"...you did promise me swimming lessons," Ashiko remembered, because she was just drunk enough to find it an appealing idea. "And all the geese are probably asleep by now." At night, the water would be chilly enough to count as a cold bath, wouldn't it? So really, they would be hitting two birds with one stone, and it would leave them coherent enough for proper, final farewells. She warmed to the idea more and more as she turned it over in her mind.

And she had not been trained for torture, because she was a Kuzuryu. She had been taught dozens of ways to kill herself in order to protect her master before the age of ten. It had never been an issue she had overly considered, to tell the truth.