Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [7]
As she spoke of her childhood, her uncertainty broke through the careful perfection of her beauty, and Luke remembered she was only twenty-six, a few years younger than himself. She scraped at the mineral deposits on an earring with a lacquered pink thumbnail. Oxydized sulfur and antimony, Tomla El had identified it, mixed with trace minerals and mud.
“My aunts had some, too,” said Leia thoughtfully. “Aunt Rouge, Aunt Celly, and Aunt Tia … Father’s sisters.” Her mouth flickered into a wry quirk at the memory of those three redoubtable dowagers. “They never stopped trying to turn me into what they called a Proper Princess—and marry me off to some brainless twerp from one of the other ancient ruling Houses.…”
“Like Isolder?” Han named the hereditary Prince of the Hapes Consortium—and Leia’s erstwhile suitor—and Leia made a face at him where he stood next to Luke in the dining room doorway.
“But they had jewelry like this,” Leia went on after a moment. “It’s Old Republic bronze, the strapwork and the iridescent wash.”
“He must have started out with pockets full of the stuff,” remarked Han, “if he’s been buying yarrock with it along the way.”
Leia reached across the table to touch her own earrings, which she’d discarded the moment she was out of public view: sleekly modern disks of silver, polished and chaste. “Maybe forty, fifty years old? They don’t make anything like that now.”
Cray nodded, being well up on every nuance of fashion. Even in the laboratories and lecture rooms of the Magrody Institute she was impeccably turned out, a tall, slim young woman—the blonde with the legs, Leia remembered Han’s description, slightly envious of her elegant height, which made it possible for her to carry off fashions that Leia, a good eighteen centimeters shorter, knew were out of the question for herself. Only when actually engaged in the rigors of Jedi training on Yavin had Leia ever actually seen Cray without makeup and jewelry, and even then the young scientist managed—Leia reflected enviously—to look gorgeous.
“What did your mother say about it?” asked Luke in his quiet voice. “Why didn’t your aunt want her to talk about it?”
Cray shook her head, and Luke turned to the golden protocol droid who had joined them in the dining room, his stubby astromech counterpart at his side.
“Ring any bells with you, Threepio?”
“I’m sorry to say it does not, sir,” replied the droid.
“It was a fortress.”
They all turned, startled, to look at the man—or the thing that had once been a man—standing beside Cray’s chair.
The ambassadorial receptions were over. The ceremonial tours of the various herds, the luncheons, teas, flower viewings, and the descent to tour the jungle floor had all been accomplished, albeit with larger and more heavily armed parties than had been previously planned. Cray and her fiancé, Nichos Marr—two of Luke’s most recent students at the Jedi Academy on Yavin who had accompanied Luke to Ithor to consult with Tomla El—had been asked to do service as bodyguards, extending their Jedi-trained senses through the brightly dressed, friendly crowds. With night’s gentle cloaking of the floating megalopolis, they had returned with the Presidential party to the privacy of the Guest Houses, the first chance Leia had had all day to speak to Cray Mingla in private about the assassination of Stinna Draesinge Sha … the inconspicuous theoretician who had studied with the people who had helped design the Death Star.
Though Leia’s news of the assassination had shocked her, Cray had had little to tell about her former teacher. Draesinge, like Nasdra Magrody himself, had been almost completely apolitical, seeking knowledge for the sake of knowledge … like the physicist Qwi Xux, thought Leia bitterly, to whom Magrody had taught the principles of artificial intelligence in Moff Tarkin’s orbital accelerated learning center above the hostage planet of Omwat.
Only afterward had Cray asked about Drub McKumb.
Beyond the suite’s lacy translucent groves of arches