There’s something deeply fascinating to me about how outcasts recognize each other almost immediately.
A female wizard’s apprentice who never fit the role society wanted for her sits across a campfire from an outlaw leader who abandoned society altogether. And suddenly they are having a conversation nobody else around them fully understands.
Because the respectable people in society are usually the ones most obsessed with hierarchy and rules and “proper roles.” But once someone has already crossed the line into becoming an outsider? A lot of those rules stop mattering.
The outlaw does not care that she is a woman in authority nearly as much as the “respectable” men do. He cares whether she can survive. Whether she can command people. Whether she can make hard decisions without flinching.
And she realizes she feels safer being herself around criminals than around polite society. Which is honestly a little horrifying. Especially because earlier that same day she literally threw him to the ground to stop him from beating one of her men half to death.
And yet later she still invites him to sit at her fire. Not because she trusts him. Not because she thinks he’s secretly good. But because she understands him. And he understands something about her too.
They are both people who could not survive inside the life society prepared for them. And I think there’s something really emotional about characters who look at each other and realize: “Oh. You were never built for the cage either.”