But she does like the idea of change. A world in flux is a world where something may happen, and for the better. Only it hasn’t happened to her.

Sometimes in secret and under the cover of night, she cries. She cries because if you have churned butter once, you have done it a hundred times. After several years, the novelty of turning sheep’s tallow into candles grows old. She did not expect that her body would grow and grow, that she would become a giantess among the men and women of Domrémy, but nothing else would change.

In church, she has stopped praying. What is the point? If you don’t even know who you are praying to, then you may as well pray to a wall and expect the stonework to answer you. So, she uses the time to rest her eyes, and sometimes the priest catches her asleep, which makes him angry.

The flames of the bonfire are dying down, but she can’t look away. Life is hard. The earth is not always fruitful. There are some parts of the kingdom where people would be glad to say, All my days are the same; I have lived to see the sun rise and set again. She knows she should be grateful.

But there is a pain in her heart as the fire dies out. All my days are the same, she thinks. It is like a prayer, spoken into the last of the flickering embers, then emptied into the bubbling stream. All my days are the same.

In the morning she rises. For some time, she has slept every night under her father’s roof. No more days beneath the Faerie Tree for Joan. He can’t kick her out anymore.

If once she carried two bags of grain under her arms to take to the miller’s, now she carries six. Ox dead? Horse half-starved? She can lift the plow as easily as pick up a head of cabbage. There is Joan swinging a scythe; there is Joan threshing, with a flail. There is Joan crouching on a roof, thatching a hole, and chopping wood to build a new fence. And who can forget the time a neighbor’s cart got stuck in the mud after days of heavy rain? He was an old man, though in good shape for his age. Hard as he pushed, it did no good. But Joan took up a corner of the cart. In her grip, the wood groaned before the cart jolted like a living thing and shuddered onto the road. She recrossed the lane and went back to her work.

This balmy morning in August, the sky is clear, the sun a washed-out yellow, and the air fragrant with fresh-cut hay. From the treetops: the hum of birdsong.