His head tilted to her slowly, and an unnerving smirk crept upon his face.
"Hul grelerak mithar?" he accused in a rapid fire speech, but Onion could make no sense of it beyond Hul, to me (Linguistic note: pronouns are given an alternate ending indicating possessive, transitive, passive, causative, and passive causative. Hu = I, ~l = transitive) She eyed the book he still held in his hands and wondered what he had seen that seemed to have catalyzed this change in him. She considered a grab for her dictionary, but thought better of it. Her mind flashed warnings of danger at the mere concept of approaching the man. It could not be physically possible, but it seemed that he had grown in stature.
Clearly impatient with her silence he demanded, "Bwaer?" Onion, still constricted and obscured underneath the gauze of her leper's garb. Onion's mind raced through the little language she had learned. Bwaer, Definition: Yes, Positive, Understand. It was strange that he was speaking Lithenese, Gregor's language, and not Eirdren, but this thought did not cross her preoccupied mind.
Her confusion was quickly turning to caution. While she still believed the scrawny man posed no genuine threat to her self, his increasingly agitated speech and defensive stance put her on edge. Instinctively she felt for her calf-high boot and the throwing knives they usually contained. But the day she lost it all she lost those too.
Her opponent also felt though the folds of his own attire, but unlike her, the man know to her as Cedric was fruitful in his search. At his waist the erratic man drew a small but sharp dagger whose blade had been concealed, pressed horizontally against the flat of his abdomen underneath his belt.
Hostage blades, they called them on the continent, though they had yet to make an appearance among any of the tribes of the Outer Crest. They were useless in melee and their balance was too asymmetrical to serve as the functional throwing daggers so favored by the Nü. But they were easily hidden and quite effective at presenting close range victims with very few options. It was a fine tool for both kidnappers and their would be victims alike, and the bei'thal likely anticipated that Cedric might become the latter.
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