“What’s that supposed to mean?” He rounded on the elf, eyes narrowed. Dwalin’s patience with the fair folk had ever been of a short nature, much like his temper at large, and something in that voice, which rang out clear and melodious, just seemed to rub him the wrong way.
“Spies aren’t welcome here,” he added, a rumble in his chest. “nor those that advocate them.”
Caranthir raised a quelling hand, tilting his chin in a raptorlike movement to look down at the young dwarven warrior.
“Ikhli, bahith!” he answered, a few words of the bare Khuzdul he had learned long ago, from those trading partners of long standing in Nogrod and Belegost, those great cities which had lain beneath the Ered Luin in his day. Perhaps still did, though as yet he knew not, nor whether he’d be welcome within them even so. The friendship between Casari and Eldar had been, it seemed, forgotten – broken not by the Noldor, by Caranthir’s own folk; but by the Þindar and their damned grasping and thievery.
“I am no spy,” he continued in the clumsily bastardized Adûnaic apparently used as a common tongue in this day, “but merely a traveler who has seen much.”