. . .

“Mercy,” Vaenwode pleads.

He goes down on one knee. He goes down on two. He fights an appalling urge to show them his naked stomach and lowers his head to them instead.

Eldri touches his shoulder.

“Don’t embarrass us,” he says. “It is you or someone else; there can be no mercy.”

In that moment it is complete: Vaenwode’s doom is sealed, it closes about him like a circle. He rises. “Then I will beg no more,” he says, because that can only be the end of it; he is wild with fear but it is no longer a fear that can be struggled with, but only a fear to be accepted and pinned wriggling within his heart.

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