Yvaine was on her knees on the concrete.

Ottavia stood over her with a thin wooden rod in her hand.

And in a chair across from them, calmly, smoking, sat Percival.

I did not need to see the rod fall again.

The sound of it, and the shape of the three of them, told me everything.

I will not set down here what I watched through that gap, because Yvaine lived it and does not need it described, and because the thing that mattered was not the cruelty itself but what the two of them said while they were doing it.