[Peach coughs into her fist and rolls first one shoulder, than the other, as if idly limbering up. It's a habitual motion, one she doesn't really think about.]

I didn't want to go to the healers about it. I knew what they were and they didn't hurt, anyway.

[What Krile said... There's something important there, rising like a bubble, but like a bubble she can't take hold of it. If Peach were still in that woman's body, she knows, she would have said something. She doesn't know what, but something, and for a moment she regrets being so measured. Maybe, like dragons being mages, it would be something she didn't know she knew.]

[Instead, she considers for a moment.]

Some people can get funny about women who fight. Even if they know someone who can, they'll try to claim that that woman's a fluke, and other girls will just get killed trying to be warriors. It's stupid of them, but that's how they are.

[That's right, she realizes. Someone had said something about that in her dream.]

[There's something white trotting through the nearest patch of underbrush. It's not the only dog loose in the park, but it is the only one coming this way.]