He had not raised her to be hard.

That was the thing people always got wrong about the General and his daughter.

He had raised her to be steady, which is a different thing entirely — to know the difference between the storms worth weathering and the storms you simply walk out of, and to never confuse her own worth with anyone else’s opinion of it.

He had taught her to shoot and to lead and to keep her head, yes.

But the lesson underneath all of those, the one he came back to again and again across her whole childhood, was gentler and harder both: that a person’s dignity is not something other people grant, and so it is not something other people can take.

They can insult you, he told her once, when she came home from school in tears over some cruelty.