They located her followers in a muddy field, as all fields here were after recent rains. The scouts rode back at speed to report. It was not a great distance. It had been twilight by then. King Hardan gave orders that the Maiden’s force, if it could be called that, should be trapped in that meadow and engaged at sunrise to be destroyed.

It rained again at sunrise, the land became even more waterlogged, Jeanette’s men and women (she had many women with her) moved awkwardly, boots or even bare feet sinking into the mud. The famed Anglcyn longbows killed them with ease. The Maiden’s people had nothing with which to reply. It was a slaughter.

The rain stopped, a wan sun broke through clouds.

The killing continued in a sodden meadow, from a distance, arrows and more arrows. There were piteous screams and cries. Some of the Anglcyn archers disliked what they were doing. None stopped doing it.

There was a cluster of people visible in the centre of the dwindling ranks of the Maiden’s army. They were trying to protect her, holding up makeshift shields of hide or blocks of wood against the death falling from the sky. Raining down, after the rain.

After quite a short time, as such things are measured—it was still morning, the sun was still rising—the order was given for the Anglcyn infantry to advance. They had to make their way through that muddy, sucking terrain, but there was no opposition at all by then, just that small circle of ragged people around a woman, a girl, who was wearing armour, a helmet, and holding a sword. She could be heard praying, or, the Anglcyn would later say, invoking aid from demons.

They killed the wounded in the meadow as they approached, then they killed those trying to defend her, with only a handful of their soldiers even injured.

They took Jeanette de Broché alive, as ordered. Also, as ordered, no one assaulted her, or offered indignities beyond spitting at her, or gripping her arms more tightly than was needed. She was not resisting them. She was praying.

She did not weep. They noticed that. And it was clear, once they could hear her, that she was indeed invoking Jad. This fact was not shared when they brought her back to their camp and king, so the story of her demons circulated, which was useful for Hardan.

That day, towards sunset (no rain, little wind, a clear sky, both moons rising), she was burned at a stake on a pyre they’d raised near their camp.

It was much larger than it needed to be to kill a small woman, but Hardan wanted it to be seen at a distance. Proclaiming that she was dead here, at his hands, this ignorant peasant girl who was supposed to be some sort of emblem of Ferrieres and Jad’s love for it and resistance to him.