Page 73 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

My cheeks heat at the praise. “Oh, it’s just what anyone would have done.”

Grace grimaces. “I don’t think so. Most people panic around injury and sickness, in my experience.”

Her eyes go to the bright red blooms across Vantos’ bandages, her lips pressed together.

She heads back to his side, peeling one of the bandages back and revealing the cut beneath.

It looks angry and bloody, and my head swims a little, but I swallow the feeling down, push through it.

On the plus side, I haven’t felt sick since the moment Grace called for my help.

“Is he…” I can’t even get the words out. I don’t want to give voice to the thought that the warrior might not survive.

“I’ve been assured he’s going to be fine,” Grace says. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? A primitive society like this. They don’t have any of the tech Mercenia had access to, but Shemza is confident he’ll pull through. I don’t know about you, but I look at those wounds and see a death sentence.”

There’s a slight wobble in her lips as she says this.

I know what she means. Sure, someone on the upper tiers back home would probably be patched up and sent home to recuperate from injuries like this.

On the bottom tiers, infection was deadly.

And Grace, as a medic, will have seen that over and over again.

It must have been hard, being the closest thing those people had to a doctor and not being able to do anything to save any of them.

“If Shemza believes he’s going to be fine, then we should believe it,” I say, trying to sound confident. Trying to feel confident. For both of us.

At that moment, the door opens, and Shemza steps through, a bowl in his arms. He’s younger than the other raskarrans, I think, or he has a more boyish face. But he has a surety about him when it comes to the medical stuff. A confidence and command that’s obvious despite the language barrier.

He sets the bowl down on a sideboard and gestures Grace to his side. He shows her the berries inside - the same berries he’s been using to treat our ailments all the way home.

“ Djenti fressin ,” he says, then gathers up a handful and puts them in a little pot.

He sets the pot on a stand over the fire that burns low in the corner of the hut, mashing the berries with a white utensil stained red at the end, as if it’s been used for this purpose many times before.

Grace watches everything he does closely, and he’s careful to pause, make space for her to see what he’s doing.

After a moment, the bitter tang of the berries starts overriding the sweat and sickly smell in the air, and I hear the berries in the pot start to bubble.

Shemza removes them from the heat, setting the pan down on the ground.

It looks to be made of some sort of clay, not metal.

I haven’t seen anything metal since we left the escape pod on the beach.

Shemza takes the utensil out of the pot, a little of the sticky berry sauce coating it.

He blows on it, touching it with the very tip of his finger a few times, testing the temperature.

Then he looks to Grace, taking her hand in his and turning it over.

There’s nothing intimate about it - it’s clinical. A doctor treating a patient.

Not at all like the way he is with Lorna, I think.

Whatever he’s looking for on Grace’s hand, he doesn’t find it.

Instead, his eyes track to me, a smile crossing his face.

He’s handsome, and from what I’ve seen, he’s kind, too.

I hope he and Lorna do end up as mates. That girl’s had a rough time of it so far on this planet. She deserves something nice.

Shemza approaches me, reaching to touch me, but pausing before he does, looking for permission.

I nod, and he cups my chin in his hand. It ought to feel wrong, like he’s about to try something I really don’t want him to, but again, he’s clinical about it, gesturing for Grace to step forward and see whatever it is he’s seeing.

He tilts my head to the side, touching a finger to a spot on my cheek, tracing the scratch I know I have there.

It’s nothing - a tiny scrape that I got when we crashed, already mostly healed.

I got off lightly. Khadija has a massive cut right on her eyebrow, and Mattie has deep bruises across her chest and shoulders where she slammed against the harnesses. A little scratch is no issue.

Shemza scoops some of the berry sauce onto his fingers, then paints it over the scratch on my cheek.

I hiss, a sensation like lots of needles stabbing into me starting up on my cheek. It lasts for no more than a second or two, but it’s intense and surprising. Then Shemza picks up the damp cloth, rinsing it in the water before using it to wipe the sauce away.

“It’s gone,” Grace says, brushing her fingers over my cheek. “So it can be used to treat external injuries as well as internal ones.”

Shemza gestures at Vantos, who’s still sleeping soundly. Grace immediately goes to his side and starts peeling away the bloodied bandages. I stand beside her, taking the bandages out of her hands.

“The crate on the side over there is for dirtied clothing,” Grace says, pointing it out. I take the bandages and deposit them inside. When I return, Shemza has poured a load of the berry sauce into Grace’s hands.

“Here,” Grace says, and I manage to cup my hands together just seconds before she pours a load into them. “You get his shoulder.”

She uses one hand to cup the berry sauce, the other to smear it across the wound on Vantos’ stomach.

Shemza is doing the wound on his other side.

I follow Grace’s lead, shifting the sauce into one hand before using my other to paint it across the wound on his shoulder.

I think of how much the little cut on my face stung, and I’m glad that Vantos is unconscious, that he doesn’t have to endure this stuff being applied.

Once Vantos’ wounds are coated, Grace dips her hands in the water, cleaning the berry sauce off, then grabs a fresh supply of bandages.

With Shemza’s gaze on her, she binds the wounds, tying the bandages off when she’s done, and looking to him for approval.

He smiles again, and Grace’s shoulders relax for the first time since I walked in here.

“I feel like they expect a lot of me,” Grace says to me as I rinse my hands off, while Shemza cleans and tidies away his tools. “Sally told them I’m a healer. It’s hard to explain that my ‘healing’ was mostly papering over cracks and providing pain relief. I’m trying to learn.”

She sounds almost defensive. I feel kind of sad for her.

Liv has painted starting our lives here as a way to reinvent ourselves, to decide what we want to do and have the chance to actually do it.

To step outside of the boxes we’ve lived in all our lives.

But Grace is being pushed into the same mold she was forced into by Mercenia.

“Do you want to learn?” I say, the words coming out before I can think better of them.

Fortunately, Grace doesn’t seem to mind my blunt question.

“Yes, I do. I couldn’t help Lorna before.

Her arm - I couldn’t do anything. But Shemza could.

He sorted her out quickly. And now she’s going to be fine.

She was dying, but now she’s fine. That’s amazing.

To have that power to help the tribe…” She shakes her head, a look of apology in her eyes.

“Thank you for your help. Sorry to have dragged you into all that. I assume you came here for a reason?”

She touches a hand to my arm. The sickly feeling rises up again in the back of my throat. I try to frame the words, to line them up and speak them.

I’m afraid I might be pregnant.

But what comes out is, “I want to learn, too.”

“You want to be a healer?” Grace smiles wide. “It would be great to have someone to learn all of this with.”

“I’m not the smartest,” I say, the words bubbling up out of me in my growing panic.

“You’ll probably have to be super patient with me.

But I don’t think I’m cut out to be a hunter like Ellie, and I’d rather never work on another item of clothing for the rest of my life.

But I want to help. I really do want to help. ”

Grace just beams and gives me a hug. “You’ll be great. You’re a natural.”

I blush again, and can’t help feeling pleased. Even though this is not how this conversation was supposed to go.

Grace talks excitedly about learning medicine with me, promising that she’ll teach me everything she knows so I can get a bit of a head start when it comes to learning what Shemza has to teach us.

With every word she speaks, the chance to say what I actually came here to say slips further and further away.