In her mind’s eye she imagines two men: one steps from a cloud, a rose-scented mist; he is a prince dressed in cloth spun from gold. The second emerges from shadow. She hears him before she can see him; he shouts, uttering words in a tongue that hurts her ears. He has a stubbled chin and a pockmarked face. He spits on the ground, licks his lips, beckons.

She recognizes these men. One is from Catherine’s dreams; the other, from her nightmares. Every night for the month they spend in Neufchâteau, Joan faces these two men. She thinks, If I had the chance, I would knock not one but both of you down, for the princes of today seem about as useful in battle as cornered virgins in a convent. I would dig my heels into your thighs. I would break all your bones.

Her rage does not go out with the first light of dawn. What she sees, what she feels, is as clear to her as if it were a vision sent from God.

III

When they return to Domrémy in late summer, a sad procession of hanging heads, she is surprised by how wrong she was. She had thought, What could the English take from a place like this? We have nothing. We are poor. A few tallow candles? The bowl called Joan’s bowl? A woman’s linen apron? We have no golden altarpieces, no statues with emerald eyes and ruby-stone lips, no secret treasury spilling over with coins. But these men, so gifted in destruction, have kicked up the herb gardens and set fire to heads of cabbage and tender bulbs of fennel; they have broken whole pieces off cottages and torched the thatched roofs; they have snatched up the chickens, whose feathers litter the ground, like a panicked trail, and entered people’s homes, it seems, for the sole purpose of shattering cups and axing stools, disfiguring cupboards and battering cauldrons. They have decapitated the statue of Saint Margaret that stood outside the church and toppled it, so the woman who crawled out of the belly of Satan now lies on her stomach, her head thrown several feet away, facedown in the dirt. Whole fields have been burned, along with the meadows, which the livestock need for grazing. It isn’t the longbow that is the secret weapon of the English, Joan thinks; it’s fire.

But the church is intact. And like a testimony to his strength, his relentless nature: Jacques d’Arc’s house of stone remains, too.

She tells her uncle when they are alone, “I hate this, this feeling of living as though I am waiting for another attack. What’s to stop them from coming a second time? And then we shall all be flattened.” Durand, who has an answer to everything, is silent.