We don’t need the English and the Burgundians to aid winter. It isn’t the work of the English that makes a calf stillborn or a child stop breathing in its cradle.