PrePub - Ascendance of a Bookworm

Switching sides and pleading for mercy... I'm torn about this. On one hand it is the best chance she has for getting out of this more or less intact, but then again, Alstede probably only knows the official version of the civil war purge and thus likely believes Trauerqual to be utterly merciless, never having learned that he tried to avoid it, but couldn't stand up to his allies. On top of that, even if she was only following orders, she still defied direct orders of the royal family and conspired with foreign invaders and traitors to the crown, for which I strongly suspect the punishment to be death, or rather more likely the kind of erasure that Ferdinand enacted on the Hasse traitors.

This fear of being killed either way, might well make her fight to the bitter end. I hope that won't happen, but it would make absolute sense.

Then again, if she wanted to get gains on the pro-royals side, locking the teleporter gate and trapping the Lanzenave king in the Royal Academy and freeing Letizia would be pretty big pro-royal family deeds and might just be enough to earn some mercy. Even so I'm thinking more along the lines of life-long imprisonment in an ivory tower or some similar structure. But since the alternatives are deathes of varying levels of gruesomeness, that's probably still the preferable choice for her.