The Maid

Behind the girl rides her army of ten thousand warriors, all of them united by the same strange and feverish joy as they crash across the winter fields, through the white land and toward the shadowed stillness of the pines. She is seventeen, a peasant, unschooled, simple as a thumb. But on this morning, she is simply God’s arrow, shot across the winterland, brilliant and savage and divine. Unstoppable. It is the fifteenth century, and the tumultuous…