An Excerpt from The Merlin of the Oak Wood:

"Jehannette, Jehannette. Daughter-God."

Her tiny, head-sized window rattled in its thick wooden frame as it took the first heavy drops of rain. The steep slope of the roof over her head seemed to funnel the blast straight at her.

"Jehannette. Rise. Fight."

She gasped with the effort of keeping prone.

And then, suddenly, it seemed she fell asleep, though how sleep could come through such tension and noisy confusion bewildered her. Besides, she'd never dreamed so vividly.

Still, as in dreams, she found herself unable to move. The force that had tried to lift her from the crackling straw of her mattress before, now pressed her into it. She could feel the network of ropes beneath the sack of straw etching itself into her back. The weight on her chest forbade her any breath but shallow little gasps. Something thicker than air infested her lungs, crawled through the shallow gulps of air. In a moment, she learned what it was as each breath coughed out a tiny white butterfly.

A dozen white butterflies, more, began to test their wings in the air about her head. She had no trouble seeing them in the dark, for their delicate white membranes glowed with their own deep sources of blue-white light. Flying together, they looked, in fact, exactly like the caul.

The mist of insects soon rose off her, taking, as it seemed, her breath and soul with them. They fluttered at the window and with their many eyes she was able to peer down into the back alley between her house and the neighbor's barn.

That was when she saw them. The fairies' cavalcade, the Good Neighbors, riding at a steady pace through the narrow pinch of road--coming toward her from the graveyard.

Catherine was the first she recognized. It was the honey-colored hair she knew and nothing else, for the curls grew out of the white bone of a death's head, grinning wildly like lips blown back against the wind. A withered chain of daisies crowned the hair still and her sister's shroud whipped around her like the very source of the storm.

But there were others in the hoard, many others, many she knew nothing of, some she remembered more vaguely of Domrémy's departed. Each rode swiftly--none touched the ground, she saw--mounted on some strange beast or other. Some rode pigs, some wolves. Catherine clung to a mane that was the tow of a spindle she'd always known how to harness so well in life. Some needed no more than the long bones of a beast as dead as themselves to reconjure swiftness. One rode a fire shovel, one the twisted, blasted branch of a tree, one old woman a broom. Some had even saddled the backs of children, human children. . . Their sound was the howl of the storm. . .

Then Jehannette saw through butterfly eyes that not all the crowd were dead. She'd missed them at first, the live ones, for their numbers were not great, six or seven, no more, in the press of hundreds. These carried torches to help their mortal eyes. The dead, of course, needed no such aid. The mortals were armed with fennel stalk, thick sheaves of it bundled together. Fennel was the smell of the night, that sweetness mixed with the pitch of the torches, the mustiness of the grave, and the sharp bite of the rain.

Jehannette couldn't recognize any of the mortals. Each was masked as some beast: this one a cow, this one wore the bushy tail of a fox. Here waved a goose's feather, here walked a sow, and they danced and squealed and grunted and gyrated like the creature they portrayed. But she thought she ought to know them. They must be her neighbors, the good folk of Domrémy. And some of nearby Greux had joined them, too, she was convinced, though not many. And who, she still didn't know.

Except the mortal in the lead. She'd missed him at first, but now she returned to that point again and saw him. And recognized at once the black hermit's robes beneath a crown of branching antlers. Père Michel led the cavalcade, torch streaming sparks behind him and, in the other hand, an iron whip.

The tiny window of her room never would have allowed Jehannette such a wide view of all the party, stretching as it did in a jostling, neighing, shrieking, laughing, clomping train from the fern-topped walls of the cemetery to her own front gate. It was this thought that made her realize the butterflies had pressed through the cracks in the window's thick wooden planks on her gasping breath. They swarmed now over the alleyway and showed her Père Michel striding up to her father's door. He pounded on it with the iron of his whip.

"Jehannette!" he cried. "Jehannette, come ride with us." Again he pounded. Her butterfly light rimed his black robes with silver. "Come fight. Our side needs you. Come!"

Jehannette tried to leap from her bed like a martinet after bugs, and yet, she couldn't move a muscle. There was only the flutter of butterfly wings.

She heard her father's growl, just through the plaster wall beyond her icy feet.

"Who's there at this hour on such a night?"

"It's I, Père Michel. The Horned One. I've come for Jehannette to do Night Battle with us, with all the good folk."

"My daughter doesn't fight."

Jehannette could see her father there, a small figure just struggling into his shirt, struggling for a light. He didn't open the door but peered out of the milky parchment in the window, trying to see something against the dark and the storm. She could tell he couldn't see the dead, he couldn't see his own daughter Catherine. He could see the priest only as a dark blur stuck with antlers. So they stood on either side of the door, the blur of black and the blur of white, offsetting one another.

"She was born with the caul," the dark figure said. "She is the one they call La Pucelle."

"Be off with you, madman."

"Let her decide for herself, Jacquot d'Arc. Jehannette," Père Michel cried against the rain and her father's curses, raising his branching head to where all the little butterflies fluttered on the roof above him.

"Off with you, cursed heathen, or I'll come at you with my pitchfork."

"Your arm and pitchfork would be welcome, too, Jacquot d'Arc, if you'd come."

"I'll see you rot in hell first, horned devil."

"And you the one with the pitchfork. Domrémy hasn't won a single Night Battle these eight or ten years. Our numbers are sorely depleted. We could use you. And your sons."

"You certainly shall not have my daughter. Over my dead body. Over hers, as I live."

Jehannette felt she must in fact be dead, her soul torn in two by the combatting forces that grabbed it by either end.

But then she saw a smile spread across the face Père Michel lifted upward to catch raindrops beneath a fringe of brown deer hide. Her father didn't see, but Père Michel did. He recognized her before she recognized herself, threaded through his antlers like a swarm of butterflies.