"Paladin," says a man with an all-too-familiar expression, the unwholesome pleasure of someone who knows something his enemies don't, that she has become accustomed to on the faces of the elf's converts. "Let them see you are the gates; draw them into the town."
"Would we rather not keep the fighting away from your people?"
He clasps her elbow, grim glee dipping for a second to — sympathy? "Trust in your wife," he says, and has no idea how nearly it is he dies.
The god swims in her skin. Her hands ache, distantly, from the force with which they're balled.
"The town, then?" she says. "This is our battlefield." It's no difference to her; if that's how they want it. Rivulets of the god's red, wet miracle begin to run from her hair, framing her face, tracing down her throat. "Show me to them, then; let's be done."
Briefly, the lords' knights think she's made a dreadful mistake in their favour, hiding herself in a dead end among plentiful other targets whose blood she'd rather not see spilled.
And then they find themselves in a maze of streets that have been turned against them; opponents melting away into narrower and narrower spaces, tighter turns, where their formations are broken and there's barely the space to swing a zweihander — or less. The streets have been further broken up with crates and barrels, refuse, stinking heaps of nightsoil. Crossbows — forbidden, their crude manufacture prominent among the elf's teachings, and her contacts abroad put to work smuggling in more — spit death from upper stories, along with a hail of anything else that can be used as a missile. The knights think of burning out their tormentors, once or twice; dissuaded by the screams of their arsonist fellows when pelted with jars of lamp-oil.
The Resistance moves like water, tugging the knights' feet from under them, dashing blindingly into their eyes, and dissipating like foam. Through it all, the paladin stalks like a bloody folktale monster, sweeping along narrow streets and cutting down every enemy with the misfortune to head the opposite way.
And something gnaws at her, even god-eyed, even through the rage. A formless, writhing doubt. Something she should have seen, something she should be seeing now; and a choking suspicion grows that she is somehow in the wrong place.
The elf drowses awake to the touch of a cold, damp cloth on her forehead.
"There you are," says a gentle voice, and she opens her eyes to look into those of the third of the Ríastrad cell sent here to destroy her. "Hello at last."
Her burning body is heavy and filled with pain, and no longer particularly attends to her wishes for it to move. She stirs, feebly.
"There are those who'd say you've escaped being Made An Example Of," her once colleague says lightly. "Though others, I suppose, might say you serve as example enough, in the state you are. You've been seen to suffer, for your part in all this, but above all, you still can't be allowed to simply die. You have crossed the Ríastrad. Nobody escapes, not even through travails such as these."
She huffs something, and the elven face in her dim vision tilts in mild confusion, trying to decipher her; until the realisation arrives that she is, to the extent she can, laughing.
"I," she breathes, in between the little puffs of it, "win."
"Do you?" A soft gleam of reflected light runs the length of a blade, as the other slowly, undramatically draws an arma insidiosa. "Do you, though? I can't reckon it. Your sicknurses here, I'm afraid, I have taken care of. Outside, the knights pursue this little local matter. And the paladin — mm. Such an instrument. A shame, really. She's already singing like a harp string about to snap; nothing you cultivated here will survive her finding you, fallen to the knife. And she'll come running in anger, straight to those who've handled her for ages of the world; think you the res carnelian was the first measure? Best, perhaps, so far. Least..." and the face looms closer over hers, to frame the last word with the greatest, softest sweetness: "damaging."
"Win," the elf says nonetheless. There's something serene in her filmy eyes.
"Maybe you do." Her erstwhile comrade leans back, away from her face. "Maybe you do. You seem very sure. May you have the very best of it, while all the rest of the world forgets you, and those few who don't remember that we won."
Her arm is gently, unstoppably manhandled; the cold needle tip of the knife pricks her underarm, with its clear path to the heart.
"I'd say I'll make this quick," the other says, and pauses. "Oh, do you hear that? That heavy, heroic tread! I do believe she's realised something's amiss. Too late, dear, too late. As I said, I'd make it quick, but I don't think your body would last through any slow death, anyway. This, the Ríastrad says to traitors:—"
"Goodbye," the elf murmurs, in perfect chorus with them.
The knife slides smoothly home.
