Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [105]
She wondered what the place had been like, when the Mluki had inhabited their massive stone houses clustered against the bottom of the bench, farming their small crops and occasionally going up to hunt on the ice.
Not so foggy, certainly, without the dome, and not so hot, though the jungly rift held the heat well. The orchards wouldn’t have extended as far as they did now. There would have been clumps of dense jungle around the warm springs, nothing at all down at the bottom of the valley, where the mudflats, caldera, and steaming gas vents of the rift’s true bottom poured forth more minerals than unengineered plants were capable of digesting.
Exactly the sort of place a heat-loving, plant-loving, beauty-loving Ho’Din would seek out.
She remembered her vision of Plett, tall and willowy, his flowerlike cluster of headstalks faded nearly white. A gentle face, with that look in his eyes Luke had had when he’d come back from servitude to the Emperor’s vile clone.
Was this a refuge he had chosen, a place to repair, to rest? How had he learned about it, for that matter? The galaxy was filled with planets, worlds, star systems still unexplored, and unless a system was on someone’s computer, it didn’t exist. Roganda might possibly have heard of the place at Court …
Although now that she thought about it, that troubled Leia, too.
And how had Plett liked having the peace of his experiments disrupted by the influx of …
How many?
Nichos had spoken as if there was a fair-sized gang of children.
Leia had had almost a year of raising two enterprising Jedi babies … with Anakin just arrived to provide his own variety of mayhem. After years of quiet meditation, how had the aged reptiloid coped with a swarm of them, of all ages, running up and down the tunnels of his crypts, following their own leaders even where their parents had warned them not to go because of the kretch …
She stopped in her tracks, Nichos’s deep voice sounding in her ears.
The older kids … Lagan Ismaren and Hoddas Umgil …
Lagan Ismaren …
Roganda Ismaren’s … brother? Her age was certainly right. A few years older than Leia—a few years younger than Nichos—she would be old enough to remember the world where she had lived.
That meant that Roganda Ismaren—Palpatine’s concubine and member in good standing of his Court—had come from the blood and the heritage of the Jedi Knights.
The Emperor had been hideously strong in the Force. He couldn’t have been unaware.
Anger flushed through Leia like the shock of a burn.
She lied.
Leia had suspected the other woman had been lying about something, but she realized with sudden clarity that it had all been an act—all of it, down to the sweet, frightened tones of her voice. An act calculated to play on her pity.
If Roganda was Force-strong the Emperor might have used her, certainly, might have coerced her … but he’d never have simply passed her around to his guests.
She came here seven years ago, thought Leia, quickly turning her steps back toward town. She wasn’t sure what she should do now—certainly not go anywhere near the woman herself, and she was gladder than ever she’d turned down that invitation to coffee—but she wanted at least to find Han, to send word to Ackbar, to look again through the records Artoo had run out to see if they included port arrivals in the year of Palpatine’s death …
But as she crossed through the small square at the head of Roganda’s narrow street, she saw something that hit her in the pit of the stomach like a club.
Emerging from between the dark foundations, the white