The Orc Road runs the continent from south to north, and Stormand squats roughly midway along it, one of the two great cities of the Spine of the World. The Orc Road largely eschews the mountain chain, skirting to the east; but the primal horrors of the Great Forest drive the merchant route into the foothills, and so to Stormand. In the magma-powered marvel of the Spine, water, boiling heat, and therefore steam are as free as the air; a rapid froth of industries of novel artificiers enjoy the motive power of a municipal grid of pneumatic pressure.
And everyone enjoys the baths.
"Lady proprietor," Ryssa says politely. The establishment is not the largest, but extensive enough; basement full of baths, dining at street level, rooms for travellers above. For the use of the guests, a top floor of intimate booths, incense and tea; small, dim windows of alchemical glass, treated to retain the building's hypocaustic heat, give thickly rippled glimpses over snow-crusted city rooftops. Across the table, Hibiscus-Blooms-Artfully-Arranged, the owner, pours from a brightly enamelled pot into two small cups.
"Auspicious guest," she smiles back at the paladin, and gently slides one cup across to her.
Hibiscus-Blooms-Artfully-Arranged is not a real elven name, though it is a richly allusive alias used by a number of literary characters and mythological figures. She is very probably a spy, for somebody; but probably not for the Ríastrad, and so things will have to do.
"How are you and your wife enjoying the hospitality of my humble house?" Hibiscus says, and the paladin casts a sceptical look around, at the room and its furnishings.
"False modesty," she says wryly. "As you know, it is entirely welcoming and extremely comfortable, and this is good tea."
The corner of Hibiscus' smile quirks. "It never hurts to hear that one has satisfied a handsome woman," she says.
"Elves, I swear," Ryssa snorts tolerantly, rolling her eyes and picking up her tea, which Hibiscus salutes with her own.
"I'm honoured that my artless flirtations should be included in the illustrious company of those that wooed you!"
"Plenty who know her wouldn't be so pleased," the paladin says, but her own smile touches her face, soft and secret.
"Speaking of your lady wife—"
There's a commotion at the stairway. Hibiscus is seated to have a view to it; Ryssa is not. Nonetheless, she immediately sighs. "She has such timing," she says dryly, watching Hibiscus' climbing brows.
The elf — skin trickling with water and softy steaming, bath-fresh, hair curling wetly around her face, and clad only a towel slung insouciantly around her hips — stalks across the room accompanied by the gasps, murmurs and occasional brave whistle of the other guests.
"Lady innkeep," she says as she arives, cocking her damply towelled hip to rest against Ryssa's shoulder. "I have been rudely accosted in your baths, by a low and wizardly kind of man. He smelled of spirits, and seemed to mistake me for an some entertainment provided for him by one of your city's brothels. He said I surely couldn't be the youngest-looking they had, but he supposed a go on an elf might make up for it—"
"Unthinkable," Hibiscus says. "Please. The house will take all steps to soothe your slight; if the man is a guest—"
"Oh, he drunkenly stumbled into the bath," the elf says. "...Until any bubbles of breath from him stopped, I'm afraid."
Hibiscus seems to stop breathing for a moment. "You can't just admit to killing a wizard out loud," she says, hushed and wide-eyed and almost, in tone, gleeful. "In public. In the middle of my tea room," but she doesn't look any less delighted the more of the list she breathes.
"I don't believe I did," the elf sniffs, and bends to brush her face along Ryssa's cheek, where the paladin has turned her face up to glare at her. "A wizard from the White Fastness," she adds, barely a breath, directly against her; and nips the rim of her ear with keen white teeth.
"No doubt Hibiscus-Blooms-Artfully-Arranged must investigate such a terrible accident on her premises," Ryssa says, suddenly very intent. "Perhaps, lady proprietor, I can offer assistance? Tragic death being something that service to my god has given me some occasional sad acquaintance with."
The elf makes as if to say something.
"Dress," Ryssa says — not looking at her — in an extremely firm way, and magnificently ignores anything she mutters in response.
Two uniformed porters have extracted the floating wizard from the heated pool by the time Hibiscus and the paladin arrive — gingerly; you never know, with wizards, and even drowned and without his clothes he seems very like one. Tattooed strangely and extensively, fitful sparks of light flickering along lines of ink under his skin. Nothing about his face stirs Ryssa's memory; but she has no way to know whether it would have, once.
"Truly dead, then," Hibiscus murmurs. "So unfortunate when foreigners bathe drunk!"
"No sign of violence on the body," the paladin says dryly. The Ríastrad, of course, train their agents well.
Hibiscus shrugs elaborately. "Paladin," she says, "foreigners on mysterious business drown while drunk in this city with such regularity that Stormand's city militia has a dedicated office specifically for not investigating their deaths further."
"This one may bring uncharacteristic trouble."
"Pfffff, a wizard." The elven hotelier smiles. "They think they run the world, but look, he's a corpse like any other, and no more pull beyond the grave than a mud-smeared serf."
"Not himself, but his colleagues." Ryssa shakes her head. "Aye, and usually wizards are more talk than stick when one of their own bleeds, but — not all. Not, I think, this time."
Hibiscus considers the corpse, with a level of equinamity borne of experience with them. "So you know him? And your wife has stumbled into making a powerful enemy?"
"Oh, no," Ryssa says. "That's not quite how it is."
"Are you speaking of me, behind my back?" the elf says lightly, from the doorway, and Ryssa narrows her eyes.
"Did I not tell you to dress?" she says, and the elf beams.
"This is a dress," she says, obviously pleased with herself.
"Yes, I remember it," Ryssa says.
The elf looks even more pleased, and stretches herself along the upright of the doorframe like a cat. Ryssa takes a step toward her, then seems to catch herself, draw a slow, controlled breath, and simply pins her with a hot, dark stare.
Both look abruptly at Hibiscus when she makes a noise in her throat, finding her gnawing on her knuckle and watching them, bright-eyed and with a flush in her cheeks.
"Don't covet my wife," the elf says warningly.
"Do I?" The hotelier licks her lips. "Does the ocean covet the moon, that the tide bellies up toward it? If there are two moons, and I heave beneath them, is it my doing?"
"Elves," Ryssa says under her breath, but her companion looks pleased.
"Do you recall that I wore this dress for you?" she says, looking through her eyelashes at Ryssa. "And you said you'd kill me where I stood, if anyone else touched me?"
"I remember," Ryssa says evenly, still watching her, and the elf arches her back, make a breathy little noise, and pushes off the doorframe.
"But you never took it off," she says, and sashays out into the corridor.
Ryssa takes a deep breath, and finally takes her eyes off the door to glance across at Hibiscus. "Lady proprietor," she says. "As much as I believe she is teasing you to secure your attention, and so your assistance with the anger of this man's peers, let me be honest: she'd sooner skin you than share."
Hibiscus snorts. "I know," she says, "That much is obvious. But a poet may still gaze at the moon."
Ryssa drops her a slight bow. "Well, then, your pardon," she says. "I think my lady needs to be kept from further mischief; I leave you to contemplate the changing phases of the heavens," and slips out of the room.
Her eyes, in the corridor, fall on the flutter of the elf's scandalous dress, vanishing around the far corner, which cannot be the result of anything but the elf waiting for her in order to theatrically disappear. Ryssa sighs and follows, falling despite herself into a more predatory gait as she rounds corner after corner, to see only the receding flutter of a floating hem.
"Hello," the elf says finally, grinning, in a steam-clouded room with no exits save the door the paladin is standing in.
"Are you planning to have the White Fastness down on our heads?" Ryssa demands, stalking across the floor as if she might at any second uncoil in a feline pounce.
"No," the elf says. "I simply saw him, and knew him, and they tried to take you from me."
"You didn't even have me yet," Ryssa murmurs, and presses the elf against the wall. "And was the wizard really waiting for a woman whose time he'd paid for?"
"He might have been." The elf nuzzles the paladin's throat.
"Oh, he might? And what might have happened to her, if such a thing were true?"
"She might have been told by someone that he'd been thrown out for vomiting in the baths and threatening to fight someone."
"But you didn't plan it at all," Ryssa says into her ear.
"Are you cross?" the elf tips her head back against the tiles and flutters her lashes, grinning wider. "Oh, lady paladin, whatever would you do if you were cross with me?"
"Take you out of that terrible dress." The paladin punctuates this by running a hand the short distance from its hem to the elf's hip, up the skin of her thigh beneath it. "Shred it, truss you in its tatters like a little game-bird ready for roasting, and make good on an ancient threat to put you across my lap."
"I feel this is unfair." The elf mouths along Ryssa's collarbone. "This dress has done nothing to earn your ire—"
Ryssa twines hair around her finger and draws it taut, applying just enough force to be pointed. "I have a long memory for the crimes of this dress," she murmurs against the elf's temple, and leaves a soft kiss of her own; which ambushes a delighted giggle and wriggle out of the elf.
"Ryssa," she says, breathless and smiling, and winds her arms around the paladin's neck. "I feel so much, there is so much in my heart; is this almost how it is, for women who aren't hollow?" and laughs again in birdlike joy as the paladin fumbles to frame her face between sword-callused hands.
"I don't care how it is for any other than you," the paladin says, eyes shining wet, and the elf draws her down for slow kisses and soothing murmurs, coaxes her into bubbling water, and leans into her encircling arms like the smuggest mermaid.
"Elf," Ryssa says eventually, soft, drawing an aimless fingertip pattern on her shoulder.
"Hmm?"
The paladin tucks herself closer, and speaks low into the elf's ear. "If you're going to kill any more wizards, do it elsewhere," she suggests, and returns the elf's earlier ear-nip in a way that makes her writhe.
