Time: August 20–25, 1429 Location: Reims / The Road to Paris / Senlis
"The Maid... has taken the army with her."
The Duke of Alençon was the first to break the paralysis. He slammed his hands onto the oak table, his face draining of all color. "God in Heaven," he whispered, horror gripping his throat. "If she has marched on Paris alone... if she falls, the spirit of France falls with her! The army will lose its soul!" Alençon turned frantically to the King. "Sire! We must mobilize the main host! We must march to her aid instantly!"
Across the table, the Count of Vendôme and the Count of Clermont exchanged a fleeting, almost imperceptible look. It was a look of suppressed, vindictive joy.
"Mobilize the host?" Vendôme scoffed, puffing out his chest with feigned aristocratic outrage. "For a peasant girl who commits open treason? She has stolen the King's vanguard! It is an insult to the Crown, an insult to the natural order!"
Clermont nodded vigorously, masking his deep relief behind a facade of righteous anger. "Let her face the English alone, I say! She has crowed about divine invincibility long enough. If she is truly sent by Heaven, let the angels shield her. We should not risk the lives of noblemen for the insubordination of a farm girl!"
Deep down, the conservative lords were ecstatic. The relentless, war-mongering Maid was finally out of the King's ear. If Bedford's arrows solved the "Joan problem," they could return to the comfortable, profitable negotiations of feudal politics.
CRASH.
The heavy silver goblet slammed into the oak table with the force of a hammer strike. Wine splattered across the polished wood, dripping down the edges like fresh blood.
The bickering dukes froze, their heads snapping toward the head of the table.
Charles VII did not yell. He did not rise from his throne. But the temperature in the room seemed to drop to freezing. His dark, abyssal eyes swept over Vendôme and Clermont, stripping away their aristocratic pride until they felt entirely naked and exposed.
"You smile," Charles said, his voice a lethal, vibrating whisper that carried to the very corners of the chamber. "You smile because a political nuisance has removed herself from your sight."
The King leaned forward, the terrifying aura of the Emperor crushing the room. "You are blind. She is not merely a peasant girl, nor just the soul of your army. She is the sword of this realm. My sword. She has taken my vanguard, severed her supply lines, and marched into the dark without my leave. That is open defiance. It is treason against the Crown's grand design."
Vendôme swallowed hard, shrinking back into his high-backed chair, suddenly realizing that the man sitting before him was not a king playing at war, but a predator calculating a kill.
Charles turned his freezing gaze to Alençon. "And you. You would have me dance to the Duke of Bedford's tune?"
"S-Sire," Alençon stammered, intimidated by the sheer, mechanical coldness of his sovereign. "What... what are your orders?"
"The main host holds its ground. We do not move until the artillery and the new formations are completely integrated," Charles commanded with absolute finality. He then turned his head toward the towering shadow standing by the heavy oak doors. "Magnus."
The commander of the Scottish Guard stepped forward, his mailed hand resting on the pommel of his massive claymore.
"You and Raoul de Gamaches, with the 1st Compagnie d'ordonnance," Charles ordered, his eyes narrowing into cold slits. "Ride north. Do not engage the English main force. Find the Maid. Do not rescue her glory—save my vanguard. And when you find her, remind her who commands the armies of France."
Far to the north, under the sweltering August sun, the white banner of the Maid was flying high, leading a tempest of steel and hooves through the dust of Champagne.
When Joan had intercepted the news of the burning of the southern supply lines, something within her had violently snapped. To her, the fifteen-day truce was no longer just a political inconvenience; it was an active, demonic deception. Alongside La Hire—the foul-mouthed, battle-crazed Gascon general who needed no excuse to spill English blood—she had taken the vanguard and ridden hard for the capital, intent on carving a path of righteous vengeance.
For five days, it felt as though the very hand of God was pushing them forward. Yet, it was not a bloodless miracle. War always demanded its toll in friction.
When the white armor of the Maid appeared before the gates of Laon, there was no grand battle, but neither was there a heroic welcome. The Burgundian garrison simply melted away in the night, fleeing out the back gates and leaving a terrified populace behind.
At Soissons, the reality of the divided kingdom laid bare. The gates did not open at once. They creaked—slowly, reluctantly—as if the city itself feared the choice it was making. The city council had debated through the night, terrified of English retaliation, opening the gates only when a local pro-Valois mob threatened to burn the guildhalls. Compiègne and Beauvais followed, but only after bloody, internal street riots forced the local mayors to lower the Burgundian colors and swear desperate fealty to Charles.
Yet, to Joan, these messy, reluctant surrenders were all translated into the language of divine victory.
In the market square of Compiègne, the vanguard had paused to water their horses. The troops were laughing, passing around looted skins of wine, their discipline fraying under the intoxicating spell of continuous advance. Joan sat atop her destrier, her visor raised, watching the weary but liberated faces of the townsfolk.
From the edge of the crowd, a small, dirt-smudged boy broke away from his mother's grasp. He toddled up to Joan's massive warhorse. With a trembling, reverent hand, the child reached out and touched the cold, polished steel of Joan's sabaton.
Joan looked down. She saw the pure, unfiltered awe in the boy's eyes. She smiled, a profound warmth swelling in her chest. This is why we ride, she thought, the absolute certainty of her holy mission blinding her to the tactical realities of the march. God is with us. The people yearn for us. The English are nothing but shadows fleeing the light.
Beside her, La Hire tore a chunk of roasted meat from a bone, washing it down with wine. "You see, Maid?!" the massive Gascon warlord roared, wiping grease from his beard. "They are terrified! The English dogs don't even have the stomach to hold their walls! Let's push on to Paris and end this!"
It was an illusion of invincibility. And it was highly contagious.
Intoxicated by the apparent collapse of the northern defenses, the discipline of the vanguard disintegrated. The new, rigid military regulations implemented by the King were forgotten in the rush of glory. Scouts stopped riding deep into the hills, preferring to stay close to the column to share in the spoils and the adulation.
They were suffering from the most fatal of all military ailments: the Victory Disease.
On the evening of August 25th, as the vanguard approached the forested hills near Senlis, the illusion shattered.
They had not stumbled into a grand, prepared ambush. Instead, they had blindly blundered straight into an active English reconnaissance hub—a muddy valley where several elite English cavalry detachments used to gather, exchange intelligence, and disperse along the northern roads.
It happened with terrifying, chaotic speed.
As the French column navigated a narrow, muddy defile, they crashed headlong into a resting English patrol. There was a moment of mutual, paralyzed shock before the twilight erupted into violence.
"To me! To me, you dogs!" La Hire roared, his eyes wide with bloodlust. The medieval warlord did not issue tactical commands; he succumbed entirely to his base nature. Drawing his massive battle-axe, he kicked his destrier into a furious gallop, charging headlong into the scrambling English riders. He swung the heavy steel like a madman, cleaving an English scout from collarbone to sternum in a spray of hot, dark blood.
Joan drew her sword, the holy fire instantly reigniting in her eyes. "Saint Michael, guide my blade!" she cried. She plunged into the chaotic melee, fighting with a wild, feral desperation that terrified the seasoned English veterans.
Yet, amidst the blood-soaked, disorganized brawl, the echoes of Napoleon's reforms refused to die completely.
A young officer of the Compagnies d'ordonnance, bleeding from a gash on his cheek, desperately raised a brass bugle to his lips. Three sharp, piercing notes cut through the screaming.
Rally. Form line.
A handful of the newly trained cavalrymen heard the call. Ignoring the frantic, individual duels happening around them, they fought their way toward the bugler, forcing their panicked horses side-by-side. They lowered their lances not as glory-seeking knights, but as a unit.
It was a messy, desperate synthesis of old and new. While La Hire hacked his way through the enemy like a mythical giant, the small, disciplined line of French lancers pushed forward, grinding down the center of the English patrol.
It was a brutal, exhausting meat-grinder of a skirmish. After forty minutes of frantic hacking, screaming, and dying in the mud, the surviving English riders broke and fled into the dark forests.
The French had won.
"We broke them!" La Hire panted, his chest heaving as he wiped blood and brain matter from his visor. His men were cheering hoarsely, immediately dismounting to strip the dead of their armor, their faces flushed with the adrenaline of a hard-fought victory. "Another pitiful patrol! They cannot stop us!"
Joan slipped from her saddle. Her legs felt unusually heavy. Her breath came in ragged, burning gasps, and her pristine white armor was now painted in horrific streaks of crimson and brown mud. She knelt in the blood-soaked earth, planting her sword deeply into the ground, resting her forehead against the crossguard. She closed her eyes, preparing to utter a prayer of thanks for yet another divine triumph.
But as the roaring in her ears began to subside, the temperature in the valley seemed to plummet.
The faint, grey light of early dawn was beginning to pierce the thick morning fog that clung to the hills of Senlis. The joy of the bitter victory had not even fully bloomed on the faces of the French soldiers before the air grew unnaturally still.
A French looter, reaching for a dead Englishman's coin purse, suddenly froze. He looked up toward the surrounding ridges, the color draining from his face. "Commander..." he whispered, his voice trembling uncontrollably.
La Hire turned. His ferocious, blood-stained smile slowly died.
The fog rolled back, revealing the terrifying, unvarnished truth of their situation. The patrol they had just butchered was not a stray unit. They were merely the first to arrive at the staging ground.
Silhouetted against the pale dawn light, lining the crests of the hills that surrounded the muddy basin, were two fresh, perfectly organized squadrons of English cavalry. They had returned from their scouting routes, drawn by the sounds of the skirmish.
They did not rush down in a disorganized mob. They sat atop their massive warhorses in grim, silent formations, their lances already lowered, blocking every path out of the defile.
Joan slowly opened her eyes and looked up. Her muscles screamed in exhaustion. Her hands, gripping the hilt of her sword, trembled slightly—not from fear, but from the crushing physical toll of the march and the slaughter.
For the very first time since she had left Domrémy, as she looked at the fresh wall of English steel trapping her exhausted, disorganized vanguard in a muddy grave, a cold, alien sensation pierced her heart.
Lord, she thought, her breath catching in her throat, a fleeting, agonizing moment of doubt washing over her. God in Heaven... does my journey end here?
The silence of the dawn was absolute, broken only by the wind whistling through the trees.
Then, a shrill neigh echoed over the blood-soaked field.