"Perhaps. But in my experience, you don't typically hear much about wounded healers. Just dead soldiers." Not that she's explicitly been involved in war before, but... you grow up places like she had to and you hear a thing or two. Ravka was in unrest for so many centuries at this point, it's hard to imagine the country may ever find peace.

She frowns a little as she takes that in, turns it over in her mind. "You clearly have not been in a position where hope is all that you had to keep you going." Inej has. More than once in her short life. The slaver ship. The pleasure house. Van Eck's. It's overwhelming to think of it all lined up in a row like that, how frequently she has been pushed into positions she never asked for, how often in just the space of a few years she has found herself feeling that bone-deep sense of inescapable hopelessness.