There is some debate — lively, apparently — whether Ryssa should accompany them any further. But the Oracle had twined her name so firmly into their shared futures....
Ryssa sits at a small fire of her own, away from the main camp. Nobody has said she must do such a thing, but...this is not Ryssa's first time travelling in her god's name.
She paid a local spell-worker to mend what they could of the stain to the inn's floors, using coin sewed into the fabric of her stout knapsack years ago. An excess of coin, in truth, but nobody likes that much blood, and a miracle of blood even less. It's not the first time. Probably not, now, the last.
She dwells on the fact of those coins, held in secret, away from her own eyes. That they spoke of an inevitability she'd refused to admit, even as she shovelled dirt on the least of the symbols of what she was and pretended she'd left it all behind.
Slow footsteps crunch over frosty grass toward her; she ignores them, painstakingly working with whetstone, oil and cloth. Sellsword she's been, and so of necessity a serviceable backsword. The bastard sword she'd dedicated to the god's works, as much part of her as the arms that held it, rusts in faraway soil; she feels its absence, now, like toothache.
"Lady knight," the elf girl says quietly, and Ryssa's lip curls into a snarl before she can school her face.
"None of the cowards will approach me themselves?" she demands. "They send you?"
"I have legs and volition of my own. Need I be sent?"
"I swore to cut your throat," Ryssa says, and pointedly angles the blade in her hands to look along its edge for imperfections.
The elf looks across the meagre fire at her in the fading afternoon light. Her hair is wrapped in a warm headcloth, and her arms are folded in front of her, hands tucked into her sleeves against the mountain chill. "The curse of a life spent in the business of lying," she says, "is a memory for what's been said, and also what hasn't."
"Well, then, we both remember—"
"If." The elf's eyes and tone are steady. "You swore to cut my throat if any of the men there tried to lay me. Which, afterward, they did not attempt."
Ryssa wipes her blade carefully, and says nothing, even though the girl waits a while.
"Creature of lies," she murmurs eventually. "I can't very well deny it, but oh, my lady, you wouldn't do such a thing, would you? Lie? When you could simply tell a particular truth so very loudly that nobody remembers anything else."
Ryssa sheathes the sword, and starts to methodically pack away the supplies for its care, and continues to say nothing.
"I asked you to take care of me," the elf says, "which you did. And you cared whether I was cold. And then," and there is a distinct edge of accusation in her voice by now, "you showed me something distracting, like a cheap prestidigitator working a street crowd for pennies, and I walked away squalling that the man pulled a finch from a handkerchief! like a gullible toddler." Her eyes are blazing, and she is rocked forward on her heels with force of feeling, and Ryssa cannot begin to pretend she isn't staring. "I would admire the pure artistry, lady knight, if I weren't vexed with you for fooling me. Me."
It seems Ryssa won't escape through silence. She works her suddenly dry mouth, to loosen her tongue. "It may as well be lady paladin," she says finally, "for all that you say knight in mockery," and the elf stares wide-eyed at her for long enough that Ryssa wonders if they are done talking.
"You wretch," the elf says eventually, with such vehement indignation that it startles a hoarse bark of laughter from Ryssa's throat. "Ryssa, you — you wretch."
"Oh, you use my name," Ryssa murmurs. "It must be serious."
"I am standing before you, trying to admit that you are right about me, and you—!" The elf makes a motion very much as if she wants to stamp her foot in frustration. "You saw me, when I introduced myself as Spider. You saw me change costume and you understood and how did you do that?"
"You changed how you move." Ryssa lifts one shoulder in a shrug, and pauses before tentatively airing ancient memory. "I was a dancer."
The elf blinks at her, vexation arrested.
"Before I was murdered," Ryssa clarifies, voice suddenly as rusty as these recollections. "Whatever you've heard about how she takes paladins, that — at least for me, that much is true."
She bears up as best she can under the girl's newly intense eyes. "How?" the elf asks, after a long pause, softly.
Ryssa sighs and reaches out, palm up, in mute request for the other's hand, and the elf gives it to her without hesitation. Ryssa rolls her neck, uses the other hand to gather her hair away, and guides the elf's fingers to the still-perceptible faultline in her skull, behind her ear. "Carelessly," she says. "A dancer; and he saw someone else watch me. And when I fell, there was — a bedpost, I think."
The elf slides her fingers through the roots of Ryssa's hair, and curls a loose, gentle fist into it.
"It's not true that she doesn't take paladins," Ryssa adds, voice fallen low into a contemplative buzz. "She takes victims, and makes of them survivors. It's just that most, so taken, desire safety, and to help others in turn. Even those who come from her with bloodlust generally...they have very specific reasons, quickly addressed. And she lets go without grudge or demand, when they're done." She meets the elf's eyes. "You call it a distraction. That's a forgiving thing to call it, the lasting desire to kill."
"What do you know about the Ríastrad?" says the elf, and Ryssa turns her head slightly into the girl's wrist.
"Only what everyone knows, I suppose," she says. "The secret eyes of the elven ancients' overcouncil. Nobody's ever met one, and yet everyone knows they're everywhere. They're spies and sneak thieves and assassins, they can each fight like twelve strong soldiers and do dark magic to bring the world to its knees. They can read the secrets right out of a sleeping man's dreams, and travel across the world in the blink of an eye by using spiders' webs as doors—"
"You just made that last one up," the girl says, her smile bubbling to her face. "It's wonderful; I'm going to whisper that to so many people until the rumour takes. We have so many wars, you know, with our own people; so many orphans. The Fürsten take those children and they make us like this by training, as young as possible. No speech but lies. No movement but lies. No life but lies. The Ríastrad."
"And the Oracle?"
The elf sighs. "I was assigned to read the missives between one king and another, and one of them became paranoid about the terrible elven spy service and began planning restrictions on our people; no elves in certain trades, that sort of thing. I was bade to run to ground, lie low for, say, fifty or sixty years. Until some of the principals are dead of age, and some others...dead, and things settled somewhat."
"And what of your people, under this king's hand?"
"The other king took the meaning from his paranoia," the elf says, "that he was a weak and unreliable ally. If you happen to know of any kingdoms that existed only until they were annexed by their neighbour; for example, roughly thirty years ago...."
"He took that meaning from the letters," Ryssa says, and the elf nods. "...Letters passed to him from your hands, on behalf of the Ríastrad."
The elf says nothing.
"The god didn't make me a paladin," Rysa tells her. "Rage made me a paladin. I am very angry."
"I know," the elf says, and wets her lip and smiles and shivers.
Ryssa takes her wrist and sighs and firmly removes the girl's hand from her hair. "Go back to the others," she says, and stares her down, unbending, until she turns and walks away in the gathering dark.
The elf holds her head high and proud as she goes, like someone unhurt.