Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [91]
Roganda got to her feet, the hem of her gown stirring the mists that drifted up from the old house foundations, the lower end of the moss-grown street. “Them.” She nodded toward the bustling noises of the market, half invisible in the fog, and her gesture took in the stone foundations of the houses around them, the patched-in white cubes with their terraces, their trellises, their steps. Her every movement still retained the implicit beauty of a trained dancer’s. Like Leia, she had been well taught how to carry herself.
“Anyone in this town. The Empire laid it to the ground not too long ago, and even those who came in afterward have cause to hate even the unwilling servants of the Emperor.”
Leia relaxed a little. The woman was unarmed, unless she had a dagger or an extremely small blaster under that simple white linen gown, and the liquid drape of the fabric made even that unlikely. As Palpatine’s concubine, Roganda would have found herself very much in the crossfire between the Emperor’s enemies and his friends. Leia wondered how she’d gotten out of Coruscant.
“This place has been my refuge, my safety, for seven years now,” Roganda continued softly. She clasped her hands in a gesture of pleading. “Don’t force me out, to seek another home.”
“No,” said Leia, embarrassed, “of course not. Why did you pick this place to come to?”
She was thinking only of the Emperor’s levee, of the jeweled headpiece Roganda had worn, massy gold and layered with a galactic dazzle of topaz, ruby, citrine; remembering the elaborate bunches of shimmersilk skirts, held in swags and volutes with gemmed plaques the size of her palm; the chains of jewels, fine as embroidery thread, dangling row on row from the curved golden splendor of her concubine collar. Roganda’s hair had been augmented and amplified by swags of lace, swatches of silk in every shade of gold and crimson, her small white hands a glory of scintillant rings.
But Roganda hesitated, seemed to draw back. “Why do you ask?” Then, quickly, “It was out of the way.… No one knew of it, no one would look for me here. Neither the Rebels from whom I fled when I left Coruscant, nor the warlords who tried to take it back. I wanted only peace.”
She gave a shy smile. “Since you’ve come this far, will you come to my rooms?” Roganda gestured back along the alley. “They aren’t elegant—you can’t pay for much elegance on a fruit packer’s wages—but I do pride myself on my coffee. The one remnant of earlier glories.”
The coffee served at the Emperor’s levee was one of the things that had stayed in Leia’s mind. The Emperor had had special farms on a number of suitable worlds to provide the beans solely for the use of his Court, including several that produced vine-coffee, a variety notoriously hard to rear. The transition to this provincial town among its orchards couldn’t have been an easy one.
“Another time,” she said, shaking her head. “Surely there were other places you could have gone?”
“Few as out of the way as this.” Roganda half smiled, and brushed aside the tendrils of dark hair that trailed across her brow. Her complexion was the clear, pallorous white of those who live without sunlight, on starships, or underground, or on worlds like this where the only thin sunlight that leaked down through the mists had to be magnified by the crystal of the dome.
“Even smugglers rarely bother anymore. I knew I wasn’t going to be welcomed in the Republic—his name was too hated, and those who haven’t been … coerced, as he could coerce … would not understand that there was no question of refusing him.”
Leia remembered what Luke had told her of his days serving the Emperor’s clone, and shuddered.
“And as for going to the worlds, the cities, still under the rule of the Governors and the new warlords, or the worlds where the old Houses still hold sway …”
She shivered, as if chill winds blew down the alley instead of the dense warmth of the drifting fogs. “He lent me to too many of them … as a gift. All I wanted to do was … forget.