It's a long, hot summer, and it feels like smoke hangs over the Duin from mountains to sea-mouth. The Ordo Cruciatus begin it, by punitively burning a village, and by that time Ryssa doesn't have to lift a finger or make any suggestion; cash crops are torn from a hundred fields and heaped onto bonfires.
If you massed together all the healing supplies of the world, eight parts in ten would contain herbs grown along the Duin.
The elf flits restlessly, in and out of Ryssa's company, up and downriver. She has a profound unease, and nothing shakes it. She passes the time with little projects, such as piratically seizing a barge full of fine moveable type, headed all the way upriver and so into the mountains to the philosopher-city of the Omphalos, and encouraging the Duin's firebrand farmers to create their own propaganda.
The people of the Duin, who grow the world's medicine, are so exploited that they make do themselves with crude ancestral hand-me-down wisdom; for a cut, chew a leaf of such-and-such and press it into the wound, that kind of thing. They are forbidden to touch their own crops, which go to the landlords, then to the great alchemy guilds of the towns, and thereby turn into pure money, of which the farmers see none.
Knowing she is gnawing at one of the knots of the Fürstens' great web of plans, the elf digs deep into Ríastrad field medicine and designs pamphlets usable by the barely-literate, explaining how the crops they grow can be boiled, pulped, refined to ingredients, combined with other substances, and turned into healing. Let Ryssa do what she's happy doing, and jam a sword through strategically picked bullies; if freelance political destabilisation is what the elf is turning her hand to, she will do as she was trained, stand back, and subvert.
They continue to call her by many unearned, reverential names.
"I think your companions in the Ríastrad have arrived," Ryssa says, next time the elf turns her steps and lets herself fall back toward the throbbing magnet that the paladin has become to her. "The coastal towns are all full of word of an elf, always an elf who just left ahead of us, a man who likewise claims to be on the side of the farmers. I brought you some of his work."
The elf flips through the other's woodblock pamphlets, sighs.
"You see what he is doing?" she says. "Fiery rhetoric, aligned enough with ours that he will be pulled into the heart of things; but see how the emphasis differs. See how he uses the language of war, not simply struggle. He will work into the heart of things and then peel everything apart along factional lines, appeal to those who imagine simple bloodshed can accomplish change."
"We simple minds," the paladin says, grinning, as though it's a taunt directed at her. It isn't; Ryssa's calculus is very different to those who don't have a god tending their continuation, but she remembers that those following with her are not similarly indestructible.
"You cannot win a fight in which your one, sufficient, army splits into six insufficient ones that won't march with each other," the elf says wearily. "This is the Ríastrad's method. And it works."
"We have you," Ryssa says, and the elf scrubs hands over her face.
"They know you have me," she says impatiently. "That is why they are doing this. Pamphlets? You think that's an accident, when I've been doing the same? They are counting on you having me, to design you a Ríastrad war; because they know such a war inside and out, and how it works, and how it fails."
"Ah," the paladin says, still smiling, "but you have me."
"Oh good, that makes such a difference to the fundamentals." The elf folds her arms on the table, and puts her head on them. It's a mistake; weeks of insufficient sleep make her head swim, her eyes dragged closed.
"You know what I'm good for," Ryssa says lightly.
Yes. The unspeakable symbolic power of a recyclable martyr, an unkillable folk hero, who makes their enemies impotent liars every time they say they've executed her. Ryssa calls, by her existence, to push; to overextend and turn the resulting loss into not just invaluable exact knowledge of the limits but a perverse triumph.
They have an unspoken division of labour, wherein the elf plans like a general and Ryssa executes on it like a warlord. And yet this weapon lies underused, and they both know it.
The elf does not look at her.
There is no reasonable way to explain that, when she heard that her fellow Ríastrad had exploded a temple with Ryssa inside, her immediate, irrational reaction was I killed her. There is no way to explain that she went to watch — they wouldn't let her help — as they dug the paladin out of the ruin. There's no way to say: when she heard the searchers' shouts, she lost all control of her seeming, forgot entirely to be Spider the good-hearted thief, was solely an instrument for the purpose of being at the paladin's side, and then — then all there had been was a body broken beyond hope.
She doesn't even dare contemplate the knot of feelings about it. She is Ríastrad; she is a thing. There is no person behind her ever-changing impersonation of a face.
There is no remorse, no scruple against killing.
It is very hard to reconcile that with her throat-burning aversion to ever seeing the paladin dead again, ever even hearing of it.
"Elf," Ryssa says softly, watching her face.
"Paladin," she says, and takes ink and paper and savagely redraws all their plans to put the paladin in death's way, swallowing back bile with every pen stroke.
