Alt-text: "Halen does not let the fact that he doesn't speak the language keep him from speaking with confidence."

Welcome to chapter nine! The worst things are over, the siege is broken, everyone is fine (more or less), ... things are looking up, right?

As a tangent for people who are interested (not necessary to understand the comic at all): I'm still trying out things with speech bubbles indicating language.

The round bubbles with the spikes on them indicate tyr'enn - notice how Katharina's is relatively clean, but does not have the little bit of white in the spikes, to indicate that she is fluent but is lacking the nuance of an actual native speaker.

Halen, on the other hand, is struggling to scrape anything understandable together at all, which is why his bubbles are all wonky and wiggly.

And if you take a look at the last page, you'll notice that Ki'i'Mar has three of those spikes on each side of the speech bubble instead of just two ... that's because tyr'enn is one of those languages that can sound very differently depending on the social status of the person speaking them, and the Great Gena was raised as thinking of herself of basically the Most Important Person In The World and grew up squarely in high society.