Free Wheel of the Infinite by Martha Wells

She felt him react to the contact, just a slight start, perhaps because her hands were cold. His skin was very warm and she was more aware of the pulsebeat in his wrist than she should be. She noticed he was clean, or at least not more filthy than she was from long days of travel, then remembered the midnight swim in the baray. That didn’t help her concentration any.
    She was uncomfortably aware that the last time she had been this close to a man had been two months ago when she had helped hold Rastim’s son down so Old Mali could lance his boil. Before that... Well, she wasn’t going to add up the days, but it had been a long time.
    He had said nothing, and under the pressure of that silence, she found herself saying, “What’s your name?”
    His eyes flicked up to meet hers. Green flecked with gold. “Rian.”
    Caught unprepared by his willingness to give up that information so readily, she stared at him and he grinned at her, obviously conscious of having surprised her. Again. Inwardly cursing her susceptibility, she said, “Is that all? No family, no clan?” If she was remembering rightly, the Sitanese took the name of their local lord for a family name.
    He turned his head and she noticed his right earlobe had the marks of at least four piercings for ornaments; she knew the Sitanese denoted rank in their warrior caste with ear studs, but she didn’t know what the number signified, if anything. He had laid the sheathed siri next to him on the bench. She had thought it without ornament, but this close she could see the ring and the hilt bore deep marks and gashes— not signs of use, but places where stones or figured metal had been removed. Had he sold everything valuable during his long journey,
carefully removed any mark of rank before he left?
Maybe both
, she thought. He was wearing an amulet around his neck, next to his skin. She knew it must be important to him, since he had sold or otherwise gotten rid of any other ornament. It was a small disk of fine white stone on a faded blue cord, inlaid with lapis in a runic figure.
That doesn’t tell you much
, she thought in wry self-disgust.
Your education in the customs of lands outside the Empire might have been just a little better
. But then she had never expected to have to wander them. He said, “Things are less complicated in the Sintane.”
    “If the Sintane is so much better, why are you here?”
    “I didn’t say it was better, just less complicated.”
    When she released his arm the warmth of his skin seemed to cling to her fingers. She took a tana leaf from the wrapped bundle under the salve jar. He watched with a somewhat bemused expression as she worked the sweet-smelling salve into the leaf. “You don’t want to know my name?” she asked.
    “I know your name. You’re Maskelle.”
    For an instant, she felt cold. “How do you know that?”
    Instead of betraying any guilt, he gave her that look she was beginning to be accustomed to, the
what is wrong with your wits
look, and explained, mock patiently, “You answer to it when the others yell it at you.”
    “Oh.”
Idiot
, she told herself. “The others are the Corriaden Travelling Grand Theatrical, from Ariad.”
    “But you’re from Duvalpore.”
    “Yes.” She took his arm again and laid the leaf along the cut, then bound it in place with a clean strip of cloth. She had to grit her teeth to hold back the impulse to explain that the tana had healing properties too; his opinion that she didn’t know what she was doing was as palpable as the dampness in the air. It had to be intentional.
    He looked at her staff. “What’s a Voice of the Ancestors doing on the Great Road with a travelling Ariaden puppet show?”
    “It’s not a puppet show.”
    He looked up at the puppets suspended from the wagon’s ceiling, one eyebrow lifted in eloquent comment. “It’s not an ordinary puppet show,” she explained, tying off the bandage and aware she sounded like a fool. And that they had