The wizard, tucked away in a dim workshop in the understreets, is a nervous little piss-streak of a man; the elf demands only that he locate a person for her, drops into his hand a lock of hair clipped from the dead man from the White Fastness. The details seem unlikely to serve much purpose but to agitate further trouble.
She is no practitioner, but his methods seem archaic by the standards of the art, as she's familiar with them. Coloured powders flung onto a naked flame, choking fumes, chanting, a handheld pendulum. It becomes less mysterious how he came to be hiding in a hole beneath a city hostile to wizards, scratching out a living in constant terror of discovery; and the answer owes a lot to professional lack. Barely enough wizard for anywhere else, but enough for a place with barely a wizard.
He spends a long time muttering over his stinking brazier, long enough for the elf to tuck her hands into her sleeves and start stroking the hilt of her knife.
Finally he steps back, and throws his pendulum down on a barrel he seems to use as an impromptu table. He turns to her, rivulets of sweat streaming down his face.
"For payment," he says, "I want you to give me nothing. I don't want to touch a coin that's passed your hand. I don't want you to give me a name, not even whatever fake you use. Don't ever come near me again, don't seek me out, don't speak of me. Nothing, nothing that could be used in sympathy to trace a link from you to me. I don't know what it is, this thing you're seeking; I only know what it's not, and it's not a man. It's not anything I want to find out about."
"Where," the elf says. "Here in the city, or outside it?"
"Here." He shrugs and wipes his face. "I'd say good luck to you, but—" and he purses his lips and turns away.
Revenge, then, she thinks, not a homing messenger returning to the White Fastness to report its own demise; and ducks silently out of the wizard's chamber, retracing her steps to the surface.
She stops, on the way into the lodging-house, to speak tersely with Hibiscus-Blooms-Artfully-Arranged; asks whether, if she handed her an amount of money, an equal amount in coin that she has never touched could somehow be arranged to arrive in the hands of someone else.
"Impressive paranoia," Hibiscus says cheerily. "One would almost think you found a wizard after all."
"I would find the paladin," the elf says shortly.
Hibiscus blinks lazily at her. "You are out of sorts," she says, and the elf turns impatiently to leave her presence. "Your lady's upstairs, in your rooms," she adds quickly, "but stay a second. I haven't seen you perturbed before, not really. Should I have concern? Or is there anything you need."
The elf sags. "I am going to shout at her," she says. "And she will tell me something horrifying, and then one or both of us will cry. So it is, with paladins." She visibly rebuilds the set of her shoulders, then. "Go on," she adds bitterly. "Have some innuendo for the occasion. Say you'll soothe me — or her."
Hibiscus looks at her, long and soft and thoughtful. "I think," she says, quieter than usual, "it's not such a long time since you were the Ríastrad's thing — no, don't interrupt; it's obvious, to one who knows their orphans — and it's a hard task to be a person, afterward. It's no simple thing to walk away from the Ríastrad, but the mirror of it which it constructed inside you, to consult for all your understanding of the world...that's much harder to escape from."
The elf looks back, jaw clenched, very aware of where she has her knife.
"It's also obvious that she cares very much," Hibiscus says. "A certain amount of crying is — life. But I hope you know she cares."
The elf unlocks her teeth from each other. "I know," she says.
"I'm glad," Hibiscus says. "Both for the simple sake of it, but also...well. You're not the first of their orphans to walk away; you'll need it, I think," and she sighs, just a little. "Being a person," she says, "is difficult," and brightens to her accustomed tone and expression. "Go, young moon, join your companion in your heavens!"
The elf growls a little at her, without meaning very much by it, rubs her face, and takes herself up the stairs.
Ryssa is seated cross-legged on the many-blanketed bed they share, damp and newly scrubbed from her dip in the oily underground pool, combing her hair. The elf, still grease-besmirched, looks at her from the doorway.
"There you are," the paladin says easily, and smiles; the elf does not.
"Paladin," she says, and Ryssa's hand pauses in its movement.
"Elf," she says back, and settles her hands in her lap, comb placed under them. Her gaze is calm and clear, and rests on the elf, unafraid and nothing but kind.
There's a great feeling inside the elf's chest, crowding out her ability to quite breathe, and nothing she says will either quite capture or dispel it. She considers how best to make a start, cheek twitching. "You are rather more than my size," she says finally, voice rough. "You could have ended that perfectly easily; if anything, it would be easier to believe, and displaying my ability to best you regardless is a tip of our hand that we needn't have shown anyone here."
"All true," Ryssa says easily, and the elf bites at the inside of her own mouth, hard enough to taste blood.
"Why," she says sharply. "Why you."
"I mislike drowning," Ryssa says simply. "More than I do most ways to die."
"You didn't have to—"
"A thousand times, before I'd do it to you."
The elf begins to say something, hands already speaking in angry sweeps.
"Rather a thousand years of drowning, with a noose around my neck tying me to a shipwreck, until rope rotted and I floated free." Nothing about Ryssa's soft eyes or tone have changed at all. "I'm not drowning you. Make a note of it, for future, if you need to know it for your tactical consideration."
The elf stands, fists working open and closed like wave-washed bivalves at the sea's edge.
"I'm going to wash," she says eventually, in a thin, taut voice, and bangs the door closed behind her.
