Their summons comes after they've waited (deliberately been made to; Ryssa knows this, as sure as breathing) overnight on the beach. In the early morning light, a series of great stone slabs float to the surface, amid the plumes of seafloor mud they rested in.
There is as much magic as in the floating, Ryssa thinks, in the fact that the topside of each has nothing attached to it; no shells or soft petalled stinging things or streaming weed. It's a nice touch. The causeway is an intricately considered, dizzyingly unnatural, power-flaunting path of utter barrenness. Wizardry all over.
Ryssa's met a lot of wizards. Ryssa's left the world with somewhat fewer in it.
"Hanssen," she says dourly, when he eagerly steps forth, "they're in no hurry for us, or they'd have let us inside to sleep in beds. Do you want to march straight over and go nuts over noggin on smooth wet stone? Let it dry. They'll wait."
He's torn. On the one hand, speed and enthusiasm and a ringing call to action; on the other, now she's said it, he's clearly picturing slipping over and looking clownish in front of the wizards.
"You wouldn't want anyone to get hurt. Someone delicate, say, like the elf."
"It is hard," the other paladin says, shading his eyes against the sun on the water and staring out across the causeway, "to quite think of the elf as delicate when she's been sparring with you for weeks."
Ryssa grins. "Bitchteeth!" she says in mock wonder. "Did you admit to learning something? Hoy, priest! Do your lot not set fire to your brothers who accidentally do that?"
They finally cross, Hanssen and his brother priest in the fore, the sellsword and Ulsmyn next, the elf, and lastly Ryssa, whistling and keeping her hand near her sword.
The elf lags back, and Ryssa, without appearing to take much notice, lags back at the same pace, so they don't end up walking together, but the gap between them and the rest grows.
"I'd rather not be here," the elf sighs.
"Too visible for a sneak-thief," Ryssa says brightly.
"Too visible," the elf says, quieter, "for what I actually am."
"Hip-wriggling elven slatterns? I'm sure some wizards can find a more private welcome for those—"
"You are exceptionally annoying today."
Ryssa goes back to whistling a jaunty sea-tune, paused patiently for the elf to hop over the arm's length of chilly, glimmering brine between one stone and the next.
"If you'd let me keep the Oracle," the elf sighs, after a pause. "At least till we were closer. I could have tailored something more suited—"
"You couldn't resist taunting me," the paladin says, and the elf grumbles low and wordlessly.
And then they're catching up, at the great doors of the fastness itself, with everyone; and to the wizard here to welcome them.
"—Heard contradictory things," the robed figure is saying, all kohl eyes and shaved head and excited hand movements. "An explosion, a theft — and here you are with it! Ah, this is your elven compatriot? And — oh. Hello, you."
"Vimbrissaminah," Ryssa says politely, giving her a nod, and the wizard strides forward with a laugh.
"Didn't I hear you'd given all this up to grow parsnips or some such?" she says, and reaches out a hand.
Ryssa can see the horrified surprise from Hanssen and the priest, the seething outrage from Ulsmyn, and the sellsword simply raising an eyebrow, when the wizard doesn't try to take Ryssa's hand in greeting; she lifts it instead to run her fingers, tousling familiarly, through the paladin's hair.
Vimbrissaminah purrs.
Ryssa doesn't check on the elf's reaction. She can hear her revising her list of People To Kill.
