Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [89]
It occurred to her that she had heard nothing from Luke or any of his party in days.
Something moved in the orchard below. A bright-yellow manollium burst out of the ferns like a startled flower and went winging away through the trees, and Leia—who had never lost the watchfulness of those years on the run between the battles of Yavin and Endor—looked automatically for what had startled it.
She didn’t see much, but it was enough. A ghostlike impression of movement faded at once into the mist, but there was no mistaking the white gown, the night-black tail of hair. From the balcony behind her Han’s voice said, “I never asked you last night, Leia—you find anything in the city records?”
“Yes,” said Leia briefly, swinging herself over the balcony rail and dropping lightly the meter and a half to the thick ferns below. “I’ll be back.…”
In the mist it was impossible to see more than a few meters clearly. Tree stems, vines, beds of shrub and fern made dim, one-dimensional cutouts in the glassy grayness. Half closing her eyes, Leia reached out with her senses, as Luke had been teaching her to do, and picked up the subliminal stir of fabric among leaves, the squish of wet foliage underfoot … the trace of perfume.
Her hand moved automatically to check for the blaster usually holstered at her side, even as she moved in pursuit. Nothing there, of course. Still she didn’t turn back. Not swiftly, but steadily, she worked to keep up with the woman whose face she’d seen under the lamplight of the path through the orchard last night.
She remembered now where she’d seen her before.
She’d been eighteen, newly elected the youngest member of the Imperial Senate. It was customary among the old Houses to bring their daughters to Coruscant when they emerged from finishing school at seventeen—or sixteen, if their parents were ambitious to start the long and elaborate jockeying for a good match at Court. Her aunts, she remembered, had been horrified when she’d refused, doubly appalled when her father had backed her up in her decision not to be presented to the Emperor until she could do so as a Senator in her own right, not simply as a young girl in the Court marriage market …
She wondered what they’d think now, those aunts, if they could see her married to a man who’d started life as a smuggler, whose parents had been nobody-knew-who. If they could see her as Chief of State, after years of dodging around the galaxy in the company of a ragged gang of idealistic warriors with a price on her head.
She honestly didn’t know whether they would have been aghast or proud. When she was eighteen, she hadn’t known them well; hadn’t known them as an adult knows other adults.
And they had all died before she could.
She stepped from among the trees of the orchard. The white dress was at the far end of Old Orchard Street, moving swiftly. Heading for the market square, Leia thought.
For a long time she’d tried not to know whether it had been day or evening in the capital of Alderaan when the Death Star had appeared in the sky. Somebody had eventually told her that it had been a warm evening late in the spring. Aunt Rouge had undoubtedly been having her hair dressed for dinner in front of that gilt-framed mirror in her boudoir; Aunt Celly would have been lying down indulging in her daily bout of hypochondria, and Aunt Tia would have been reading aloud to her or talking baby talk to the pittins. Leia even remembered the pittins’ names: Taffy, Winkie, Fluffy, and AT-AV—“All-Terrain Attack Vehicle.” She’d named that last one. It had been pale candy pink and small enough to fit in her cupped hands.
The pittins had all died, too, when somebody had pulled that lever on the Death Star.
And everything else had died as well.
Everything else.
Leia gritted her teeth as she moved along the steep slant of the street, keeping close to the jumble of old walls and prefab shops, fighting the sting behind her eyes and the dreadful tightness of her throat. Her aunts had made her girlhood an intermittent