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work on his leg, the medicine and her touch bringing that same deep, healing comfort. This time, though, the sensation soon became more than mere comfort. With the absence of the pain, he was helpless to stop the response of his body to hers.
    He sat there, feeling the heat gather in his loins as her hands worked their way down his leg and up again toward his thigh. And he knew the precise moment that she realized how her touch was affecting him.
    Uttering a strangled cry, she scrambled off the bed.
    “Kasi.”
    The name from their childhood stopped her. Still, she stood warily, poised to flee.
    He gestured downward. “I’m not going to run after you. By the time I attached that pitiful excuse for a leg, you’d be gone—to wherever it is you hide during the day.” He made a sound that was almost a laugh. “Or I could hop after you. I haven’t tried that yet—don’t know how fast I’d be at it.” Nor had he joked about the leg, he thought with a kind of detached amazement.
    Her features contorted.
    “Kasi,” he said again, very gently.
    She held herself stiffly, as if she might break in two, and the question that had been gnawing at him for days worked its way to his lips and came out in a half-strangled growl. “The Dorre soldiers who came to Renfaral—did they find you?”
    Her whole body jerked as if he’d slapped her, and he felt a sudden pain in his gut, like the twisting of a knife.
    “Did they catch you?” he managed, praying he was wrong.
    Her head gave the smallest of nods. When she spoke, her voice cracked. “In the woods. They didn’t know I was Laster’s daughter, so they didn’t kill me.”
    The look on her face told him more than the words. He clenched his jaw to keep from roaring his outrage. He had heard soldiers bragging of catching Farlian women and teaching them a lesson in obedience to their new masters.
    “I would never do anything to hurt you,” he said, struggling to speak around the fist-sized obstruction in his throat.
    “When I touched you, you got . . .” She stopped, gulped.
    “Hard,” he finished for her, then went on to admit, “I was aroused. Do you know what that means?”
    “That you want to have sex with me.”
    The stark look on her face pierced though his chest to his heart. “That’s only a small part of what I feel. When you touched me and talked to me, you made me feel things I didn’t think I’d ever feel again. Good things. Things I thought had died inside me.”
    She stayed where she was, her gaze searching his face.
    “Kasi, I would never hurt you,” he repeated. “I swear that. On the altar of Atherdan.”
    Her head came up. “On Atherdan? The sacred place of your people.”
    “Yes.”
    Her small white teeth worried her lip.
    “I can’t get up. You have to come back here, so we can talk.”
    The breath froze in his lungs as he watched her stand unmoving. Then, in a rush she came to the bed and perched on the side, just out of reach, her face turned away from him.
    “Can you tell me about it?” he asked.
    “I haven’t told anyone,” she said in a ragged voice.
    “Last night you made me face things I didn’t want to face. And this morning I felt better.”
    “What happened to me was . . . bad.”
    “I know.” He wanted to reach for her, take her in his arms. He kept his hands flat against the mattress.
    “Four of them caught me,” she choked out. “And they dragged me into the old tool shed.”
    She told him things, then, that he didn’t want to hear, things that made bile rise in his throat, though he listened until she was finished, until she began to weep, until he wept with her. Finally, when he couldn’t stand it any longer and reached for her, she slid away. When he called her name, she slipped out of the room.
    And he was left alone on the bed with only his troubled thoughts for company. He had come to this place feeling sorry for himself, for what he had endured. But his wounds were of the flesh. Hers were of the