Time: August 25 – August 27, 1429 Location: Forêt de Chantilly / Saint-Denis / Paris
The warhorses tore through the muddy trails, their lungs heaving like broken bellows.
Within this small detachment of English cavalry riding frantically southward, a highly unnatural atmosphere reigned. Every man twisted in his saddle, some white with terror, others laughing with frantic exhilaration, unable to reconcile the nightmare they had survived with the prize they carried.
Their eardrums still ached. The memory of the dawn skirmish—of the French vanguard producing those demonic, fire-spitting iron tubes—had left a scarring psychological imprint. Even though they had put dozens of miles between themselves and the hills of Senlis, the slightest rustle of wind through the heavy canopy of the trees made these seasoned veterans flinch and reach for their sword hilts. They had never seen armor shattered by invisible thunder before.
Yet, whenever they twisted in their saddles to look back at the center of their column, the terror evaporated, replaced instantly by a feverish, almost hysterical joy.
Bound brutally over the back of a packhorse was a girl in mud-streaked white armor. They had done the impossible. They had captured the Maid of France. They had seized the very witch who had shattered the myth of English invincibility at Orléans.
As night fell, the detachment made a temporary camp in a hidden, sunken valley deep within the Forêt de Chantilly. They dared only to light a meager fire, its weak, orange glow flickering nervously against the massive trunks of ancient oaks.
Joan was roughly dragged from the horse and tossed onto a bed of damp, rotting leaves. Her wrists burned where the rough hemp cut into her flesh. The mud clung to her armor, her hair caked with blood and sweat. Crushing exhaustion and the agonizing ache of bruised muscles tore at her senses. Yet, for every pang of fear, a spark of defiance lit inside her chest. She was no longer merely a girl; she was a symbol. If they thought her flesh could break the spirit of France, they were gravely mistaken.
From the shadows of the trees, a few English men-at-arms approached. The stench of cheap wine and unwashed bodies preceded them. The flickering campfire illuminated the leering, predatory smiles stretching across their grimy faces. One heavily bearded soldier licked his cracked lips, dropping to his knees beside Joan. He reached out a filthy, calloused hand toward the leather buckles of her breastplate.
"They say the witch is still an untouched maiden," the bearded man slurred to his companions, his eyes gleaming with dark intent. "I say, before we hand her over to the high and mighty lords in Paris, we ought to see if she bleeds like a mortal woman..."
CRACK.
A steel-toed leather riding boot slammed with devastating force into the bearded soldier's ribs. The impact lifted the heavy man off the ground, sending him tumbling violently into a puddle of freezing mud.
Cedric, the captain of the cavalry detachment, stepped into the firelight. His armor was battered, missing several plates, and a jagged, half-coagulated gash ran down the side of his cheek, making his face look utterly demonic in the shadows. He drew his short sword, the steel singing sharply in the quiet forest, and glared at the surrounding men.
"Keep your filthy hands off her, you swine!" Cedric snarled, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. "This is the Duke of Bedford's prize! The most valuable prisoner in the world. If any of you so much as touches a single hair on her head before the Duke gives his express permission, I will personally flay the skin from your bones and feed it to the hounds!"
The soldiers, thoroughly cowed by their captain's murderous glare, muttered apologies and shrank back into the darkness.
Joan slowly raised her head. Her dark, fathomless eyes locked onto the scarred face of the English captain. Her lips were cracked and bleeding, but when she spoke, her voice did not tremble. It rang with the absolute, unyielding conviction of a martyr.
"Kill me," Joan stated, her gaze burning with defiance. "Strike me down now. Because if you do not, I swear by God in Heaven, as long as I draw breath, I will find a way to kill every last one of you."
Cedric looked down at the girl. He saw no fear, only the ferocity of a trapped wolf. He did not yell. He only offered a cold, cynical stare.
"Pray you survive long enough to see the walls of Paris, girl," Cedric said flatly, sheathing his sword. "You think we are your only enemies? There are people who want you dead far more than the English do."
Two days of relentless marching carried the captive southward. Each village they passed whispered rumors of the Maid's capture. When at last the forest cleared, Saint-Denis rose like a silent sentinel, its alabaster towers gleaming in the weak morning sun.
If the soul of the French monarchy was crowned in Reims, its physical body slept in Saint-Denis. Since the third century, this ground had been the ultimate synonym for the sacred. From the reign of Dagobert I, this magnificent Gothic abbey had served as the final resting place for the Kings of France. Through the breathtaking, kaleidoscopic rose windows designed by Abbot Suger himself, the sunlight spilled over the pristine alabaster tombs of Philip Augustus, Louis IX, and Charles V. In the silent, cavernous nave of the basilica, the carved effigies of past sovereigns lay with their hands clasped in eternal prayer, holding their stone scepters, seemingly watching over their realm from beyond the veil of death.
It was the very heart of French history. A pearl of incalculable cultural and spiritual wealth.
Today, that sacred silence was brutally violated. The cobblestone courtyard of the abbey echoed with the sharp clatter of English hooves and the guttural, boisterous laughter of foreign mercenaries. The resting place of France's greatest monarchs had been reduced to a heavily fortified English outpost. It was a profound, suffocating humiliation—the crown jewel of the kingdom, firmly in the grip of thieves.
Cedric halted his detachment here to requisition fresh warhorses. As the saddles were changed, he made sure the news of his prize echoed off the abbey walls.
"We have the witch! The Maid is taken!"
The news acted like a spark in a powder keg. The English and Burgundian garrison erupted. By midday, as Cedric's detachment approached the Porte Saint-Denis—the grand northern gate of Paris—they were no longer just a tired cavalry patrol. They were the center of a triumphant, hysterical parade.
The city of Paris exploded into a frenzy. English soldiers, Burgundian militiamen, and anti-Valois citizens flooded the narrow streets, beating their swords against their shields, creating a deafening cacophony of victory. To them, the terrifying nightmare that had broken the siege of Orléans and marched unchecked to Reims was finally over. The holy terror was now nothing but a bruised girl tied to a horse.
The procession finally halted in the heavily guarded courtyard of a military garrison near the Louvre. Cedric dragged Joan from the horse and shoved her roughly to the cobblestones at the feet of a high-ranking commander.
Sitting rigidly in a high-backed wooden chair was Sir John Fastolf.
Ever since the disaster at the Battle of Patay—where the terrifying new French infantry and artillery had annihilated his veteran army—Fastolf had lived in a waking nightmare. He had been mocked by his peers, called a coward, and suffered the ultimate disgrace of being stripped of his Order of the Garter. He was a broken old man, drinking himself into a stupor to forget the thunder of Charles's guns.
But as Fastolf looked down at the mud-covered girl on the ground, the deadness in his eyes shattered. A violent seismic shift occurred across his weathered face. The initial shock melted into disbelief, which rapidly boiled over into a sick, twisted, euphoric joy of vengeance.
Fastolf stood up, his armor clanking. He stepped forward and roughly grabbed Joan's chin with his cold, steel-gauntleted hand, forcing her to look up at him.
He stared at her intensely, expecting to see a demon, or perhaps the ethereal beauty of an angel from the songs of troubadours. Instead, he saw a peasant. She was not tall. Her frame was thick and sturdy, built by years of hard labor in the fields of Domrémy and the crushing weight of plate armor. Her neck was robust, her hair cropped brutally short like a young boy's to fit beneath a bascinet. Her face was smudged with dirt, and a purple bruise swelled beneath her left eye.
But her eyes. Her dark, wide eyes stared back at him without a single ounce of submission. They burned with a holy, contemptuous fire that seemed to pierce straight through the old knight's soul.
"God in Heaven..." Fastolf breathed, a hollow, incredulous laugh escaping his lips. "This? Just this little child? This is the illiterate farm girl who led that pathetic bastard of Bourges to a crown?"
He abruptly released her chin and spun around to face the cavalry captain, his demeanor instantly snapping back to that of a ruthless military commander desperate for redemption.
"Cedric," Fastolf demanded, his voice trembling with suppressed excitement. "Tell me exactly how you managed to capture the witch."
Cedric stood at attention, his chest puffed out with pride. "Sir! I was ordered to lead a reconnaissance gathering at the Senlis staging ground. As we approached the valley, I heard the sounds of a fierce melee echoing from the west. Knowing French scouts might be near, I ordered the men to keep quiet and we rode hard toward the ridge. When we crested the hill and looked down, we saw..."
Two hours later. The English High Command, Paris.
John of Lancaster, the Duke of Bedford and Regent of France, stood silently before a massive, sprawling map of the kingdom. His hands were clasped firmly behind his back as he listened to the bitter, explosive argument raging in his war room.
"My Lord Duke! This is the perfect shield granted to us by God Himself!" Sir John Fastolf shouted, his face flushed red with manic energy. "Hang her in an iron cage from the highest battlement of the Paris walls! So long as she is in our custody, Charles will never dare to order his artillery to fire upon the city! Let that Valois bastard sit in his camp and watch his savior rot in the sun. His army will tear itself apart from the inside!"
"Absolute rubbish! A coward's tactic!" Richard de Beauchamp, the Earl of Warwick, slammed his fist onto the heavy oak table. Warwick, a man known for his rigid chivalry and fanatical piety, glared at Fastolf with undisguised disgust. "My Lord, this is not a political hostage to be bargained with! This is a heretic! An instrument of Satan! We must immediately convene a public trial. We must prove to the world that she is a witch. Only by doing so can we legally and theologically annihilate the legitimacy of that bastard's coronation in Reims!"
"The Earl of Warwick speaks the absolute truth."
A cold, oily voice slithered from the shadows near the hearth. Pierre Cauchon, the exiled Bishop of Beauvais and the intellectual leader of the pro-Burgundian faction, stepped smoothly into the candlelight. His eyes gleamed with the calculating malice of a serpent.
"My Lord Duke," Cauchon said, bowing his head slightly but keeping his eyes locked on Bedford. "The heretic must burn. If we merely hold her as a hostage, we tacitly acknowledge her as a legitimate prisoner of war. No. She is a blasphemer. A whore who practices dark arts. If we use the Holy Church to convict her and reduce her to ash, Charles's crown becomes nothing more than a joke won by demonic deceit."
The room fell silent. All eyes turned to the Regent.
Bedford slowly turned away from the map. He walked over to the tall, leaded windows and looked out toward the northern horizon, his mind flashing to the reports of the terrifying, mechanical discipline Charles had instilled in his new army.
"You are all right. And yet, you are all wrong," Bedford said, his voice a chilling monotone. He turned his piercing gaze upon his commanders. "Charles is no longer the weak, vacillating Dauphin he once was. I do not believe for a second that the life of one girl will stop his cannons from firing. But I do need to break the illusion of his divine mandate."
Bedford looked directly at Cauchon. "Bishop Cauchon. You will take full charge of the trial. But hear me well: the process must be meticulous. The theology must be flawless. Above all, this must remain, in the eyes of the public, an 'independent ecclesiastical trial.' The English Crown will not have its hands visibly stained with her blood. You will break her spirit, Bishop. You will make her confess, from her own lips, that she is a false prophet."
Cauchon bowed deeply, a cruel smile touching the corners of his mouth. "It shall be done exactly as you command, Your Grace."
Bedford walked over to his heavy wooden desk and picked up a quill, dipping it deliberately into an inkwell.
"As for our true enemy..." the Regent said, his eyes narrowing into two cold, calculating slits. "I wonder if he has the audacity to come to Paris to keep the appointment."