The great nobles cautiously approached the queen.
"Your Majesty, there is no need to impose such punishment upon your own body."
"We were all deeply moved by Your Majesty's resolve to demonstrate exemplary justice with your own hand. However, she is a saint who has already offered her body to the Goddess. We worry that if you were to flog her, the gods might look upon it unfavorably."
"……."
Cold stares poured down upon the great nobles.
The queen, the generals, and the soldiers had already formed a flawless triangular formation among themselves. The great nobles were nothing more than outsiders. Queen Henrietta firmly shook her head.
"The judgment of a king is solemn and allows no reversal."
"Y-Your Majesty, at the very least, spare us some face here—"
"I shall carry out the sentence! Bring the whip!"
Queen Henrietta shot to her feet and strode toward the saint.
The spectacle was something to behold. With every step the queen took, a regimental commander, a cavalry commander, a knight commander, the chief court mage, and every manner of high-ranking officer rushed over to seize her feet. They all wailed in unison.
At last, Queen Henrietta reached the saint.
"Jacqueline Longwy, remove your blouse! Surely you won't beg for forgiveness now!"
"…Yes, my queen."
The saint removed her pure-white blouse and turned her back to the queen. Her skin was flawlessly smooth, without a single blemish. Queen Henrietta received the whip from an attendant and raised it high. The people around them screamed as though in protest.
"You mustn't, Your Majesty!"
But their efforts were in vain. The whip cracked down viciously across the saint's back. Saint Longwy staggered. She nearly collapsed face-first onto the ground. Yet with iron will, she endured the pain and did not so much as groan.
'This isn't acting! This is real!'
'They're flogging the saint! Has that she-dog of Bretagne finally lost her mind?!'
The great nobles were horrified.
They were not the only ones in shock. Some of the soldiers had naïvely assumed that Her Majesty would never truly strike the saint hard. But when the crack of the whip echoed thunderously through the entire hall, the soldiers were terrified.
"One!"
The queen lashed the whip mercilessly. There was not even a moment for people to catch their breath. The second strike dug into the saint's back, leaving a long, diagonal welt of blood. The saint's body tilted even further toward the ground.
And then the third strike.
"Aaaargh!"
The saint, who had been clenching back every groan until now, could hold out no longer. Tears streaming down her face, she let out a scream that seemed to tear the air apart. The generals and soldiers all threw themselves prostrate, wailing loudly in solidarity each time she cried out.
Queen Henrietta relentlessly completed all twenty lashes.
"……."
The saint lay crumpled on the ground. By the tenth blow, her posture had completely collapsed and she lay limp. Now she merely twitched and screamed each time the whip fell. The skin on her back had turned a grotesque mottled of dark red and purple, horribly ravaged.
"Carry Deputy Commander Jacqueline Longwy to her quarters and treat her wounds," Queen Henrietta said. Her own face was also drenched in tears.
"Next is my turn."
When it was the queen's turn to receive the flogging, the wailing that erupted was even louder than before. From regimental commanders to the lowliest soldiers, every man and woman of Bretagne's army wept without regard to origin or rank. To them, Henrietta de Bretagne was not merely a sovereign—she was a goddess.
"Hngh…!"
The red-haired queen endured all twenty lashes as she had promised. Remarkably, Henrietta did not scream once throughout the entire punishment. Maintaining a perfectly upright posture, she absorbed every blow. This was possible only because her own skill was comparable to that of a Sword Master.
The queen staggered to her feet.
"Next… the officers' turn."
Over a dozen officers stripped off their blouses through their tears. They were not crying from fear of the flogging. They wept out of sorrow that their beloved queen had been subjected to such an ordeal.
Henrietta personally lashed all eleven officers one by one. Every single officer endured the punishment without flinching. Their resolve was unshakable. Her Majesty had withstood twenty blows without a single scream. Meanwhile, they would receive only five. A mere five. How could they dare so much as groan…
No—the whip didn't even hurt. The whip the queen swung was pitifully weak. Of course it was. How could someone who had just endured a bare-skinned flogging possibly swing her arm with any force? And yet Queen Henrietta still administered the punishment, counting "One… two…"
It didn't hurt. That fact was even more agonizing for the officers.
The queen could have punished her subordinates and then punished herself. Yet she had deliberately placed herself second in line. Why?
The officers understood the queen's intentions perfectly. She had done it on purpose. After enduring twenty lashes of flogging, even someone like Henrietta de Bretagne would be completely drained. In that state, any punishment she administered would be meaningless.
In truth, the only ones who truly suffered were the queen and the saint… the officers received only a token punishment. The queen had deliberately excluded the officers from today's trial, declaring that she could not flog officers who were innocent of any crime.
"Your Majesty… hhrk, Your Majesty…"
As time passed, the strength slowly drained from Henrietta's grip on the whip. The officers felt this with heartbreaking clarity from the decreasing force of each lash on their backs. The tears flowing from the officers' eyes did not diminish—if anything, they only grew more abundant.
In the end, Henrietta collapsed after punishing the final regimental commander. She had fainted.
The queen was carried away on a stretcher to her tent. Even among the attendants, there was not a single person who was not in tears. The entire Bretagne army had become a house of mourning, with wails echoing everywhere.
In one corner of the makeshift courtroom, the other protagonists of this trial—the two hundred-odd Sardinian rebels—were tied up with rope. They were overwhelmed with a mixture of gratitude, guilt, and sorrow: gratitude and remorse for the saint who had been punished on their behalf, and shame for the queen who had neglected her own well-being to protect that saint.
Truly, every human being there was swept up in passionate emotion.
Except for the great nobles of southern Frank.
"……."
The soldiers glared at the great nobles with eyes as cold as ice.
If looks alone could kill, the atmosphere was lethal enough that the great nobles would have been slaughtered wholesale. To the Bretagne army, the great nobles had already been branded as 'the bastards who ravaged the kindest, most noble saint in the world and their beloved queen—they deserve to be chewed up and spat out.'
"The, the atmosphere is rather ominous."
"Let us leave this place at once."
The great nobles fled back to their base camp as though running for their lives. The soldiers' icy stares clung to their shadows all the way to the end.
News of the trial spread instantly to the Sardinian rebel territories.
The saint—the most noble human being under heaven—had sacrificed herself for two hundred lowly commoners who, having risen in revolt, could have been executed without a second thought. This story moved not only the Sardinians but the Frank people as well.
Meanwhile, the eight great nobles of the south saw their reputations plummet to rock bottom.
First, the great nobles had profited through cowardly means in the recent Chrysanthemum War. They had only dipped their toes in at the very tail end of an already nearly concluded war, yet they had seized territory. Their behavior was dripping with a complete absence of chivalry.
Second, the great nobles had turned their backs on their homeland of Frank and declared autonomy and independence. As a result, the slaves on their estates—estates that were their homeland—could not be freed. Their conduct was anything but the noble obligation of noblesse oblige.
Third, they had stood by and watched a queen and a saint endure a flogging, all for the sake of recovering a mere two hundred prisoners. They showed no magnanimity toward the prisoners, nor any respect toward individuals of higher station than themselves. Before even considering their status as nobles, they were simply immature as human beings.
Cowardice that disregarded the laws of war.
Selfishness that betrayed loyalty and tradition to their homeland.
And above all, the inhumanity laid bare during the trial.
For these three reasons, the great nobles of southern Frank completely lost the people's trust. The Sardinians rose up in revolt with even greater ferocity. Even the upper classes and nobles who had been carefully assessing the situation now raised the banner of rebellion.
The great nobles poured every effort into crushing the revolt. Though they had no shame, they requested the Bretagne army to subdue the rebels. The rebels' weapons and supplies had dwindled dramatically, so there was no conceivable way they could defeat the Bretagne army in a direct confrontation.
But then an absurd situation arose.
The rebels began surrendering to the Bretagne army, one after another.
Whenever Saint Longwy rode out onto the battlefield atop a white horse, the rebels immediately changed their stance and raised white flags high. The people of Sardinia might point their spears and swords at the 'vicious Frank dictators,' but they were more than willing to bow before 'the kind and noble saint.'
Of course, these surrenders harbored calculated compromises. With no hope of support from the Sardinian motherland, the rebels had no choice but to seek a new patron. The Bretagne army was a perfect fit.
For one, Bretagne's homeland was far away. They did not have the capacity to directly administer this Piedmont region. There was a high probability that significant autonomy would be guaranteed. Moreover, Bretagne was a military power—they would be safe from the pressure of neighboring states…
From both an emotional affinity and a calculated standpoint, the Kingdom of Bretagne passed muster.
Once the first wave crashed in, it could not be stopped. The rebels surrendered to Bretagne at a rapid pace. There were even cases where towns and villages that the rebels had recaptured on their own came running to surrender of their own volition.
"This, this cannot be! Bretagne came only as our mercenaries! Instead of protecting those they were hired to guard, they've turned their swords against us—where in the world is there such a law?!"
The great nobles protested furiously to the queen.
Queen Henrietta received the letter of protest and penned a simple one-line reply:
"Heaven commands Bretagne to tend to Piedmont—how could we refuse?"
Only then did the great nobles realize that they had not summoned a mercenary, but a wolf. Queen Henrietta intended to swallow the entire Piedmont region whole without batting an eye!
The great nobles urgently requested military reinforcements from the Frank motherland. It was far too reckless to face Bretagne on their own. But the reply they received contained just two words, far shorter than Queen Henrietta's letter:
"Impossible."
Count Bercy was not foolish enough to send reinforcements to great nobles who had refused to participate in the formation of the new government. On the contrary, Count Bercy was delighted and watched the Piedmont rebellion with a very comfortable heart.
They were truly hemmed in on all sides.
But the problems did not end there. If it could get any worse, the Bretagne army, having seized the Piedmont region, pressed on and invaded the Frank motherland. The great nobles' original estates were now in danger.
"This is a violation of the Treaty of Le Havre!"
The great nobles sent envoys to protest vehemently.
In the Puppet War, Bretagne had lost to Frank and pledged that 'the Kingdom of Bretagne and the Frank Empire shall not encroach upon each other's territory for the next fourteen years.' The envoy passionately argued that the queen's seizure of their estates was a clear violation of an international treaty.
But.
"You are no longer subjects of the Frank Empire. There is no treaty left to violate, is there?"
"What… what utter nonsense!"
"I have already consulted with Frank on the matter. I obtained advance consent as to whether this constituted a treaty violation."
With a flick, Queen Henrietta tossed a scroll to the envoy.
The envoy unrolled the scroll with trembling hands. It bore the opinion of Count Bercy of the judiciary, stating that the eight great nobles' estates were fully independent nations with guaranteed autonomy, and that Frank would not interfere in the slightest.
Queen Henrietta smiled sweetly.
"It appears your lords must now choose between surrendering to me or pledging fealty to Frank once more. What a pity. If you surrender to me, I'll treat you well. After all, weren't we once bound in a relationship of employer and employee?"
The envoy wanted to collapse on the spot.