"I take you to Rubinova Vezha," Hro Long-Finger tells the stupid foreigners. The prospect of beds and hot food — no matter how dismayed they are by the north's squalid reality when they arrive — seems the quickest way to get rid of them.
"We cannot, Wise Long-Finger," the Ryssa lady says. "We are tracked by an unnatural hunting-creature in the shape of a man, created by a wizard of the south. We cannot be responsible for bringing it somewhere it may kill people. We would not have brought it near you, had we known you were here."
"Sestra plache za kozoyu!" Hro spits, and grips their spear tight, calculating whether they can simply skewer these lethal liabilities and have done; but they see the elf watching them a killer's look, and think: whichever they spear first, the other will slay them in the act. "You bring wizard shit here?"
"I expect whichever of the Iron Czars notices it," warrior-thewed Ryssa says calmly, "they will kill it, where we cannot."
"Along with you and every person who's spoken to you or seen you, north of the snowline!" Hro rages. "You are poison! You are death!"
"As I said," the lady says, eyes fathomless. "We cannot go to Rubinova Vezha. Travel with us, Wise, and we will do everything in our power to see you through, alive and unharmed."
"What can you do," Hro says with the contempt of someone who's just been carelessly condemned to die.
"More than you think," the lady says steadily, and something in her unwavering eyes, or her voice, or the deep currents of the world, sets the hair on Hro's nape cold and prickling.
"Your choices are very few," the elf says, by her side, like a blade. "Stay here, and perhaps the thing behind us will kill you; or the Iron Czars will kill you for its proximity, as you fear. Or run, alone, and the Iron Czars will find you and kill you, as you fear. Or travel with us, and..." she turns her knifelike look on her companion. "I have seen the paladin accomplish stranger things than keeping you alive."
"Your god means nothing, north of the snowline," Hro says. "Your southern wizards mean nothing, north of the snowline. Nothing means anything, save for the ice and the ice and the Czars."
"I don't promise you my god will aid you, Wise," the lady says. "I make you the promise I can keep: that I will."
"And where she goes, I go," the elf says, looking put out about it, "so my aid, too, I suppose," and very obviously deliberately doesn't mirror the soft look the lady gives her.
"The north kills softness," Hro says, and if she thought the elf a blade before, now she sees her true edge: deadly focus, all on Hro.
"The north is not enough to kill the paladin," she says, like the hiss of steel on oilstone, "nor any part of her. Perhaps your softness was simply a weak softness."
Hro gapes, behind their mask.
This is — this is such a bizarre thing to throw as an insult, that they cannot even find purchase to argue; as though the elf had spat at Hro's feet and said well, perhaps you fall over on the northern ground should you trip, but my paladin is too much for your northern gravity, weakling! The north is a world entire to itself, filled to bursting with the ice and the ice, with everything south of it smeared on its psychogeographic periphery like the skin of solidified fat on top of cooled stew. The north is obliterating vastness. The north is everything and takes everything and kills everything with cold and cruelty. This is a fact in the way that the stars are facts, or one's own fingers. Nobody simply survives the north.
The lady folds fingers gently around her little lunatic's wrist. "Wise Long-Finger," she says. "I cannot promise to escape the attentions of the Czars; I cannot promise we will be unscathed. But these are perils you live with every heartbeat of your life, whether we are here or not. We will do our utmost for you. This is I can promise; this I have, if you choose it."
They are worse than stupid foreigners; they are mad. Truly god-touched, perhaps, their ability to grasp reality twisted out of shape by contact with the ineffable, unable to comprehend the north, even standing in it.
"The north will kill you both," Hro croaks, their own mind reeling and recoiling from these two.
"That, at least," the lady says, "I know it will not," and Hro's neck prickles horribly again.
