Fel shook his head. “Bodies decompose too fast in the; jungle.”
He reached inside his jacket, causing Nashtah to reach for her thigh holster again.
“Whoa, there!” Han said, managing to clasp the assassin’s arm before she could draw the blaster.
Nashtah squinted at him in disbelief. “How’d you do that?”
“Old smuggling trick,” Han said casually. Something was definitely wrong with their drinks. He had seen how fast Nashtah was, and he should never have been able to stop her-not on his best day thirty years earlier. “Jag isn’t going to hurt anyone here. He just wants to show us something.”
Nashtah squinted across the table, but she pulled her hand away from her holster. “Don’t try anything stupid.”
“You have nothing to fear from me, I assure you,” Fel said. Once it was clear she would not be trying to blast him, he pulled a coil of braided hide strips from inside his jacket. He held it in front of Leia. “You know what this is, I assume?”
Leia nodded. “A Twi’lek memory cord-a long one.”
“Correct. I found it on Tenupe, shortly after I discovered the bodies of the commercial search party I mentioned.” He laid it on the table. “But their vessel was missing, and I followed the tracks of a lame female back to a cave where she had been living.”
“And that’s where you found this?” Leia asked.
Fel nodded. “My family had it researched. The first part seems to recount how she saved herself by cutting the spidersloth’s throat from the inside. It bit down just as you described, but the creature was already dying and didn’t do as much damage as you led Aristocra Formbi to believe.”
“Her lightsaber was activated when the creature took her,” Leia said. “I just didn’t think she’d kill the thing quickly enough to survive.”
“She nearly didn’t,” Fel said. He pointed to the next set of knots. “These describe her wounds and recovery. Her arm and six ribs were fractured, and she had several deep wounds in her abdomen and back. Fortunately for her-and unfortunately for us-when the Killiks evacuated after the battle, they left thousands of stragglers behind. She was able to summon a small group to care for her.”
“Wait a minute,” Han said. He was doing his best to keep an unobtrusive eye on the rest of the cantina, and so far the Hapan Security team seemed willing to wait for them to finish their drinks and pass out. “Are you saying the Killiks are still there?”
“I doubt it,” Fel said. “They were castaways, just as I was. I had regular, um, encounters with them during the first year. But they were always from different nests, and by the second year they were beginning to disappear. I think they lived out their lives and died.”
“That makes sense-Killiks have short life spans,” Leia said. “But a year would have been enough to nurse Alema back to health.”
“Indeed. She records each of their deaths in detail.” Fel paused, then indicated a set of knots that seemed to repeat themselves every four or five centimeters. “But these knots are the reason I’m here. They appear to be a recurring list of injuries received at your hands, and the knots between appear to be lists of possible retaliations.”
“What are you getting at?” Han demanded. “Are you saying that crazy trollop is coming after Leia?”
“I’m telling you what I found in her cave,” Fel replied evenly. “What you make of it is your business,”
Leia’s eyes flashed a warning at Han, then she turned back to Fel. “Thank you for telling me, Jagged. After what happened on Tenupe, I know it couldn’t have been easy for you.”
“Easy doesn’t matter.” Fel’s gaze grew distant and perhaps a little hard. “You warned me to eject, and I had a debt to repay. Now I have.”
“I see.” Leia’s expression turned sad. “So now you’ll be heading back to the Ascendency?”
Fel shook his head. “No, I’ll be watching you.”
Han would have asked why, except that was when the bartender returned. He set Fel’s ale on the table, then frowned at Nashtah, who was slumped in the corner with the same unfocused gaze that Leia often assumed when she entered a Force trance.
“Is Baldy all right?” he asked. “I don’t want nobody dying in here.”
“She’sh fine.” Han slurred his words deliberately, but he truly was feeling a little warm and drowsy. “Jush forgets to closh her eyes.”
The bartender scowled in suspicion. Han thought he might have overdone it, but Fel made a point of lifting his own mug to his lips and taking a small sip.