La Pucelle d'Orleans

Agincourt

A mailed foot pressing down on the back of his head pushed him deeper into the mud, filling his mouth and nostrils with silt and gravel and blood. From somewhere above, he heard hoarse, crude and most of all, English voices urging his tormentor to step harder, but a sharp command out of nowhere secured his instant release. Wiping the mud off his face with an even muddier hand, he looked up into the eyes of his rescuer, those hated green eyes, and spat bitterly. (It was instinct after all, a hastily learned habit whose origins he could not remember now, only that he must continue.) While his act of useless defiance didn't make it very far, it left a black stain upon the child's ragged cloak and he must be content with that.

The boy stared at his defeated opponent, looking neither triumphant nor proud, only tired and unhappy, like a child who has been away from home too long. His hands clenched reflexively around a yew longbow, the magic wand they gave him to make all the monsters go away. (At what cost they never said.) But his voice remained dispassionate, for he had seen scenes of slaughter many times before and the stench of rotting flesh and the screams of injured men no longer made him retch and cry.

"This wouldn't have happened if you had just surrendered, brother. Now, please take your leave. You are on English soil now."

Domremy

He had fallen off his horse some hours ago, and lay dying somewhere in what he could only assume was still enemy territory. Already he felt like a shade of his former self, ignored by the larks in the sky and the mice in the fields, abandoned by the very land that was now surely being snatched away by those greedy English pigs.

He was coming to terms with an early and humiliating death by infected arrow wounds, lying forgotten in a wheat field that had seen better days, when his savior discovered him.

"Ser… are you an angel?" the child asked, mingled curiosity and grave concern in her large brown eyes. She squatted down beside him, taking in his battered and exceedingly not divine appearance, and came to another conclusion. "Have you… fallen from heaven?"

He cleared his throat to make a sarcastic reply, but he lost his voice during that horrific battle and his lips were cracked and bleeding. The girl then offered him a waterskin, which he eagerly drank from despite his earlier wish to die. He handed it back to her with a croaked word of thanks.

"What is your name, ser angel?"

It seemed that she was incredibly stupid or impossibly fearless or both, so he replied, as clearly as he could, not really caring either way.

She looked at him dubiously, as if she could possibly know who he really was, but set to work cleaning and binding his wounds with a grown-up efficiency, using the rest of her water and strips torn from the bottom of her apron. The pain was unbearable at first, but he could summon no strength to resist her efforts even if he wanted to. After she tended the most accessible of the wounds, she put her arm gently around his shoulders and lifted him to his feet with ease, surprising them both. "My name is Jeanne, ser Francis. You can come home with me and recover there. You don't have to run anymore, you are safe now."

She smiled like the sun upon clear water or the first birdsong after winter, and he lost consciousness.

Orleans

"Sometimes I fight with my brothers," she mused once, while she brushed out the tangles in his hair with a wooden comb, "but we always forgave each other afterwards. Because we are family."

He did not deign to answer that with anything other than a snort and she giggled at his stubbornness.

As she tied his hair back with a scrap of ribbon, her fingers brushed his ear ever so lightly. He felt himself redden and he brushed her hand away in irritation. But she did not look hurt, and her eyes shone with a desperate and painful love, the kind of loyalty he did not deserve.

Though he tried, God knows how much he tried, he could not break away from this girl who had saved him and cherished him and healed his heart, only to break it again. "I am no saint, mon agneau, surely you know that by now."

"I know it," she answered simply, hands tightening into fists in her lap, her gaze intense and adoring and challenging all at once. Angels spoke to this peasant girl, he knew, and whether or not anyone believed her, she somehow made those visions real with the strength of her belief. "But you are still my life, Francis."

"I will be your death as well," he whispered softly, certainly.

He woke up one morning to see her pale face hovering above his. In the half-light of dawn, he noticed the faint glimmer of chain mail and the sword at her belt, and he sat up, worried.

"Is it time?" he asked, fear threatening to freeze the breath in his lungs.

"Ssshh… don't move so suddenly. Your wounds have re-opened." The cloth covering the old shoulder wound from Agincourt had turned dark red and sticky over the night, and she replaced it with a fresh bandage.

"…If I wait any longer, you may not survive and I can not let that happen." Her girlish voice sounded utterly calm, as if she was considering going to market to buy some thread instead of riding to certain death at the ends of the English longbows.

"I did this to her," he thought with dull horror, "she will die because of me and she will think it glorious."

"Jeanne…" he whispered, hating how his voice cracked and trembled, hating his cowardice and weakness and indecision that drove her to this madness. "The English will have no mercy, not after what you did at Orleans and Reims. And you can not trust Burgundy… I beg you, turn back, save yourself-"

"Non," she protested gently, persistent to the end. "They must see me lead the charge. They must see the flag I made. I am the only one who can save us, Francis. Don't you see?"

Slowly, she knelt beside his cot, with fingers interlaced, bowing so that her roughly-cropped hair hid the tears threatening to spill from her eyes.

"Please, pray with me."

Placing his hands over her clasped ones, he bent forward to kiss her sweet mouth, so that she opened her eyes in surprise. "Let God's will be done. Whatever happens… Know that I will never forget you, Jeanne."

"I- I love you, Francis," and now she was crying, frightened, his brave warrior maiden, his champion, hiccupping in soft sobs so that the other soldiers could not hear.

It was then that he realized the voices had not answered her today, and he knew, as she knew, that her luck had run out.

"Je t'aime." Though it broke his heart to say those words without living their promise, he said them anyway because she needed to hear them.

She nodded, her tears having stopped momentarily, her lips now moving in a childlike prayer. "Lord in Heaven above, Jesus Christ, protect France and let him live. In the name of love and light, in the name of mercy, please let him live."

And so he lived. Though England found her guilty of witchcraft and burned her body twice and scattered her ashes into the Seine, he lived. He lived through the later wars and conquests and invasions, enduring the slaughter over and over again, forgiving though never truly forgetting. For her sake, for her sake, he repeated to himself, as old scars faded and new ones made their mark, for the sake of that girl who loved him so much she died for him.

That girl.

[One of my oldest fics, written years ago, but still one that I am proud of.]