There are things no one can make a man forget.
Thiel never told him that he failed. He did not want to find out what would happen if he told Leck that he could remember; it would surely be worse, and he could remember too much already. The only merciful thing would be his death, and he knew intimately that Leck was not a man of mercy.
"Was there no one there who cared?"
She had sounded so much like Ashen.
He remembered tears and careful stitches, his lightest touch. Cannot leave scars on the Queen.
He remembered terror, and enjoying himself through it; vomiting after. He remembered the screams of pain. He remembered liking them, because he was doing his job properly.
He remembered holding her, shaking with fear and rage, as she fought off the fog that he would have welcomed. He remembered the brief comfort of her arms, and the punishment when Leck had found out. Cutting into her himself, telling her it had all been a game of Leck's. He remembered her pleas for him to stop. He remembered not stopping.
He remembered a burning body, Leck watching with fascination as the flames ate away at her.
There can be no atonement. He isn't foolish enough to think that. But there can be silence, and forgetting, in the ice of the river. Ice to pair her fire.
Leck had never made him forget that he loved her.