The comment served the way she wanted it to, and yet as Imenry turned back, Elsa had to bite her teeth together to keep her head high. The woman fought like a man, and she certainly glared like one too. Women seldom intimidated Elsa, not the way men did, but Imenry was somehow different, her cold gazer cutting to the bone. Nevertheless, Elsa felt as if she had won the first round - Brennan obviously had not told his friend everything, despite her attempt to make it sound like Elsa was unimportant her shoulders were tense. Letting her eyes play up and down Imenry's tall form, Elsa shrugged slightly with one shoulder, eyelashes dipping against her pale cheek for a moment. She would consider it a win and continue playing. The next comment made her eyebrows fly up and a slightly bewildered expression entered her dark eyes.
She didn't want to ask, because knowledge was power, and she did not want to come across as weak, not now. But the fact remained that she had no idea what the woman was talking about. Brennan - and this time she thought about him with less pleasure and more annoyance - had told her precious little, beside naming her a mage. The word tower though, reverberated around her soul, echoing emptily. Turning her head slightly to the side to hide her confusion, she raised her right hand, pressing the back of her knuckles against her mouth as if she could force the truth back. "I am unfamiliar with this land and it's customs," she compromised at last, her heavily accented voice holding a measure of amusement. It was true after all, and perfectly polite to say.
Success, at last. Slowly letting out a breath she had not realised she was holding, Elsa nodded her head slowly in gratitude, a gesture more grand than her tattered dress and knotted hair gave her reason to. Wordlessly she followed Imenry outside, drawing her woollen shawl closer against the wind. As she caught the last word and her brain unknowingly translated it, she had to fight the urge to wrap the shawl over her face instead. "Knights?" she questioned, voice suddenly unsure, breathy even. "Is there no other place we could go?" She remembered the feeling knights and armoured men evoked inside her, and she did not want to experience it if it could be avoided. Glancing around her quickly, she shivered, once, twice, before giving in to the vague feeling of threat and dragging the shawl up over her head, lifting a corner of it over the lower half of her face. If her calculating mind her considered it, she would have realised how suspiciously she looked, but her inarticulate fear was overriding anything else.