Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [173]
She touched his face, the bruises and the shrapnel cuts and the beard stubble, his mouth that had pressed to hers in the dream that hadn’t been a dream.
If I could ask for only one thing, one thing in my entire life …
He brought her gently against him, holding the long slender bones, the light sinewiness of her, pressing his face against the pale ragged hair, which he knew would turn brown in time. She was breathing. He could feel it against his cheek, under his hands, next to his heart.
Then she laughed, a soft and wondering sob, and he flung his head back and everything rose within him in a single wild whoop of triumph and joy. “Yes!” he yelled, and they were laughing and crying both, hanging on to each other, and she was saying his name, over and over again as if she still didn’t believe it; couldn’t believe that such things were occasionally permitted by Fate.
It was her voice, and nothing like Cray’s at all.
His hands shook as they framed her face, Leia and Mara and Han and the others standing in the doorway of the hold watching all this in silence, knowing something was taking place and not quite knowing what.
But after a time Leia said, hesitantly, “That … that isn’t Cray.” There was no question in her voice.
“She stepped aside,” said Luke, knowing absolutely and exactly what had happened in the last moments on board the Eye.
“After Nichos went up the shaft,” said Callista softly. “He was hit, badly, most of his systems cut to pieces … He was in no pain, but he could feel himself shutting down as he set the core on overload. Cray said to me that she wanted to stay with him. To cross to the other side with him. To be with him. She was a Jedi, too, remember … not fully trained, but she would have been one of the best.”
Tears flooded the gray eyes again. “She said if she couldn’t be with the one she loved in this world, at least someone could. She said to thank you, Luke, for all you tried to do for her, and for all you did.”
He kissed her, like the breath of life coming into his body after long cold, and stumbled trying to get to his feet on his bad leg. Laughing shakily, holding on to each other for support, they got to their feet and turned to the group in the doorway.
He said softly, knowing it for the truth as he knew the truth of his own bones, “Leia—Han—Mara … Threepio, Artoo … This is Callista.”
Chapter 26
“Everything has to be paid for.” Callista passed her hands across the surface of the glass sphere, where the pink-gold liquid glittered—unstirring—in the glow of the lamp. Shadows bent and flickered over the other objects in the toy room, catching angles of color, shadow, light. Outside, the stream that ran through the wide hall clucked and muttered in its stone channel, and the glowrod hissed a little in a loose socket, but there was no other sound.
“I should have known there would be a risk,” she went on in that soft, slightly husky voice with the slight inflection of the Chad deep-water ranges. “I might have guessed there would be a price.”
“Would you have done it,” asked Leia, “if you knew?”
Callista said, “I don’t know.”
She crossed the room to the flat rectangular tank, with its thin layer of yellow sand, moving with an odd, graceful awkwardness. She had on the faded blue jumpsuit of a spaceport mechanic, laced down as tight as it would go in the back and still baggy over flanks and shoulders, and a mechanic’s heavy boots. With her cropped hair and shy, rather quirky cast of face she had an unfledged look, like a military cadet. A lightsaber hung at her belt, a gleaming line of bronze sea creatures inlaid in its grip.
“The Masters used to call images in the tank, like forming up holos. They’d project their thoughts through the sand. I don’t know what its exact composition is, but it occurs naturally on a world in the Gelviddis Cluster. The sand is what makes it easy for a child to do the same.”
Leia frowned, considering the faintly glittering, daffodil-colored dust, trying to evoke Han’s face, or Jacen’s, by thinking through