The crowd lulled as the stag unfurled a parchment in his hands. "Hear ye, Hear ye!" he boomed in an impressively loud voice, a voice that carried to every corner of Market Square. "Be it known by Royal Decree that Keritanima-Chan Eram, Crown Princess of Wikuna, has been pronounced guilty of insolence to the throne, plotting against the King, insubordination, and dereliction of her Royal duties! By the command of King Damon Eram, King of Wikuna, Keritanima-Chan Eram is hereby sentenced to take the lash one hundred times!"
That made the crowd gasp and begin to whisper. Usually even the most horrific crime warranted fifty lashes. Most sentenced to more tended to die during the flogging.
"Does the guilty party wish to make a statement?" the cryer boomed. This was where Damon Eram would give her the opportunity to beg, beg and humiate herself, in the very stark, real face of her punishment. It was actually a clever idea, to deepen her humiliation by letting her face the fact that she had been weak and begged. But she intended to make him eat that decision.
"I do," she said calmly. "If my father is ruthless enough to sentence me to this, just imagine what he'd do to you!" she shouted to the crowd. "I'm here because I did nothing more than embarass my father. Thank the gods I didn't do anything illegal!" She gave the cryer a slight smile. "I'm done. We can get on with this now. My lunch is getting cold."
The cryer gave her a curious look, then he frowned ever-so-slightly. "Then let the will of King Damon Eram be carried out!" he boomed. He turned to the witness, who then nodded to the prison guard who would be the administer of the punishment. The alligator shook out a very long whip, then cracked it to his side a few times to both get out the kinks and prepare the crowd.
Keritanima studied that whip intensely for a long moment, her exceptional mind analyzing its length, its thickness, and the way it moved. Then she closed her eyes and bowed her head slightly, reaching deep within and making a strong connection to the Weave. Once she felt she was ready, she built up a considerable reserve of power, then opened her eyes and began. She started with a weave that placed an image before her eyes, an image only she could see, of her own back. It was a view some twenty feet away, letting her see all four of them on the platform. She absolutely had to be able to see the whip to make this believable. Then she assembled the energies she would need to weave Illusions, and stood ready for the first lash. The appointed punisher reared back with his whip, sized up Keritanima, then snapped it at her.
Crack!
To everyone watching, the whip left an angry red line across Keritanima's back, stripping her fur out and sending it scattering to the platform. The angry line was raw and bloody, but Keritanima did not so much as flinch as it cut across her. In reality, the bloody line was an Illusion, hastily woven by her the instant the whip struck, while a razor-thin weave of Air created a skin-deep slice across her back. It was barely enough to cut the skin, but it bled liberally, causing that blood to issue forth from the whipline. That blood would get into her fur and create a physical assurance that the whip was hurting her. She had to be able to see the whip to create the proper image and cut, and by studying how the punisher moved as he prepared to strike, she knew how deep or severe to make the complementary Illusory wound. The fur laying on the platform was a powerful reinforcement of the Illusion she created, a physical sign that the whip had certainly hit her. It made the magically created "wound" that much more believable.
What she was doing was tricky. A Sorcerer usually couldn't weave weaves on herself, but Keritanima was weaving on herself in an indirect manner. She created her weave to manifest in a physical way, and that physical effect was what was causing her wound. She had to be very careful not to let the physical manifestation go too deep, or the flows powering it would merge with the magic inside her, and make all her weavings fizzle. The Illusion would drop, and it would probably also disrupt the Ward, leaving her open and vulnerable to the remainder of the lashes.
The second lash hit her just above the first, making more fur fly and forcing her to conjure up another Illusion and slice. This was why it was going to be such a challenge to her, to create an Illusion, then alter the existing Illusion ninety-nine more times while at the same time weaving a cutting spell of Air to coincide with each Illusion, and do it so fast that both were complete before the lash dropped from her back Then she would have to hold the Illusion for the long walk back to the Palace. Again, she did not flinch at the lash, and it seemed that the onlookers were beginning to notice that.
Resolutely, her face nearly meditatively serene, Keritanima stood there and remained completely motionless as the punisher methodically applied the lash. To the onlookers, her back became a bloody zigzag of long wounds, and her fur laid around her feet in thick clumps. But the immense drain on her was beginning to make her sag slightly, a drain that was only amplified by her overextension the day before, and she began to react to the strike of the whip. That was only logical for anyone watching, as the compounded pain from the lashings took their toll on her body. The platform became peppered with bloody clumps of fur, and it began to stick to the whip, forcing the punisher to pause to clean it off between lashes.
After what seemed an eternity of counting, Keritanima counted the hundreth lash. It struck her squarely in the buttocks, right over the base of her tail, and he had aimed there on purpose. She was forced to conjure the appropriate Illusion and cut herself right across the backside. The indignation of that roused her from her bone-weariness, an exhaustion that had caused her to get lost in the seeming endless repetition of altering her Illusion and slashing herself with a razor-edge of Air to bring out real blood from the inhibited whipstrike. After that hundreth lash, her entire back burned and throbbed. One hundred cuts created a patchwork over her back, and almost all the fur had been stripped off by the whip. It made moving her arms or tail a painful procedure, and she could feel the blood oozing through the fur on the backs of her legs and down her tail. She gave the punishing Wikuni an evil stare, then crossed her arms and looked at the witness expectantly.
"Well? Make your declaration so I can go home," she told him impatiently. The pain of the cuts she'd put in her own back was merging with her exhaustion to draw her face, and make her pant heavily when not actively speaking. Her tongue lolled out from the side of her maw for a moment, but she recovered herself and put on the appearance of a Princess, a supposedly super-Wikuni figure impervious to such things as mortal pain.
He gaped at her. After one hundred lashes, she should have been laying unconscious on the platform! But there she stood, obviously in pain but trying to look only mildly discomfited by the flogging. It made her seem super-Wikuni, larger than life, and it made him forget his duty for a moment and stare at her in shock. She could see what he was thinking in his eyes. That she was obviously hurt, but she wasn't about to give her father the satisfaction of seeing her faint, grovel, beg, or in any way knuckle under to his punishment. Her standing there after one hundred lashes was a defiant display, a testament to the intense, passionate hatred she had for her father, a hatred so intense that she would push herself past her physical limits just to spite him.
"I declare the punishment to be rendered," he called in a startled voice.
That was when she noticed the silence. She turned partially and looked out over the crowd, looking at their faces. Fur, leather, scale, and feather, as the old saying went about Wikuni crowds. Those faces stared at her in surprise, in awe, and then someone in the back shouted her name. "Keritanima!" he called. "Keritanima!"