Chapter Five - Marching Under Heaven

CHAPTER FIVE

Marching Under Heaven

THE SIEGE IS over, but Joan isn’t finished.
She hasn’t been sent just to lift Orléans.
She’s been sent to end the war — and crown the king.

The army that once mocked her now follows her.
Not out of superstition. Out of conviction.
Men who’ve fought for years without hope suddenly walk taller.
They cross themselves when she passes.
They whisper prayers in her name.
They start believing again — in God, in France, in themselves.

Joan refuses to kill.
She carries a sword but rarely draws it.
Her weapon is her banner.
She rides at the front, lifting it high above the crush of steel.
She shouts encouragement. She prays.
She comforts the wounded. She rebukes the profane.

Officers start to listen to her strategies.
She tells them to move faster, strike harder, break the siege mentality.
They do. It works.
The French begin taking town after town along the Loire.
The road to Reims opens — the road to coronation.

She is seventeen, maybe eighteen, a peasant’s daughter with no military training.
Yet she plans campaigns, rallies troops, and makes hardened captains defer to her.

They call her la Pucelle — The Maid.
A name that carries both purity and power.
She wears men’s armor but never loses her sense of mission:
Not conquest, but cleansing.
Not slaughter, but salvation.

This is not a priest’s crusade.
It’s not even the king’s crusade.
It’s hers — and they know it.

Behind her rides a kingdom that had forgotten how to be one.
Ahead of her rises the cathedral where kings are made.

And somewhere in between, the voices still whisper:

Take him to Reims.
Crown him king.
Fulfill your charge.