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Raider raised an eyebrow. “Are you asking if we’ve fucked?”
“I can tell that you have, though not since you’ve been with us.”
Raider rolled his eyes. “You cannot tell that.”
“I most certainly can. There is tension between you but familiarity also. But there is a problem, yes?”
Raider sipped the watered-down tisine tincture, considering. If he couldn’t talk to Asha, he couldn’t talk to anyone.
When the Sudai had found him unconscious in the Kesh ten years ago, it was Asha who had insisted on saving him even when he’d been thought a raider cast out from his gang. The Raider, they had called him. Asha’s Raider.
She had cared for him in spite of that. She had cared for him even when he’d been at his worst. Confused and volatile. Even dangerous.
Raider didn’t like to remember those times. He had put them behind, with the rest of it.
“Yes, there are many problems,” Raider confessed.
“Hmm,” she murmured. “‘Many problems’ are usually one problem. If it had one word, what would it be?”
Raider winced, immediately aware that she had sensed what the problem was. “Who made you so wise and cruel, Asha?”
Asha laid a brown hand over his and said, “Fear is a thief.”
“Because it only takes from us, never gives back. I know.” Raider drained the cup and rested it on his knee, considering. “But it’s not just that. I don’t want to hurt him.”
“He is also afraid.”
“He’s just smart. He thinks ahead.”
“No one knows what is ahead, Raider. The sand dunes on the horizon are always shifting, because the wind is always changing.”
Raider sighed at the familiar axiom. Asha was impossible to argue with.
She took his emptied cup. “Let me help you.”
If not for the tisine already working to soothe his nerves, Raider might have found that difficult. But the mild sedative untied the knot that wanted to form in his stomach whenever he thought about Seth. Raider shrugged out of his kaftan and lay belly down on the rug.
He heard Asha uncap the jar, then he felt the warm smear of salve on his left shoulder. It was familiar, having her do this for him, even if it wasn’t comfortable. A cup of tisine couldn’t change that.
Raider liked to be touched, but this was different. Even though it felt good in a way, this was about pain, about acknowledging that it was there—and it meant thinking about its source.
As Asha started to work the salve into knotted muscles, Raider grunted. He wasn’t stiff like in the mornings, but even in the afternoons his fluidity was like a river flowing over and around rocks, a constant accommodation of them.
Near the surface, his muscles loosened under expert fingers, but deeper there was pain—and Asha found it.
Raider winced as a bolt of it shot up his neck into his skull, piercing strangely through his face.
Asha worked on his shoulder until it was supple and the pain became a smooth, almost distant pulse. Then she worked her way down to his forearm, finding knots he hadn’t known were there.
She turned her attention to his back. The muscles loosened between his shoulder blades, but when she worked her way down the knotted muscles along his spine, he tensed.
“Stop holding onto the pain,” Asha said. “Breathe and let it go.”
Easy for her to say.
But she was right, so Raider did what she said. The knots began to loosen. Raider moaned in relief.
When Asha stilled, it took Raider’s attention a moment to sharpen. Then he heard the footsteps.
