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Greasy water slimes her mouth. She chokes on it, coughs, spits out the foul stuff and inhales air just as fœtid. She gags, but does not vomit.
A invisible hand brushes against her: not a hand, but a thing, a physical sensation like the wind—a winter wind blended with the crack of thunder and the flash of a lightning strike. An overwhelming sense strikes her, as if someone just outside her field of vision watches her. She rises above the water and sees darkness alone. Alone, as she is alone.
The water slaps against a canal edge. Rough stone scrapes skin from her arm. She pushes away from the burn—
Burn. Fire. She remembers fire, flames licking up the channels of her mind. She freezes, sinks in the water, is dragged by the current. Foul water floods her mouth with the filth of sewers again. She flails, struggling for the surface. Her fingers strike stone; as the current pushes against her, she grabs onto the lip of stone, resisting the shoving water.
With her other hand, she finds the stone again, clings to the edge. The stone is rough near the surface, algae-slick elsewhere. She scrabbles for a toe-hold on the slippery rock, and rests for a moment, winded.
Night. Overhead the stars wink in from cover—
Clouds. Clouds in the night sky cover the stars. As they pass overhead, she sees the gibbous moon rising over Rouen. The wind brushes chill fingers across her wet skin, bringing the stench of the street into her nostrils. She retches, her stomach cramping but bringing up only bile.
She remembers fire. Fire crackling through her hair, sizzling her eyelids, blistering and blackening her skin. The stake, the fire, a priest’s unctuous voice reading words he didn’t believe: all of these are parts of the fire. She sees, in her memory, a soldier binding two sticks together for a cross and holding it so that she can see it.
Her teeth chatter. How did she get from fire to water?
Jehanne d’Arc. Her name is Jehanne. The Church burnt her for a witch, for a heretic. Burnt her for listening to her saints.
Where are they? No voices welcome her. Nothing speaks to her. She clings to the stone, naked, filthy, stinking in a world of silence. Tears scald her eyes; the gritty stone burns her skin.
She has not cried before, not when the crossbow hit her in the thigh, and later, when another bored into her shoulder. She is a general, and generals do not weep. Jehanne digs her fingers into the stone, pushes with her toes, and begins crawling out of the river.
Her toes slip; she digs her nails into the dirt groove between two adjoining stones, holding her weight against the current. A better, higher ledge presents itself. Jehanne shoves her upper body as high as she can, falls onto the flagging with only her legs in the water. Too much of her still in the water. She drags herself forward, scraping her arms, rasping her knees, bruising her toes.
Air alone envelopes her at last. She lays on the stone, shaking in the foul night air, relearning how to breathe. She had last breathed in fire. There had been fire. Yes, she’d placed that. They had burnt her—
But if they burnt her, then she must be dead.
She rolls over, pushes herself up on hands and knees. The stone flagging scratches her knees, tears at her palms. She sits back on her heels. If she isn’t dead—
Something flickers at the corner of her eye. She turns; she flinches. Fire.
A banked fire, her mind supplies, and two horses standing in the shadows near it. A second later, her eyes identify the dark shape behind it as human. A human wrapped in a long cloak, a hood hiding his—her?—face from the moonlight, rises to his feet and approaches her.
Words burn out of her mouth, scald her lips. “Who am I? What am I? Why has God abandoned me?”
A male voice, a familiar voice, answers as he throws a cloak around her and fastens it at her throat. “You are Jehanne d’Arc. You are Immortal.” He emphasizes that last word, as if pinning it to her soul. “And God has not abandoned you.” He pushes back his hood. The voice links with the face, and she knows who he is: the ferocious eyes, the hard mouth, the scar that runs through his left eye. “He has sent me to teach you.”
She wraps herself in the wool. It reeks of horse; after all the months spent on campaign, the odor is comforting. “Koronel,” she says. “You’re General Koronel.” It was Koronel who cut the crossbow bolt from her thigh.
“Elek.” He smiles—a smile on his face was never reassuring before, but now, it is. Her desolation doesn’t touch him. He reaches forward to pull the blanket over her hair.
“I can’t—” The world swings around her as if she’s perched on a child’s top. “I can’t hear my saints.”
“You can hear me,” he says. “You don’t need to hear them while I am with you.”
Immortal, he has said. She takes the word into her head, studies it, tries to link it into something that makes sense. The only creatures she knows as immortal… “Are we—are we demons?”
His eyes widen. He throws back his head and laughs. “Demons? Ah, no. You and I are what God meant men to be.”
“Men?”
That makes him laugh once more. “And women.”
“You’ll teach me this? What it means to be—Immortal?”
General Koronel—Elek—smiles again. His eyes gleam as brightly as the flames. “I will teach you whatever you wish to learn, Lark.”