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Frustrated, at midday he returned to the offworlders’ camp. He was not the first there; Dyon was already on hand, cooking their midday meal. Dyon, turning lizard cutlets wrapped in transparisteel foil atop bare ashes, grinned up at him. “You’re a very dull boy, Ben. You know that, don’t you? There are lots of Force-using girls around here who have still not paired up.”

“Oh, be quiet.” Ben sat, his back to a large rock. “No, don’t be quiet. Tell me what you know about Tribeless Sha.”

“Huh.” Dyon frowned, thinking back. “Her name was Sha’natrac Tsu. She was originally of the Blue Coral Divers. But the clan put a death mark on her.”

“Why?”

“The Blue Corals had a feud going with the Scissorfists, who were named for a kind of big, lumbering crustacean. The Blue Coral Divers were one of the new breed of clans, women and men ruling jointly, and the Scissorfists were former escaped slaves from a variety of clans and some women who’d joined them. Both clans lived near the sea. It was one of those feuds that went on for years; a handful of clan members on either side were lost every year to ambush, or just disappeared.”

“Got it. Two clans not smart enough not to kill each other.”

“That’s basically it. Anyway, in one of those rare fits of sense that the Dathomiri clans sometimes have, the feuding groups had a diplomatic meeting to try to work out their differences, and Sha was part of the party, and she fell in love with a Scissorfist.”

“Oh, no, not a love story.”

“And one with a sad ending, too. The peace talks went badly, the two clans went back to warring, and Sha and her mate, who hadn’t made any secret of their relationship, were suddenly traitors because they wouldn’t agree to kill each other. They ran off together and were exiled. They ended up moving to a site not all that far from the spaceport, well out of the hunting ranges of their former clans. This would have been about seven years ago.”

“So? Tragic ending?”

“So about five years ago, she starts hiring herself out to patrons at the spaceport, as a guide. She accepts courier jobs, hunting jobs, spying jobs, and seems to prefer the ones that take her farther and farther away from her home grounds, especially if they give her the opportunity to meet clans she hasn’t run into before. When people ask about her husband, she says he’s dead and she’s going to kill whoever killed him. She doesn’t say more than that, though.”

Ben glared at him. “That’s it? That’s the whole story?”

“That’s the whole story as far as anybody but Sha knew it, yes.”

“You really know how to make these epics come alive, Dyon. How is it that you didn’t become a historian?”

Dyon waved him away. “Don’t be sarcastic to the man cooking your food.”

“Actually, that’s good advice.” Ben fell silent. Dyon’s story did suggest that perhaps Sha had stumbled across the killer of her husband. Still, the tale raised more questions than it settled. Who had killed her husband, and why? And how would the specific questions she was asking lead her to that person?

Something nagged at Ben, something Sha had said when they’d first met.

That was it, words about the Nightsisters. They hide, they heal, they return. If their numbers are few, they come for your children. And she’d looked so sorrowful, but only for an instant.

Ben stared at Dyon. “That’s it. They took her daughter.”

“What daughter?”

“Yes, what daughter?” That was Luke, settling into a cross-legged sitting pose beside the fire.

“I think Sha had a daughter, and the Nightsisters stole her.” He explained his thinking.

Luke accepted a mug of caf from Dyon and shook his head. “That’s pretty tenuous, Ben.”

“I’m trusting my instincts. Yeah, it’s tenuous, but it explains a lot if it’s true. She and her Scissorfist husband are living away from their persecutors but also away from the protection a clan normally offers. They have a baby, everything’s good. Then one night the Nightsisters come. Suddenly her baby’s gone and her husband’s dead. She