"Strong enough." It's the easy answer, that understatement, because strong blades are valuable enough to be worth stealing, and some habits you never really fall out of. Some things you never really forget, even when you forget everything else.

(It isn't that he's a good person. He's a just person, and there's nothing just in forcing children to fight, and everything just in making it so that they don't have to.)

Still, the smile he gives her is somewhere in the range of older-brother-ly. "Just focus on what you can do," he says. "There's no shame in not being able to do everything."