Belle Morte Bites (Belle Morte 4.3)

Agnes: Part One

TW: sexual assault

France, 1429

Ysanne Moreau tipped back her head and breathed in the smell of wildflowers. It wasn't the same smell that used to greet her whenever she left her family home back in Carcassonne, and she was strangely glad about that. It reminded her that she had shaken off her old life and forged a new one.

If only it hadn't taken Richart's death to get her here.

Not that she even knew where here was anymore.

Months had passed since her husband's life had been lost to war, and the absence of him was still a hollow ache in her chest, but she thought he would have been proud of her for choosing this path.

At twenty-three, still so young and beautiful, Ysanne had attracted a lot of attention from would-be suitors, almost before Richart was cold in the ground, and to the dismay of her parents, she had refused them all. As a widow, Ysanne enjoyed certain rights that she had not had as a wife, and she had no intention of giving up that freedom to become a wife again.

So she had left behind the home that Richart had built for her in Gascony, refused to return to Carcassonne, and had instead scandalised everyone by travelling France alone.

Even now, months later, Ysanne couldn't help laughing as she recalled the shocked expression on the faces of her parents, and her friends, most of whom had children by now.

"But isn't this the life you want?" one of them had hesitantly asked, smoothing her hands over the swell of her belly where her second child slept.

"I don't think it is, at least not at the moment," Ysanne had replied.

She'd always assumed she would be a mother because that's what women did. They got married, they had babies, whether they liked it or not, and Ysanne wasn't necessarily averse to that. During the first weeks of her marriage to Richart, she'd been terrified of becoming pregnant. She'd lost so many siblings in infancy, and seen her mother reduced to little more than a broodmare by a husband desperate for a son, and the thought of suffering through that herself made Ysanne feel sick.

But Richart had always talked so enthusiastically about the children they would have, and gradually, Ysanne's fears had faded and she'd started to wonder if maybe she could be a mother after all.

Then Richart died.

It wasn't just his death that had led Ysanne to realise there was more to this world than she had always thought.

It was Joan.

Ysanne had been raised to understand that her purpose in life was to take care of her husband and his home and to provide and raise as many male heirs as possible. Her desire to see more of the country she lived in didn't matter. Her yearning to learn to read didn't matter. None of those were necessary for someone whose place was in the home.

But Joan of Arc had changed everything.

France had been caught up in war for longer than Ysanne had been alive – she'd grown used to hearing horror-stories of sieges and slaughters – and then humiliating French losses had been suddenly reversed, thanks to a mere peasant girl.

Joan's role in life should have been the same as Ysanne's, but she trampled those expectations beneath the hooves of her horse as she rode into battle, and that had lit a fire in Ysanne's chest.

She had made Ysanne understand that she didn't have to follow the path that had been paved for her.

Ysanne paused to pick some berries growing from a nearby bush. She popped them into her mouth, and the tart flavour exploded across her tongue, making her smile. This wasn't the life she had imagined for herself, but she was freer now than she'd ever been.