Every one of them is relieved to descend from the mountains into another town; at least until they're within good sight of it and the elf slinks a way away to climb on a boulder and peer down at it with a folding spyglass that was tucked into her sleeve.
Ryssa leans on the base of the boulder and waits for the elf to peer over the edge.
"Am I spied upon, now?" the elf says, crooking a brow.
"Something concerns you," Ryssa says. "If you expect me to lie to Hanssen about it, which is inevitable—"
"I cannot set foot in the town."
They regard one other.
"Ríastrad," Ryssa says finally. A guess, but the only one she can fit any sense to. "Your comrades."
"My comrades if I met them," the elf says. "I am lying low somewhere else entirely." She slithers down from the rock.
"It seems to your advantage to have their support." Ryssa puts no particula emphasis on it, and the elf spares her no particular glance.
"To mine, yes," she says, and Ryssa lets her walk swiftly ahead; and by the time she catches up, there is no elf to be found to catch up to. And so, once more—
"Hanssen. The girl thinks there's something amiss in town; she'll meet us later."
He looks gallingly concerned. Not for the news, of course; for the elf, the poor, poor elf girl in hypothetical peril. As if womens' peril is what his god cares about.
"I assume she's scouting the situation, however sneak-thieves do so," Ryssa adds sourly, and simply walks away from his attempt to chide her that of course their travelling companion is more respectable than that, and Ryssa is judging her in an unfair and unseemly way not befitting a paladin—
The elf has skipped out so quick and light that she's left her pack for someone else to deal with. Ryssa snarls and snatches it up.
There is a temple to Hanssen's god here, and they make their way directly to it, where Hanssen clasps arms with the local head priest and earnestly launches into speeches.
Ryssa edges out of the room when she's certain he's too enthralled to notice, lets herself into a scriptorium silenced by their arrival, and leans against a wall of cubbyholes, each containing a wooden box of a design standard to the church, each box containing papers standard to the church, figures and rubrics and the endless clutch of controlling hands.
She massages the spot between her brows with her fingertips.
When they come to find her, she has usurped a scribe's chair, the burden of her pack and the elf's resting at her feet. Her chin is rested wearily on her chest.
"Are you done talking?" she says.
"Paladin—" Hanssen starts, and the sellsword she was once akin to claps a hand on his shoulder.
"Lady," he interrupts firmly, "the plan is for the temple here to safely house our cargo, at least for the night. They have secured lodgings for us nearby, while we rest and resupply."
She grunts, rises, hauls her pack back to her shoulder, and takes up the elf's. "Let us go, then," she says, then drops her own hand on Hanssen's shoulder, just as they are the only two still in the room. "You'll take the first watch here?" she says quietly. "I'll come up from the inn and take the later."
"Paladin, there are many priests here—"
"And so will we be." She takes her hand off him. "I take the fears of sneak-thieves seriously."
She leaves him to follow in her wake, staring at her in total, immiserated bafflement that he cannot follow the workings of her mind, as she effortlessly snags the head priest and makes him show her where their burden has been placed, explain how it will be guarded, and then demands a stool to stand on to inspect the windows.
"Nobody can get in through—"
"I will believe it when I have inspected them." He is, in any case, wrong; she is sure the elf could, which presumably means her kin in the Ríastrad can, too. He has, at least, learned the futility of arguing, and goes to find something. The head priest follows him into the corridor; she can hear the general tone of the priest's questions.
She busies herself, and they find her pacing out the length of the walls and eyeing what she suspects are decorative pillars when they bring her a stool. She climbs on it and inspects the windows; each of them.
"If you're set on visiting the inn before taking your watch, I'll stay until you're back," she concludes grimly, when she's done, and Hanssen looks startled, then resolute, as he decides he can be manly and rugged and not require the frivolities of clean clothes and hot food before duty. He's a fool, and a predictable one. "I'll relieve you in the night, then."
She avails herself of fresh bread, a hot bath, and a bed.
The elves show up at the darkest hour of the night. They do not bother with the windows, because the temple isn't a structure paricularly intended to keep people out, nor secrets in; it's not much trouble to them to simply walk in through the perfectly good doors provided for that purpose, while nobody is watching.
They are very quiet; Ryssa is fully expecting them, and she still doesn't hear a thing until they open the door to the room, and there they are: two, clad in black, with scarves wound tightly, up nearly to their eyes.
She has a chair, a candle, and by her elbow on the table is the wooden box, wrapped around with silver chains.
"I never heard that elves are fool enough to want dangerous magical relics," she says. "What dealing the White Fastness are you interfering in?" but they quite reasonably try to kill her instead of answering.
They do not know what she is.
They are the Ríastrad; of course they come at her with total confidence. It would even be warranted, if they'd been forewarned. As it is, her sword bites deeper into one than mortal arms have any right to drive it, and she bares her teeth, black-eyed and with a slick caul of the Mother's sign running thickly down her face and plastering down her hair, as she simply kicks the body off the blade. The second elf leaps back sharply, needle-nosed arma insidiosa drooping in a less than perfect knife-fighting stance in the shock of the miscalculation.
"I ask you," Ryssa says in the god-voice, swinging the backsword lazily as she stalks the elven spy around the room, "what business you seek to disrupt by taking this."
"I tell you one thing only, paladin," the elf says, watching her closely, moving like moonlight, his knife weaving as he retreats around and around the room. "...We work in threes."
It might not have availed them, if it had simply presaged a strike from behind; but as she whirls, sword up, the third is in the doorway, almost insouciant. Their gazes meet as the elf strikes flame to the fuses of what she dimly recognises to be sapping explosives.
She whirls back to see the second elf, box and all, slipping bonelessly out of a window. She has no hope of stopping that, and spins once more in the direction of the now-vacant doorway; but the fuses are very short.
"Mother," she says hoarsely, and the temple bursts asunder.