The next time someone ventures to Ryssa, in her own set-apart portion of their camp, it is not the elf.
The sellsword stands several careful arms' length from her, scratching at his blooming beard. "Lady," he says.
She sighs heavily. "What is it?"
"I don't pretend any comfort with you," he says bluntly, "but I know a situation that's in danger of sudden fracture. The p—...Hanssen is scarce capable of lacing his boots without fretting that you've stolen his authority to lead, and whether he's look stronger if he left them unlaced. The elf...." he looks at the sky, as if searching it for some way to avoid the topic. "Tell me again, if you would, now that I know I ask a paladin, and I have an idea whose. Need I have a concern about the elf?"
"Not the kind you mean," Ryssa says sourly, and rubs a hand over her face. What can she even say? "What think you of the girl? What skills she lends our task?"
"I'll allow some curiosity what skills those are."
The Ríastrad are spies and sneak thieves and assassins— "She appears to me very like some kind of cat burglar," Ryssa says, and it's almost not a lie, almost. "I mistrust her." Definitely not a lie. "I mistrust what we'll do that might require one."
"The Oracle said nothing about—"
"How much of the Oracle's words did you hear for yourself? How much do you know only from what Hanssen thought of them?" Ryssa curls her lip. "The man who can't do up his boots for the thought another paladin's within a mile, that he might not be able to give orders to."
"Do you trust the Oracle?" The man is frowning, now.
"I trust this." She pats her scabbard. "If there's any reason I'm here, it's so that there is one thing in this entire venture that I can."
He nods. That makes sense to him. "This errand's going to fly apart if you don't speak to Hanssen," he says. "One of the two of you needs to be in charge; right now it's only the shadow of you in his mind."
She makes a noise of disgust, but hauls herself to her feet, shoulders her pack, and begins to kick slush over her smouldering fire.
Ulsmyn, the stick-thin herbwife, had tried to draw Ryssa to conversation many times; coaxed and wheedled and all but put on a travelling mummers' show. We women seemed her favourite words, close followed by the Mothers.
The Mothers are an uncertain grouping; Mother One and Mother Many at the heart, and whatever handful of gods of hearth and harvest, family and childbirth are regional. Some places count Ryssa's god among them.
She thinks, from the way the herbwife's back is pulled straight like a tall stalk, her hood drawn up and angled away from even the sight of Ryssa, that Ulsmyn's accounting of the Mothers distinctly does not. No place in sacred unity and the bonds of all women for Ryssa's bloody hand holding a sword.
That is fine; Ryssa is utterly indifferent to her opinion.
The young priest of Hanssen's god wrings his hands, gaze fluttering from Ryssa to anywhere but, and back. Their god — or the mass of their fellow followers — favours hierarchy, institution, orders of men issuing orders to further orders of men. He is junior, expendable upon this fool's errand, a pair of hands to commit to the task his order have set; and Hanssen along to be a portable source of authority to him, not having dutifuly milled enough of his life away in drudgery to be trusted with any thought of his own.
Ryssa would be indifferent to his opinion, if he were allowed to have any.
The elf is nowhere in sight. This means nothing. (The Ríastrad are spies and sneak thieves and assassins—)
Hanssen broods within a tent of his church's holy colours, contemplating the small wooden chest that they are charged to convey, the entire point of this endeavour.
Power hoards power. The relic in the box — described by its keepers in their dusty catalogues as the res potentia carnelian — is older than their church. It's possible they don't know what it does, or that they simply haven't seen fit to tell anyone. They have hoarded it for a long time; and now they have announced a desire to transfer it to the keeping of the White Fastness.
The wizards of the White Fastness say that one does not simply unmake a magical relic. That much, Ryssa believes. They say that if ones does, every last mote and grain of dust from it remains a danger; that if you somehow burned one to nothing, the very smoke would carry loosed dangers to the corners of the sky. That it must be done, regardless, when it can; and until then, the things should be stored with utmost care and watchfulness, until it becomes possible to dismantle them in safety. And that all seems very much believable.
The wizards of the White Fastness say they are the best people in the world to do so, and she would reluctantly concede that, if need be. They are even, probably, better stewards of it than Hanssen's church.
Even so, the idea that wizards are the best people to guard the greatest stockpile of arcane temptations to survive the ages is not one that lies easy. And power hoards power; if Hanssen's church relinquishes it vountarily, what dread capability do they suddenly suspect of it?
Or if there's no such sudden dread of it, what strange payment does its transfer actually secure?
She ducks through the tent's flap, and Hanssen stiffens, eyes upon her. "Paladin," he greets her.
"Don't be a fool," she says curtly, in lieu of greeting. "You're cultivated for command. This is a mission from your church. If I had any intent to wrest it from you, I'd have done it at the outset, as no more than a sellsword. Do what you're for, paladin."
He takes a half-step back, as if struck. "I know your signs," he says. "I know what god you serve—"
"Unless I come to you running with blood and cut you down, my god is of no matter to you, nor you to her." Ryssa glowers at him. "Lead your mission, fool."
There is no question that she will ever treat him as an authority over her. He knows it; it did nothing to disturb his worldview when she was a mere sellsword, nobody who mattered. He cannot think his way through her independence from his notion of hierarchy as a fellow god-warrior, and had fallen to confusedly attempting to report to her, as though he is the young priest, himself grovelling to Hanssen.
He begins to burble some self-justification about the combined counsel of two paladins being wise, and she cuts him off.
"If you want guidance, you have a god," she spits. "And if you want a mother, renounce your god and seek another by that title; I am here with my sword and a lick of everyday sense, and that's all you'll have of me, however little you like them."
She stamps her way back through the slush to their fire, and deliberately lets her pack fall by it.
"This?" she says, gesturing to herself, to where she stands. "This is what it takes for you fools to do as you came to do? I am the biggest fool among you; I should have let you march off, stayed home, and not troubled myself that you'd all die."
This is, of course, a tremendous lie. If she ever had a home, it hasn't been since the god took Ryssa's murder upon herself.
"There's stew," the elf says dryly.
