The Decisive Battle
Asty's calculation was remarkably simple.
Recovering the Order's lands, scattered across every corner of the kingdom, was impossible. The Order as it stood simply lacked the capacity.
According to surveys the old Order had conducted itself, the land it once held exceeded twenty percent of all farmland in France. And that figure was no exaggeration. Factor in unregistered silver mines and undeveloped wilderness, and the true share might barely scrape ten percent — but within the reach of the Order's administrative network, twenty percent was a conservative estimate, if anything.
For reference, the royal family's own holdings had never once, in centuries, surpassed ten percent of the total.
The crown had only begun to raise its voice against the Order after the Holy Capital of Paris fell and the Order's administrative web collapsed. Until the Order declined and the reigning king of the day, Claude II, seized control of state affairs, the Order's high clergy had been the kingdom's true rulers.
...If I try to reclaim all of that, we'll end up fighting another civil war for real.
So Asty abandoned that glittering legacy without a shred of regret. Even if she swallowed it whole, she could never digest it. The lords who had occupied those lands for decades would never quietly surrender their titles — and even if a miracle delivered a peaceful recovery, she had no one to manage the estates. Without people, how was she supposed to hold the land and collect taxes from the tenant farmers?
The newborn Vesta Order, even counting the ailing Arisa, numbered five souls. A minor power. Battlefield glory and the banner of faith had temporarily handed them the initiative, but in pure scale they fell short of a rural barony.
So she let it go. What the Order needed now was quality personnel and time to build a precise system — not vast tracts of land she could never properly use.
If she intended to keep operating on French soil, holding onto the land titles as a bargaining chip might not have been a bad play. But Asty's plan was to leave France entirely and found a theocratic state in the Benelux region. There was no reason to keep clutching documents for another country's land she could never fully reclaim.
"The Order hereby formally renounces all claim to every parcel of land occupied or sold over the past forty years."
That was the result of her calculation — a bombshell of a statement. A miracle of alchemy available only at this peak moment, when her renown from the battlefield stood at its absolute height: the conversion of bad debt into an army.
The lords who had trembled in fear that the newborn Vesta Order's transcendent military might would seize the land deeds they had swallowed forty years ago were so moved by Her Holiness's boundless mercy that they joined the holy war to strike down the enemies of the faith.
And so Claude V, already confined to solitary isolation, met an end twice as wretched as before.
Central France. The royal allotment within the Duke of Orléans's direct domain.
The New Orleans Palace — a building that looked for all the world like a fortress, with marble slabs slapped over every surface. The temporary seat of government for the Kingdom of France, used as the royal residence ever since the devastation of Paris, was blazing like a well-dried stack of firewood.
Because she had set it on fire.
Claude V, sealed away in solitary confinement for his breathtaking incompetence, had — true to form — been unable to sit still and made one last desperate thrash. Exploiting the fact that every servant in the palace where he was held already knew him, he had secretly summoned a handful of trusted knights and, seizing a moment when the Duke of Orléans's army was away, attempted a jailbreak.
And astonishingly, he succeeded. No one had registered him as a genuine threat.
His Great Majesty Claude V possessed neither political skill, nor popularity, nor even personal martial prowess — a combination so thorough that even the rigorously trained guards of the ducal domain had grown careless. The man was so incompetent that the idea he might actively do something simply never occurred to anyone.
If that were true, it was a talent of genuinely impressive proportions. At a certain level, even patheticness deserved to be classified as a skill.
At any rate, a handful of knights slipped into the palace through that lax security and extracted him. Riding that momentum, they briefly seized the entire Orléans ducal domain — or rather, failed to, and managed only to secure the palace itself before settling into a siege.
Of course they did. The sort of men still sucking up to a king even the royalist faction had abandoned were never going to be proper knights. The loyal retainers who answered Claude V's call were, to a man, members of the corruption cartel that had fattened itself on his private treasury — and they demonstrated with perfect clarity what it means for like to flock with like, matching their remarkable king with remarkable incompetence.
In short: they were terrible at everything.
This time, even Rebecca didn't need to step in. The knights of House Orléans took profound offense at the fact that their own stronghold had nearly been ransacked by none other than the king, volunteered for the vanguard without being asked, and trampled the king's loyalists under a lance charge so ferocious it was hard to believe they had once been enemies.
Aghast at his own side's spectacular uselessness, Claude V barricaded himself in the palace with his remaining handful of knights — and an irritated Asty answered with fire, which brought them to the present moment.
"Whew. Must be the spring weather — the breeze feels nice and warm. Would've been lovely if it'd been like this from the start."
"No, isn't that just because Your Holiness set the place on fire?"
For the record, lest anyone misunderstand: setting the royal palace ablaze had been an entirely rational tactical decision. She was no arsonist. She hadn't simply started flinging fire the moment she arrived.
At first she had fully intended to take the palace the normal way and capture the king. But the building had been constructed as a fortress, and its layout was fiendishly inconvenient. The disparity in force was overwhelming enough that brute strength would have broken through soon enough — but the troops had marched here in haste and were already exhausted. The moment she ordered a full assault, casualties were guaranteed.
There was no reason to accept losses of life just to preserve a palace of no particular value. The blood already spilled at Clermont-Ferrand Fortress was more than enough for the purpose of changing the occupant of the throne.
"Burns nicely, doesn't it."
Of course, the real reason she had chosen arson was to destroy the palace's function. And that, in truth, was the heart of the matter.
If Count Montpellier ever tried to use this place as a royal residence, things would get complicated in all sorts of ways. The New Orleans Palace was an eyesore — a small fortress with marble slabs slapped on for show — but as a temporary seat of government, its location was superb. It might plant dangerous ideas in the power-drunk Count Montpellier: relocating the capital to Orléans, centralization, and other such unwelcome inspirations.
The heart of the new Kingdom of France needed to stay buried at the southern tip of the country. To keep Count Montpellier from falling into wrongheaded thoughts and making wrongheaded choices, the options themselves had to be incinerated.
"Wouldn't it have been better to simply surround the palace and starve them out? There are important documents and old seals in there, and so much else..."
Matilda, the former royal finance officer, who knew nothing of any of this, wore a miserable face and insisted they should put out the fire even now. Her pleas only stoked Asty's appetite for destruction further. Which was to say: the place still functioned as a royal palace. Count Montpellier holding a coronation here was absolutely unacceptable. The campfire would continue until the thatched hut was ash and the eyesore of a building became an eyesore, pure and simple.
Wouldn't burning every administrative document and financial ledger stored in the palace plunge the kingdom into chaos?
Not her country. Not her problem.
Besides, the Kingdom of France had kept running just fine even during Claude V's reign of spectacular inaction. This was a feudal state, where economic activity and tax collection operated independently in each domain. A central strike might, at worst, fray national cohesion, spur armed clashes between lords, and raise the odds of a full-scale civil war.
And the civil war had already started. It was about to end.
Count Montpellier, who had done precious little to earn it, would struggle to secure the authority for any real attempt at centralization. If everyone simply managed their own domains diligently, the chances of another major war stayed low. Torching the New Orleans Palace along with everything inside it would do no great harm.
As for the historical value of the artworks and records currently burning within — she would think of them as a sacrifice for a brighter future. They could always make new things and preserve those. A few hundred years from now, it all became cultural heritage just the same.
"Matilda, would you like to go pay your old employer a visit?"
"Pardon?"
Though the gold and jewels were rather tempting.
Conveniently, a former finance officer was standing right next to her. Might as well go in — double-check the kill, while they were at it.
Time to take the king's head.