Joan, acting largely on her own, rallied a group of soldiers and peasants and townsfolk and captured an English stronghold. Then another. And then she began to capture entire towns and was able to get the Dauphin—the French king in waiting—officially crowned.
Then things took a grim turn for Joan. She was captured by the English. The French abandoned her to her fate, and she was dragged before a trumped-up religious court
, which found her guilty of heresy in part because she had worn men’s clothing.
She was taken to the town square and tied to a tall pole, and dry wood was piled around and beneath her. The fire was lit.
Derek’s brother had reveled in the details. The way the flames would at first have warmed her. The way the smoke would sting her eyes. The jeers and insults of the crowd. The way her clothing would have been the first thing to burn, the way it would have curled and smoked and fallen away, and by then the agony would have begun.
Blistering skin. A smell like crisping bacon. Unbearable pain. Gasping for breath as the heat baked the air in your lungs. Skin bursting open.
I told Messenger. I was sure, you see, that he would never inflict anything so inhuman on Derek.
At the start of my recitation, Derek tried to laugh it off. But he began to sweat. He began to lick his lips nervously. And as Messenger listened impassively, Derek began to interject. “No, that’s not right. That’s not right. No. No way.”
His voice grew panicky. Oriax’s eyes glittered with an emotion I could only guess at. Messenger just listened. Just listened and did not stop me.
“Okay, man, okay, you’re scaring me,” Derek said. “I’ll play your game. If I win, I go free, right? I’ll play your game. Let me play your game!”
“You have done well,” Messenger said to me.
“I think he’s scared now—I think he gets it,” I said, pleading Derek’s case.
“Yeah, yeah, I mean, just, like, just, just let me play the game!”
“Too late,” Oriax purred. And then she began to sing in a low but very melodious voice. It was a song set to an ancient melody I knew, though I did not at that moment recall the name and only later retrieved from memory that it was called “Greensleeves.”
She sang this:
What fool is this, who cries and frets,
As doom is fast approaching?
Who made his bed, now will lose his head,
While Messenger laughs at his screaming?
It seemed to be made up on the spot, the mocking lyrics coming to her a few words at a time.
Messenger had in his hands a black cloth. I don’t know where it came from. It was rough-textured, felt perhaps, and when he drew it over his hair and pulled it down across his face, it was revealed to be a hood. Only Messenger’s eyes were visible, blue lights shining from eye slits.
“In the name of Isthil and the balance She maintains,” Messenger intoned, “I summon the Hooded Wraiths and charge them to carry out the sentence.”
“No, no, no, man, I didn’t do anything wrong!” Derek yelled. “I was just doing it because Charles, man. Charles! It was all him, I never thought . . . I was just messing around!”
It was the mist itself that seemed to form the two dark and hooded figures now taking shape before my eyes. They might have been men, might have been human, but no feature was discernible, no touchstone of normalcy. They were too tall to be truly human, more than seven feet tall; at least they were that tall from the trailing hem of their cloaks to the pointed peak. There were no holes for eyes, no fingers protruded beyond their capacious sleeves.
Then the mist withdrew and I was reminded that we were still in a gymnasium, that people still filled the seats, though they remained immobile. The light was unbearably bright on those immobile faces, but around us, and centered on Derek, a shadow formed. It was not the mist—it was some unnatural extinction of light, as though an invisible force field had formed around us, bending light away, allowing only the faintest illumination.
One of the wraiths raised his arms and, with a shattering noise of ripping and tearing, the wooden floorboards twisted loose from the nails that held them. They flowed in streams from the edges of the gym floor, revealing glue-stained concrete beneath. They flowed, noisy, clattering, and swirled around Derek’s feet.
I had no choice but to step away or be swept off my feet. I felt a jolt of guilt. I was abandoning Derek, a bad person, an angry, malicious person, but still for all that, just a dumb teenager.
He stood rooted in the spot, twisting this way and that but unable to flee.
The wood piled around him, and some of the boards rose to a vertical, gathered together to form a stake, maybe eight feet high. And now Derek was rising as boards forced themselves beneath his feet, forming a rude platform.
The second wraith made a graceful gesture of his arm, and cords that had held suspended banners released the banners to flutter away while snaking down as if they had come alive to wrap themselves around Derek and tie him to the stake. He was bound at the ankles, the knees, the thighs, the waist, the chest. His hands were unbound, but a rope circled his throat and held him to the pole.