The words hit her differently than they should have.
She heard "strong." She heard "woman." She heard the way he said it—not dismissive, not mocking, not the way the knights said it, not the way Dorn said it, not the way the world said it. He said it the way one states a fact. The way one says the sky is blue or the stone is cold. Without judgment. Without agenda. Without the underlying implication that "strong" and "woman" were contradictions.
She broke.
Not broke—opened. The shell that had held her together—the fighter's shell, the knight's shell, the sixteen-year shell of callouses and silence and refusal to be anything other than what she had decided to be—cracked. Not shattered. Cracked. Just enough to let something out. Something that had been behind the steel since she was three years old and swinging a stick at a fence post.
