The wide eyes. Don't laugh. Don't laugh at his face, he can't help being clueless! Lashan's lips do something complicated and she leans forwards and pats her horse's neck. Helpfully, Thistle tosses his head and shakes his mane as if he needs soothing, a trace remaining of his high-strung colthood.

"I'm not that old, fledgling," she says after a moment, amusement still in her tone. "I'm still a callow stripling in this, only my seventy-first summer." She can't be the oldest person the very young Guts has ever seen, but most her age and older aren't still putting on armor and taking up swords.

She might just have to be crude about it. Fine, Lashan's not squeamish. "I'm trying to tell you everyone expected I was a boy-child because I came out of the womb with a pizzle. I grew up big and inclined to fighting and if you'd met me when I was your age you would have thought I was a boy." Especially with the local paucity of women warriors. "But I'm not a man. My inner self is female even if my outer self isn't. Not every bayot is little and pretty."

It's on the tip of her tongue to say that not every lakinon is big and muscular either, but he hasn't actually voiced that thought. Sometimes Lashan thinks that if she'd been born different she might have been lakinon anyway. Not all of them are quite men, just as not every bayot is quite a woman.