Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [92]
“What were you doing outside the house?”
“Waiting for you,” said Roganda simply. “For a chance to speak to you alone. I recognized you last night, when your droid malfunctioned.… I hope you got it back to the path without mishap? I almost came down to help you, but … on other worlds where I thought to take refuge, I’ve had bad experiences with those who remembered me from the Emperor’s Court. And I admit I was … unhappy enough to do some foolish things in those days.”
She averted her face, twisting on her finger the small topaz ring that was probably the only jewel she had left of those days. Maybe, thought Leia, the only thing left unsold after her passage here had been paid. Her hand was still white and small and fragile as a cage-reared bird.
“I lost my nerve,” she concluded, not meeting Leia’s eyes. “Then last night I began to fear that you had recognized me. That you might speak of it to your husband, and he to others here. I … I made up my mind to come to you in private. To beg for your silence.”
A bright drift of music keened from the market as the jugglers started setting up their pitches. A busker cried, “Step right up, ladies’an’gennelmens … three turns and turn ’em over …” Somewhere Leia heard the dim, skeletal clatter of a mechanical tree feeder being walked out of a repair shop back to the orchards, and a musical Ithorian voice sang, “Fresh tarts! Fresh tarts! Podon and brandifert, sweetest in town …” while high overhead the vast, flower-decked gondolas of the silk and coffee beds glided along their tracks, lifting and lowering, silent as birds beneath the crystal of the dome.
“But you didn’t.”
Roganda looked down at her hands again, turning her ring. “No,” she said. Her long black lashes trembled. “I can’t … explain, exactly. I’ve been so afraid for so long. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been through what I’ve been through.”
She raised pleading eyes to Leia’s, darkness and old memories shimmering in them like unshed tears. “Sometimes it seems I’ll never cease being afraid. The way it seems some nights that I’ll never cease having nightmares about him, for as long as I live.”
“It’s all right.” Leia’s voice sounded gruff and awkward in her own ears, shaky with the memory of her own nightmares. “I promise I won’t betray you to those who live here.”
“Thank you.” Her voice was barely a whisper. Then she smiled tremulously. “You’re sure you won’t have coffee with me? I make it rather well.”
Leia shook her head. “Thank you,” she said, and smiled back. “Han will be wondering where I’ve gone.” She started back for the market square, then turned, remembering something else. Something her aunt Celly had whispered to her in a corner when Aunt Rouge was over lecturing the head of the House Elegin about the proper deportment of its scions …
“Roganda … didn’t you have a son?”
Roganda looked quickly away. Her voice was almost inaudible under the musical chatter of the market. “He died.”
Turning swiftly, she vanished into the mist, the white swirl of it absorbing her like a white-robed ghost.
Silent in the narrow alleyway, Leia recalled the day the Rebels had taken Coruscant. The Emperor’s palace—that endless, gorgeous maze of crystal roofs, hanging gardens, pyramids of green and blue marble shining with gold … summer quarters, winter quarters, treasuries, pavilions, music rooms, prisons, halls … grace-and-favor residences for concubines, ministers, and trained assassins—had been shelled hard and partially looted already, Rebel partisans having killed whichever members of the Court they could catch. These had included, if Leia remembered correctly, not only the President of the Bureau of Punishments and the head of the Emperor’s School of Torturers, but the court clothing designer and any number of minor and completely innocent servants of all ages, species, and sexes whose names had never even been reported.
As Leia walked back across the market square she thought, No wonder she was twisting her hands in fear.
And stopped, to be cursed at by the driver of a puttering mechanized barrow of cheap