At the Battle of Wolfwood, the paladin falls to a clothyard through the chest, and later needs someone to hack it short and draw it out.
At Potter's Field, she is stabbed in the gut with a sword.
Ambushed near Hamberford, she is circled by mounted knights and beaten down with maces; dragged into the town and paraded before a captive crowd, the local Knight Commander has her limp form flung into a vat of alchemical lye. And so, when he turns to deliver some "WHERE IS YOUR HOPE NOW?" speech, Ryssa rises — black-eyed, skinless, and steaming — and drags him bodily into the same caustic bath. The rioting routs the Knights; parts of the town burn for two entire days afterward.
The elf has never seen Ryssa happier.
Maybe it's that which makes it all feel as if it's poisoning the elf to death. She rides all up and down the green, green banks of the Duin, and teaches desperately angry people to fight; she listens for the echoes of the Ríastrad's footsteps in all things, feinting and dodging in the dark; and she watches the paladin die and die and die, and it burns her throat and weighs her limbs down, even as the knightly orders crumble and retreat and the people join hands and swell with strength.
There is another elf, a Ríastrad operative, another of the hollow orphans, roaming the region quite openly and undermining her work. He is a threat; he is obvious bait in a trap with undoubtedly many teeth. If she had the resources of the Ríastrad to work with, she would concentrate on patiently uncovering the other two operatives his presence implies; as it is, she weaves ever-denser webs of bluff and decoy, and watches her opponents, unable to simply cut through them, methodically snip at threads: causing sufficent forces of knights to be mobilised to cover every possible front she might appear at, decoys captured or cut down, message routes compromised and cut off, safe locations burned.
She is running out of usefulness. She is running out of time.
The paladin has made it clear that she can and will do this work without the elf; and in doing it, the paladin is happy. Happy. The elf closes her mouth tight over her objections, her terrors. It is decided, and she is an empty mask, offering no say and having no say to offer. Clearly she must do as the Ríastrad would have her do, just as the paladin indicated she was to be used; it is time to weigh what little steady use is left in her against what dramatic gains might be gambled from burning her candle quicker.
She begins, quietly, to draw, redraw and consider those plans which put herself in death's way.
In the end, it as simple as this: they are trying very hard to catch her, and all it would take is a mistake; so she pretends to make one. She walks into a supposed meeting, in a private upstairs room of an inn, with a local resistance cell; and instead, there he is, her loyal Ríastrad counterpart, sitting with a glass of wine largely untouched, reading some papers, waiting for her.
It's a display, of course, a show of you can run if you like, but you are so surely doomed I need not bother chase — which might even be true.
"You will," he greets her matter-of-factly, "be Made An Example Of."
"No, I don't believe so," she says calmly, and kicks the table into his gut; or would, if he did not brace his hands against the edge and simply ride its motion back, allowing his chair to tip, tumbling up toward standing. She gives it a second kick at his rising head, and he smoothly dives beneath it, at her legs, instead; she leaps atop the table and dives likewise, above it and in the precisely opposite direction, somersaulting over the chair still rocking to a stop, and darts out of the door opposite the one she entered by.
He has two people waiting for her, but they are only local recruited muscle, not Ríastrad. She is not even fully through the door, and they are barely reacting yet to her sudden appearance, when she drives her stiffened hand into the side of one meaty neck; the other's arm she ducks beneath as he whirls, plants a leg-breaking kick to the side of his knee, and simply flows past. There is a window, small and dingy; she whips her collar up and shades her face even as she springs, driving herself headfirst through the glass and tumbling into the stable yard.
She is, she estimates, perhaps as many as five seconds ahead of him.
Her escort are no doubt already dead, were already when she was shown to the meeting room. She knew they would be; she chose them knowing so. Nobody is irreplaceable; but neither were they nobody. Their deaths will hurt people, and so be turnable to propaganda.
She runs. He has the advantage, knowing where he does or does not have people ready to assist in her death; she must calculate and gamble against the possibilities. The necessary care has already whittled a second off her lead. A leap puts her boot to a barrel, which affords her a spring that puts her grasping fingers to the eaves of a low roof, and she launches herself up into a new battlefield, one where she abruptly changes direction and zigzags across peaks and gutters. She does not look back; but she does hear her own scrambling footfalls dogged by the echo of others.
Like certain chess problems, however, it is simply an impossibility for one rogue Ríastrad to indefinitely win against two.
She rounds a chimney, ready to slide down a roof and drop to the street, and slams into a silent waiting figure. The breath is knocked from her, and proves hard to catch; it takes several seconds for her to realise, staggering down the roof anyway, that she has collided not with mere flesh, but the point of an arma insidiosa, and she is leaking blood, and the pain hits sickeningly as she totters at the very edge of the fall.
They materialise from the dark, the two of them, one behind each of her shoulders as she sways, looking down at the street.
"Well," the first concedes, "perhaps not, after all," and a gentle shove sends her soaring to the cobbles.
The Ríastrad know many things, but still, not everything. She learned, here in the land of the Duin, from the farmers' herblore, even as she taught them the uses of the crops they raise. Among the poisons known to the Ríastrad are many concoctions little used, due to unreliability or availability or nuisance in application; but among the Duin's rudimentary plantlore, they know not just what plants might help, but also which to avoid, or which to use only sparingly. The elf believes she has stumbled on an alternative preparation for an obscure two-part poison which is principally effective only on elves, precipitating in them a massive allegic response.
One part is an innocuous byproduct of the healing substances she has been educating the revolutionaries in. And, all the way back at the beginning of her operations, she wove it into the Revolution's signals: wine flavoured with it, as a subtle sign of their identity. In sabotaging her, her opponents have unwittingly been dosing themselves for months.
She is wearing the second component, tonight, as a scent.
She lies in the street, barely keeping her consciousness about a great dark tide of pain-washed oblivion; and smiles twistedly nonetheless, at the loud and death-gasping fall of first one, then two, more bodies from roof level.
