"You certainly know your stuff," he'd told her. Doubtless he meant it as a compliment, but it bit her just the same.
She certainly knew...how to kill a good man.
She certainly knew...how to hunt down an innocent princess.
She certainly knew...how to help the forces of evil.
Yes, she certainly knew her stuff.

Guilt surged through her once again. She kept her gaze focused on the enemy, unable to look Solomon in the eye. "Thank you, I try," she replied, making sure her tone remained even and revealed nothing.

Solomon took a stab at narrating how the other scouts were faring. Rose decided it would make a good opportunity to forget her guilt, and watched with interest as Solomon interpreted what he could see. He soon had her cackling again after he introduced the carrots.

At the end, though, he resumed his inadvertent crusade to resurface her guilt. "I will never know as much about scouting as you would, Rose, but I'm quite sure you aren't supposed to loot, not even ashy carrots."

The 'ashy carrots' line would normally have sent her giggling. But Solomon didn't know how deathly scared she'd been of those enemy scouts, nor of the guilt he kept insensitively pricking. She decided it was high time to tell him.
[i]One cannot fix a problem that is not first put to light.[/i]
"It's not that I know so much more about scouting than they do, really," she began quietly. "It's just that...well, bad guys don't seem so scary when you can laugh at them, you know? It takes away their power over you. If you can recognize their strengths and flaws and see them for who they are, you can more appropriately choose when to run and when to stand strong. Honestly, even one of these guys could eat you for breakfast with one hand tied behind his back. If they see us, it's over. But we don't stand a chance if we cower behind our rocks quivering every time they look this way."

She paused to find her words. In her mind, she drafted up half a dozen ways to broach the matter of his pricking her conscience, but they all felt like victim-blaming, fishing for compliments, or worse. So she kept her mouth shut and smiled.

[i]I'll brood on it later.[/i]

Rose looked again to the newly-cristened Phil the Amataur. Now he was looting the bakery, near the same place Rose herself had looted the sack of bread rolls. "Yup, looting ashy carrots definitely falls outside the bounds of civilized behavior," she quipped. The midnight dark was all that made her joking smirk seem real.