"Lady paladin," one of the Resistance says insistently, from the doorway. "Lady paladin."
Ryssa grunts, to show she's heard.
"I know you don't want to leave her side," the man says. "I know it's hard. But now they know you're both here, there's an army on the march. There'll be a damn sight more than one death, if you won't keep moving."
The elf is waking less, and lucid much less than that. Her wound weeps and stinks, and her breath is shallow and rattling.
Ryssa would like, occasionally, to be able to lie to herself when she looks others' deaths in the face. She has not developed the ability this time, either. The elf is dying.
"I don't move until she leaves this bed," the paladin says, immovable as the world, empty as the cold sky. "Or until they're at the gates," she concedes after a pause, because she still is what she is.
"Paladin," the man says, with a note of desperation.
Ryssa stops paying attention to him, and after a while he leaves the doorway.
This is by far from the first deathbed she's sat by, but she doesn't remember the last futile time she gave in so far to despair as to carefully set a sword point down, clutch at the pommel with both hands, and bend herself over it in a parody of supplication.
She knows, deep within her, that it isn't, that she has never in the last of her submitted to her god, and that, perhaps, is why they do not communicate. But she is filled with dread and misery, so heavy with grief already; and isn't that enough? Isn't that enough for other people, with their other gods, to get their miracles?
"Mother," she chokes out in a mutter. "Mother."
(Here is a secret that Ryssa knows, that is in no books, even though she herself is: everyone knows that Mother Weep-No-More calls almost no paladins. The Mother has no temples, next to no organised worship; she is not a god of palatable survivors, angry, violent, ungrateful. Nobody thinks to ask whether she has priests; whoever heard of a secret priest? Suppressed, yes, persecuted, unwanted; but truly, genuinely secret?
(The Mother takes priests everywhere. Their miracles are not Ryssa's miracle, their work is not her violence. Silent embers, to her wildfire. The works the Mother grants them are silent mercies: safe and painless abortion, euthenasia.
(Knowing this makes Ryssa less but also even more alone: perhaps, after all, it's only she to whom the Mother has nothing at all to say.)
It takes two days of pretending to pray before Ryssa can force out any more. "Not her," she grates, her own teeth clashing painfully within her bite. "Mother." The elf is whimpering shallowly through sleep that no longer rests her, and Ryssa wants to have more to say, to be capable of having more to say.
She still is what she is.
The days run into each other by candlelight, and the vengeful army, the final fist of the aristocracy, convinced that they can win now she has simply stayed where they can catch up, draws near the town's walls.
"I'll take it," Ryssa manages, after she fails to get even a spoon of broth into the elf, who no longer seems to see her at all, or perhaps anything much of anything, a listless, glassy presence separated from a corpse only by the technicality of breath. "It's only a wound. I've taken thousands for you. Take it away from her and give it to me."
The elf makes a noise, then, and Ryssa covers her weakly twitching fingers and bends close, trying to make words of tiny rattling gasps.
"No," the elf says. "No — consent."
"You are nearly dead," the paladin whispers over her, eyes closed.
"Ríastrad — would — repair," the elf pants, laborious. "Like — clock. Thing."
"I am not the Ríastrad," Ryssa says, trying not to hold her fingers too tight. "I will ask you, see? I ask you. Let me. Let me," and she is sure, in that fervent second, that if the elf says yes she will make the Mother listen.
"No," the elf says, and makes the closest, exhausted facial twitch to a smile she has in what feels a sleepless eternity. "Thank — you," and closes her eyes and as far as Ryssa can tell, slips back into sleep, as Ryssa silently, wetly weeps onto her sallow, upturned face.
"Paladin," an urgent voice says eventually. "Paladin, they're here," and so Ryssa has to let go of her hand, and stand, and take up her sword; and leave her breathing down to her last to go and trade murders with an army.
"Mother," she whispers bitterly, but she goes.
