Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [84]
“Would yarrock work?” Han put an arm around Leia’s waist, felt her body rigid as wood. “To calm them? The healers on Ithor seem to think it would, though I don’t know how Drub would get any in the tunnels.”
Mara shook her head. “I don’t know.”
In the silence Artoo bleeped faintly from the door, to let them know the coffee and supper Leia had put in the heater were done. Nobody said a word and the little droid, evidently reading the atmosphere of the room, did not signal again.
“Thanks, Mara,” said Han at length. “I owe you dinner when we get back to Coruscant. If you can get back with me on the coordinates of those pads it might help. Sorry about waking you up …”
“It beats being pulled out of bed by an airstrike.”
“One more thing.” Leia looked up suddenly. “You say you were keeping an eye on Belsavis. Did anybody from Palpatine’s Court take refuge there after Coruscant fell? Anyone you know about?”
The woman who had been the Emperor’s Hand settled back into her chair, running memories, rumor, recollection through her mind like bolts of colored ribbon, seeking some flaw or slub. In time she shook her head. “Not that I know about,” she said. “But Belsavis isn’t that far from the Senex Sector. That’s practically a little Empire itself these days—the Garonnin family and the Vandrons and their kind always wanted it to be. Who were you thinking of?”
Leia shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just wondered.”
“You okay?”
Leia turned sharply. She’d folded back one of the metal shutters to step out onto the balcony, and the diffuse light from the orchard fell in a muzzy bar into the room behind her, picking out the hard edge of Han’s arm muscle, the sharp points of collarbone and shoulder, the small scar on his forearm. The dark print of the sarong he wore was like the black-on-black mottling of a trepennit’s hide, lost in the shadows of the room.
She didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure what she could have said, and she’d long ago learned that lying to Han was impossible. In the sticky warmth of the night his hand, dry and cool from the air-conditioning of the house, was a welcome strength on her bare arm.
“Don’t worry about Keldor.” His hands went from her shoulders to her hair, gathering its auburn weight against his face. “Somebody’ll find him one of these days. Same—”
She felt in the very slight flinch of his hand the swift cutting off of speech and thought midsentence. As if, she thought, he believed she didn’t know. Hadn’t been thinking the same.
“Same way someone found Stinna Draesinge Sha?” she asked. “And Nasdra Magrody … and his family? The way some … some so-called patriot from the New Alderaan movement came to me a month ago hinting there were people ready to foot the bill if I used my ‘influence’ to have Qwi Xux murdered? And all the rest of the list who were just ‘following orders’?”
“I don’t know about Qwi,” said Han softly, naming the fragile genius whose mind had been manipulated into participating in the Death Star’s design. “She always seemed to me more a victim than anything else even before what she went through later … but I’ve never talked to anyone who didn’t think you had every right to take a shot at the rest of them.”
“No.” Leia sighed, feeling as if it had been years since she’d last relaxed enough to breathe. It was good beyond words to feel his arms around her, his body pressing into her back. “No. I don’t have any right. Not if I’m the Chief of State. Not if I stand for doing things in accordance with the law. Not if I stand for everything that Palpatine was not. That’s what hurts, I think. That it’s what I want to do—and what I cannot let myself do—and everyone thinks I did it anyway. So why not do it?”
“But you didn’t,” Han told her gently. “And you know that, and I know that … and that’s what counts. What’s Luke always