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The tent kept her out of direct sunlight, but it couldn't fend off all of the heat. Jeht lay out on her bedroll on her stomach, frozen stiff so as not to agitate the injuries beneath the heavy bandaging across her back. She inhaled, slow, and then just as carefully hissed her breath out between her teeth. It expanded her chest, and stretched the shredded skin across her shoulderblades. Her toes curled tight; she swallowed back a whimper against the pain.
Within arm's reach was the salve she was meant to put on it. The process was one that she dreaded doing. It was painstakingly long and excrutiating, retrieving the jar, unwinding and unwinding and unwinding her bandages, steeling herself as she forced her arm to bend to apply the salve to her back, and then finally wind and wind and wind new bandages around herself. And it was about time, now, to get it done.
Jeht dug a canine tooth into her lower lip. Her golden eyes glared accusingly at the unassuming little jar, close yet much too far away all at once. Then she buried her face into her bedroll. Inch by inch her hand crawled towards the salve. A sear like a hot iron slapped across her back. She drove her teeth into her lip so hard that she drew a rusty tang to her tongue. Her lip now burned too, but at least she had held back her voice.
"Lady Jeht?"
She froze at the voice from behind. Although she didn't raise her face to look, she recognized it as one of the people who'd taken to following her, this one a woman named Hajra.
"I told you, don't start with the 'lady' - it's just Jeht." She intended to travel alone after Babel had turned her into an outcast among the Tanit. Others who had nowhere to go joined her, and insisted on simply traveling in the same direction when she tried to send them away, and so she allowed them to do as they pleased and accompany her. She drew the line at taking any sort of official leadership role among them, however.
"Jeht," Hajra corrected herself, yet she maintained the same tone of respect that Jeht was too much in pain to contradict. Her voice was soft, but beneath the surface held a dangerous glitter. Naturally she was tough - like Jeht, like the others who joined her, she was an outcast herself. "It's about time to reapply the salve to your wounds."
"I was just planning on doing that."
"May I assist you?"
"No need." So much for taking it slow, damn it all. Jeht forced herself to sit upright, and her body screamed in protest. Without looking, her fingers felt for where she'd tied the bandages off. A couple agonizing tugs, and the bandages came loose.
They slid from her bare chest, but stuck to and hung from her back where they clung to the slashes across where razor claws had rent into her skin. A whimper escaped her throat; she peeled the bandages off. They fell into a bloody pile on the ground encircling her waist.
She reached, and her nerve endings fired off, raw and jolting through her limbs. Jeht froze, her mouth agape, unable to move or even cry out for a good few seconds. When it passed, her head swam, suddenly dizzied.
Hajra knelt beside her, a steadying hand upon her shoulder. She picked up the jar instead, and unscrewed the lid to dip her fingers inside. She scooped out some of its goop, pressing firmly upon Jeht's shoulder to get her to present her back to her. No verbal insistence upon helping, only doing, and giving the injured Jeht little choice but to allow her in this moment of weakness.
And so she did, just as silently, and Hajra began to apply the salve. Each stroke brought sharp pain from the agitation of her touch, followed by the chill that first hurt and then soothed where it spread. Some of the tension relaxed from Jeht's shoulders, and as Hajra worked across her wounds, the intensity of their pain gradually faded. Then Hajra helped to redo her bandages, each stroke across Jeht's skin like a comforting touch to reassure her in such a vulnerable moment.
Jeht was grateful to at last return to her prone position upon her bedroll, the reapplication of the salve faster than ever from Hajra's assistance.
"Thank you," she said. Exhaustion had gripped her so suddenly now that her brain no longer fixated upon her pain.
"Of course. I am here to support you, we are…" Hajra trailed off. Jeht could guess at what she was about to say. She understood the longing for a place of belonging, a tribe that they could call their own after being so long denied such "family".
Hajra cleared her throat, and allowed it to go unsaid. "Now I'll leave you to rest, Lady Jeht."
And Jeht was too tired to reprimand the title that once again slipped from Hajra's tongue.