[Legacy Of The Force] - 08(147)

“I don’t remember, “he lied. She could tell anyway. “Let’s go do the family thing, then.” Sintas put the stone in the hip pocket of her pants. “Just this once.”

He hadn’t finished calibrating the HUD, but he put his helmet on anyway. And once it was on, he looked like the Bo she once knew and loved, and the lost years vanished for a brief time. They went to Mirta’s feast.

Maybe Sintas would do that Kiffar thing with the new heart-of-fire, and read and discover everything that had happened to him while they were apart, and what he just couldn’t manage to tell her even now.

It was just three words. But it was three too many for Boba Fett.



NOVOC VEVUT’S HOME, KELDABE: WEDDING FEAST OF MIRTA GEV AND GHES GRADE

“I’ve found a use for Jedi!” Carid bellowed. “I knew I would one day! Look!”

The line of ale bottles stretched the length of the duraplast trestle table in Vevut’s crowded courtyard. Jaina concentrated, knowing how critical the timing would be. Then she inhaled slowly, stepped back, and Force-pulled all thirty caps off in a rapid sequence that popped and rattled like a Luit pyrocracker. Froth welled from the necks of the bottles; the guests showed their approval with shouts of “Oya!” and “Kandosii!, “hammering their fists on the thigh plates of their armor.

Jaina took a bow. “Now you know why Jedi apprentices spend years in quiet contemplation and earnest study at the academy. “

The celebratory feast was packed; guests had spilled out from the courtyard onto the grass outside the low retaining wall. A man in gray armor had an animal with him, a predator with a deeply folded coat and six legs. When she passed, it looked up sharply as if it recognized her, and made plaintive grumbling noises, slapping its whip-like tail on the ground. Mirta edged through the crowd toward her, not looking radiant or blushing.

Jaina could sense her misery, but she also knew the specific cause of it, because Sintas had told her: a single traumatic event whose consequences had spiraled out of control and finally fed into the crisis that now engulfed Jaina’s own family, and much of the galaxy. It wasn’t a di-rect causal chain, but it was so close and personal now that it might as well have been.

Fifty-odd years ago, what was happening to us right then? Mom was growing up on Alderaan. Uncle Luke was on Tatooine, no idea what was coming ten years down the line. Dad…. Dad was probably learning to steal speeders. And Sintas, who none of us knew or even thought about until this year, was a teenager with a baby daughter going through the worst time of her life. And none of us knew that we’d end up on this collision course.

Mirta finally pushed through the sea of bodies and steered Jaina to a quieter corner.

“Ba’buir was here with Grandmama earlier, but I can’t find them now, “Mirta said.

“They’ve probably got some talking to do.” “All I can think of now is-what if I’d killed him?” “But you didn’t.”

“You don’t understand, Jaina. It’s all I can remember with my mama now. She built her whole life around hating Fett and making him pay, from the work she did to the man she married. And everything she taught me. I grew up on hatred.”

“But you’ve changed all that, Mirta, “Jaina said. “You stopped that cycle, didn’t you? That takes some doing. Put it behind you. Live your life. I think Fett wants you to be happy, even if he doesn’t give you any clues.”

“I’m talking about what I nearly did. I was going to kill him. If your mother hadn’t diverted my blaster back on Corellia, he’d be dead now.”

Mirta hadn’t struck Jaina as the kind of woman who worried about things like that. She was hard; pure and sim-ple, an unsentimental and unforgiving woman. But in all that struggle to survive, and all the violence she had meted out, there remained someone who could challenge the core of her upbringing. It was an extraordinary strength. “What-ifs can be corrosive, “Jaina said. “You should…” “It’s not about me, Jaina. It’s about you. How do you think it feels when you find out that none of the events happened the way you thought, or even happened at all? But you were prepared to kill your own flesh and blood on the strength of it?”

“You think I’m going to kill my brother.” “I think you need to hear from someone who nearly killed their own grandfather. Think about what it’ll do to you.”

“Mirta, he murdered your mother. He killed my aunt.”

Jaina had an image of Jacen in her mind as he once was, and then imagined bringing a lightsaber down across his neck. It made her unsteady for a moment. “Are you saying I should forgive him? Is that what this is all about?”