Wizards like to hear themselves talk, and Ryssa doesn't want to stand out in the sea air for hours and listen; so instead of standing around and letting Vimbrissaminah pet her head, she takes the wizard's hand from her hair and tucks it into her chivalrously crooked elbow, using it to smoothly walk her back in the direction of Hanssen, his cargo, and the point of the whole thing.
"It's been quite a journey, Vimbre," she says. "Do you think, perhaps, we might find breakfast within your walls?"
The elf, she notes, maintains the perfect body language and expression of a petty elven crook with a heart of, if not gold exactly, perhaps electrum of reasonable purity; finding herself in overwhelmingly grand surroundings and trying not to display any worry that her grasp of good manners are insufficient to the day.
It's the first time in weeks the elf has put in the proper discipline one would expect of an agent of the Ríastrad. She's had too much attention on Ryssa, her performance of Spider the rogue becoming perfunctory, affect not always entirely convincing.
And she's not even snapped back to the perfect performance because she should, or because the White Fastness might discover her and mete out consequence, or remembers her mission or her pride, no, she is just angry at Ryssa in the way of an outraged solipsist confronted with the fact that Ryssa's existence before her was not simply a misty prologue to convey the paladin into her sight.
Ryssa and the elf have been sparring for weeks. At some point, the elf may realise that Ryssa never stops simply because they lower their fists and stop hitting one another.
Ryssa has never fought one of the Ríastrad before. She is learning.
It is delightful.
The White Fastness is a huge place. Chambers with ceilings as high as cathedrals. Corridors without end. So many staircases, so many rooms.
And it's eerily empty. You can't have any building this size without people; not unless you're a wizard. Things need doing, which dictates people to do it, and those people imply the existence of other people to feed and clothe them, heal them when they're sick, all manner of things; and all those people imply yet more people, to grow and harvest the food and fibres, spin the yarn, weave the cloth, gather medicinal ingredients. You can't have a place like this, in magnificent isolation, and nobody in it. You can't have it warmed by fires and stocked with breakfast and kept swept and tidy and everything that this place is; you can't have a fortress without a settlement, and farmland, or at the very least extensive trade. But here there's nothing, nothing but magic.
They meet nobody except this wizard Ryssa knows.
"They're here, of course," Vimbrissaminah says, emoting constantly with her hands. "But only so many reside within the Fastness at any time, and we keep that number and their exact persons obscured to blunt the possibility of numerological attack. And against the possibility that any of the devices prove to be a corruptive influence, staff are only permitted to remain within the Fastness for so many years at a stretch, with so many more between, serving as hands and eyes in the world outside when in those periods. Good fortune that I caught you," she says, stroking Ryssa's sleeve.
She casually sits them down in what, anywhere else, would be a banqueting hall. Here...who knows? There could be one such hall for each wizard in the place to take their breakfast in. There is food set out, already waiting for them.
"I expect," the wizard says casually, spooning some kind of sweet porridge from a steaming copper pot into one of a stack of clay bowls, "that your church has sent you with some instructions to convey only to me, in secret from your companions; that's how they usually arrange things," and Hanssen gives Ryssa a furtive, guilty look.
Ryssa rolls her eyes. "Paladin," she says, in a tone of strained patience, and doesn't even bother to elaborate.
The wizard glances between them. "After breakfast, I'll show you to the rooms we keep for guests," she says. "And I'll have a private talk with you, paladin, in my offices," she tells Hanssen. "Ryssa, sweetness, would you like to take in some sea air along the battlements, after all that?"
"Sweetness?" Ulsmyn says, in tones of envenomed doubt.
"How is it you know one another?" the elf murmurs, slipping unobtrusive into the lee of the herbwife's rudeness.
"Oh, as I said, we serve longer outside the walls of the Fastness itself than within." The wizard sends a smile at the paladin. "The pursuit of arcane might is one that has oft led to the abandonment of all principle: a little more power, if one balks not at cruelty. A little more, if not at torture. A little more, if not at massacre...and so the devices we seek to remove from the world are oft a natural fit for the hands that Ryssa's patron would also remove. I was seeking a certain thing; you, if I recall, seeking a certain man."
"It's often men," Ryssa says agreeably.
"The work is hard." The wizard's face is fond. "Easier when one is lucky to be gifted soft company."
"Soft?" Hanssen says disbelievingly.
"Why would her Mother have paladins," the wizard says, gaze on Ryssa, eyes sparkling and voice lowering a little into her throat, "if not to keep space for softness?"
"Hm," the elf says, in a cool and thoughtful way.
For several days, they see the wizard at mealtimes, and Hanssen talks to her in private after. He looks relieved — presumably meaning he has handed off the res potentia carnelian and they have done what they set out to do — but not as happy about it as might be expected.
At any rate, as happy as he might have been expected to be about it prior to Ryssa's taking up the sword again for her god. It seems a strangely personal thing to have affected all of them quite so profoundly.
The wizard talks incessantly, when she is about; takes the paladin for long walks under the sun and again under the moonlight, around the Fastness ramparts; and beams kindness down on them all — without there ever being the slightest doubt in anyone that she does view it as beaming down on their mereness, from her elevated position of occult mastery. Except maybe Ryssa, for whom she has smiles that have secrets sewed into them, and eyes that hold fondness more than kindness, and an easy familiarity.
She is obviously and particularly kind to the elf, who scrupulously performs a shy, blooming appreciation; and then Ryssa jolts awake in her soft bed at the darkest hour of a night, with the elf perched at the end of it, kicking the sole of Ryssa's foot and scowling horribly.
"What is it?" Ryssa says. She sounds sleepy, but her eyes are clear the moment they open, and her sword is neatly arranged as close at hand as always.
"I want to know what you've told the wizard about me," the elf says.
"What, no 'the wizard is evil, come help stab her'?" Ryssa stretches, rolls over, and tugs the blanket up to cosy it right up under her chin.
"You have no intention of stabbing the wizard, or you'd have tried already." The elf kicks Ryssa's foot again, slightly harder. "Tell me."
"Oh, tried, is it?"
The elf ignores her mocking tone. "Paladin," she insists coldly.
"As near nothing as comes naturally," Ryssa says. "It isn't you we speak of, if you can imagine that. Do you think I've been whispering in her ear, under the stars, that you're a Ríastrad spy sneaking about?"
"Tell me."
"Elf," Ryssa says, and turns onto her back, eyes glittering in the dim room. "There is a god who comes in darkness to those who are abused, and would answer their abuser with the sword; and she holds to them, in darkness, a hilt. And I am that god's thing; and you are an elf of an impressionable age, abroad in the world with no family, in my company, and cleaved to me as though you see me as a rescuer; and resenting Vimbre as though your feelings have settled themselves in my direction because of it and you feel you have things to resent. And that is what Vimbre sees; I need say nothing to her to make her see so. I know you appreciate the art of saying nothing."
"I hate you," the elf says, prompting a deep chuckle. "Tell me exactly how long ago you met her, and exactly where."
"Oh, do you think you have her caught in some sinister deception?"
"I think you'd be a fool to mistake a lover for someone incapable of sinister deception," the elf says, unblinking. "I would think you've been murdered by at least one too many to be so foolish."
Ryssa stretches again, yawns. "I am not even certain my name was always Ryssa," she says carelessly. "I had my skull cleaved by an axe, from behind, on an occasion; it took a year, from what I recall, for me to remember my own name. I remember it as Ryssa. But I could not say for sure it always was."
The elf cocks her head, apparently in consideration.
"Ask me if I trust her," Ryssa adds, low and harder. "Ask me if I trust the White Fastness. Ask if I think she tells the truth, to me or to you. Ask if I trust the errand we came on. None of these things, elf."
The room is silent for a while.
"Why does she get to have you?" the elf says, almost petulant, and Ryssa laughs quiet and filthy.
"Don't evil wizards always get what they want?" she says. "Why else would they do it?"
In the morning, when the wizard and Hanssen emerge from their private talk, the elf is outside the wizard's office.
"I would speak to you," she says, in the awkward flutter of distressed youth. "I would speak to you about — her."
Hanssen shoots her a look of quick, embarrassed sympathy, and the wizard presses a knuckle to her lips, wide-eyed, and then, practically dripping with kindness, motions the elf into her sanctum and pulls the door closed.
While her back is turned, the elf shrugs off Spider, stands slim and straight and expressionless as her own stiletto, and when the wizard turns her condescending kindness to face her, and falters, the elf says: "The bird sings high in the tree, and its only word is Need."
Classical allusion, the elven weakness.
The blood drains from the wizard's face, leaving her a kohl-and-paper sketch of herself. "The tree roots deep in the ground, in wordless necessity," she whispers; sign and countersign. The paladin suspects collusion and conspiracy, murky bargains; but she does have a prejudice against the elven way of thinking.
The long game is, by definition, long. The Ríastrad will — sometimes — accept allies of convenience, in the service of the long. Something complicated is happening here, involving the church and the Fastness and the elves.
The questions are: does the church know that? What goal does the White Fastness have? And how much can the wizard be persuaded to tell her?
The elf smiles slow and cold.
"Time for us to discuss matters, Vimbrissaminah," she says.