Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [125]
Leia was familiar with that posture from her days in the marriage mart of the Emperor’s Court. A lot of the young men had had it, knowing the universe revolved around them and them alone.
“If we keep her at all,” he added, and gave her a look, up and down, calculated to be an insult.
Lord Garonnin replied quietly, “Whatever her position in the Republic, Lord Irek, Her Highness deserves the consideration due to the daughter of one of the Great Houses.”
Irek opened his mouth to snap a reply and Drost Elegin’s lip curled slightly with something close to smugness, as if his opinion about the boy and his mother had been borne out to their discredit. Roganda put her hand quickly on her son’s shoulder and added, “And for the time being, my son, she is our guest. And this is what we owe to our guests.” It might have been Aunt Rouge speaking—Leia could see Roganda’s eyes on Elegin as she brought out the words, and guessed they were more to impress him with her knowledge of how Things Should Be Done than from any true concern for Leia’s comfort.
“But …” Irek glanced from his mother’s face, to Garonnin’s, to Leia’s, and subsided. But the full lips were sullen, the blue eyes smoldering with a secret discontent.
“It is time we looked to our other guests.”
Irek threw a cocky glance back to Leia and said, with deliberate malice, “I suppose we can always kill her later, can’t we?” He transferred his gaze to Garonnin and added, “Have you caught that droid of hers yet?”
“The men are searching the tunnels between here and the pad,” said Lord Garonnin. “It won’t get far.”
“It better not.”
The boy turned and strode out, followed by Roganda in a whisper of silk.
Garonnin turned back to Leia. “They are parvenus,” he said, his matter-of-fact tone containing, by its sheer lack of apology, something abyssally deeper than contempt for those not of the Ancient Houses. “But such people have their uses. With him as our spearhead, we will be able to negotiate from a position of power with the military hierarchies that fight for control of the remains of Palpatine’s New Order. I trust you will be comfortable, Your Highness.”
Chief of State of the New Republic and architect of the Rebellion she might be, but Leia could see that she remained, in his eyes, Bail Organa’s daughter … and the last surviving member of House Organa. The last Princess of Alderaan.
“Thank you,” she said, biting back the annoyance she had always felt at the old Senex aristocracy and speaking to him aristocrat to aristocrat, sensing in him a potentially weak link in the chains that bound her. “I appreciate your kindness, my lord. Am I to be killed?” She fought to keep sarcasm out of her voice, to replace it with that dignified combination of martyrdom and noblesse oblige with which, she had been taught, aristocratic ladies surmounted every adversity from genocide to spotty tableware at tea.
He hesitated. “In my opinion, Your Highness, you would be of far more use as a hostage than as an example.”
She inclined her head, veiling her eyes with her lashes. Lord Garonnin came of the class that did not kill hostages.
Whether the same could be said for Roganda and her son was another matter.
“Thank you, my lord.”
And thank you, Aunt Rouge, she added silently, as the burly aristocrat bowed to her and closed the door behind him.
The bolts hadn’t even finished clanking over as Leia began her search of the room.
There was, unfortunately, little enough to search. Though large, the chamber contained almost no furniture: a bed built of squared ampohr logs and equipped with an old-fashioned stuffed mattress and one foam pillow so old that the foam was starting to yellow; a worktable, also of ampohr logs, beautifully put together but whose drawers contained nothing; a lightweight plastic chair of a truly repellent lavender. A screened-off cubicle contained sanitary facilities; a curtainless rod with pegs embedded in the wall behind it indicated where someone had once hung clothes.
Leia noted automatically that all the furniture was human proportioned,