[A noise escapes from between Myr's teeth--a little, dying-animal sort of keen. There's a juddering, clattering sound of beads on antler bone as he shakes his head, as if the image Niles invokes (the recollected feelings of what had happened through their Bond; pain and the desperate terror of suffocation and something else, equally desperate--) could be that easily dismissed.

I suspect, in fact, there was no world where I could have said no.]

You'd blame him for that, [he says, tone tight with the effort of self-control.] You'd excuse your own inaction because, what, trapped and suffering, he did anything to make it less awful?