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Raider sighed.
“You know, for all the times I’ve seen you following Demia, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you actually talk to her, and you talk to everybody. So just talk to her! Be yourself!”
“What if she doesn’t like me?”
“You’ve known her since you could walk!”
“It’s different now! I want her to like me differently. And she doesn’t know everything about me. She might not like it all. How do I choose what to tell her?”
“Just be honest. If she likes you, she likes you. If she doesn’t, she doesn’t. It doesn’t do any good to have her like only part of you.”
Fahet shook his head. “This is terrible advice. Maybe I will ask Tulef.”
On a certain level, Raider agreed. He wouldn’t take that advice either. Because when it came to Seth?
Raider could not bear to think of him learning the truth.
***
“Kubat said you wanted to see me?” Raider said, ducking into Asha’s tent.
Sitting comfortably cross legged in her loose pants of saffron linen, a sleeveless white tunic baring her strong arms, Asha patted the green and pink rug beside her. A familiar pottery jar rested by her knee.
“Come have tea with me.”
This being the midday stop, no fires had been lit to cook or brew. Asha uncorked a flask and poured a stream of rusty-colored liquid into a copper cup. She diluted it with some water from a skin.
“Tea?”
Instead of replying, Asha set out the copper cup where he was supposed to sit.
Given that Asha had her jar of salve out, Raider would put his money on that being a tincture of tisine root. A mild sedative.
Raider sighed, sort of hating that she’d noticed, sort of relieved that she had.
“It’s getting worse,” she said as he sat beside her.
Raider picked up the cup and took a sip, tasting the expected bitterness of tisine. “This stuff is awful.”
“It helps the muscles loosen,” Asha said then repeated, “It’s getting worse.”
“A little.”
Asha picked up her own cup and sipped, though Raider could tell from the pink stain it left on her lip that hers was juice.
She asked, “So how did you meet the Curator?”
“Jumping right into it, are you?”
She shrugged, unrepentant. “At the oasis, he was there, then yesterday there were too many people around, everyone demanding your attention. I didn’t get to ask about your man.”
“He’s not my man.”
Asha’s rather extravagant snort of disbelief made one of her graying braids fall over her shoulder into her cup.
“You deserved that,” Raider told her as she retrieved the braid and sucked pink juice from its sodden end. “And Seth and I are just—”
“You are not friends,” Asha cut in, tossing the braid over her shoulder. “But the fact that you introduced him that way means you are more than traveling companions.”
