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The other apprentices started to get up, but Luke waved them back down into their seats. “We will be but a moment. The kitchen?”

I nodded and followed him. Once alone in the kitchen, Luke turned on me. “You should not have attempted to interfere with Kyp.”

I blinked with surprise. “I wasn’t trying to interfere. He was upset. I just asked what was happening.”

“But you did something to provoke an attack, didn’t you?”

I rubbed a hand along my jaw and leaned back against the conservator. “It’s an old interrogation technique. I drew a conclusion from what I saw earlier this evening and tried it out. I told him Exar Kun had gotten his butt kicked by the Jedi, and that Kun was wrong. I got a reaction, a very strong one.”

“Kyp is strong in the Force.” Luke folded his arms over his chest. “He has a certain sympathy for Exar Kun. The reaction was not to be unexpected.”

“I could buy into that, but I felt another presence. Not strongly, but it was there and it helped Kyp’s next attack pack a wallop.”

“And you think that was Exar Kun?”

I thought for a moment before answering. “Either it is Exar Kun or someone calling himself Exar Kun because Kyp reacted to that name. Could be it’s someone just trying to wrap himself up in Kun’s legend, just the way he presented himself to you as your father. Regardless, he’s powerful. Kind of what I would expect from a Dark Lord of the Sith.”

Luke shook his head. “You’re making a mistake jumping to the conclusion that we’re dealing with Exar Kun. We don’t know what happened to him in the end.”

“Look, I’ve been with Tionne as she’s pulled as much information as we can from the Holocron about Kun. He was running the culture here and a massive Jedi strike wiped it out. Certain conclusions seem logical from there.” I shrugged. “I think planning for the worst case scenario can’t hurt.”

“There might be gatekeepers in the Holocron that have data about Exar Kun that neither you nor Tionne can access. I will have to conduct my own investigation in that area.”

I caught a note of hesitancy in his voice. “You’re not thinking that just because you were able to redeem the last Dark Lord of the Sith that Exar Kun might have had a change of heart, are you?”

Luke’s face became impassive. “That can’t be ruled out.”

“Wait a minute, you can’t be serious.” I watched him carefully. “Look, if Exar Kun was never redeemed, if no other Dark Lord of the Sith ever saw the error of his ways and came back to the light side, that means nothing concerning your father. You’re letting yourself think that if you’d been good enough, if you’d done everything right, your father could have, would have survived. You’re thinking that you didn’t work hard enough to redeem him because, if you had, he’d still be here. And you’re thinking that if another Dark Lord had been redeemed, then you could compare what you did to what happened to him and learn if you really did do all you could do.”

“No, no way.” Luke shook his head adamantly. “You have it all wrong.”

“Could be, Master Skywalker, but …” I swallowed hard. “Look, I know exactly how this game is played because I did the same thing when my father died. Neither one of us can be certain that we did all we could to save them, but all the second guessing in the galaxy won’t give us a second chance at saving them. The only thing we can do is accept responsibility and live with the consequences.”

Luke’s expression remained impassive, but even that told a story. Just for a moment I got to see him as the human being he was. Raised by relatives on Tatooine, always wondering about his parents, never learning how to properly deal with a mother or father. He had to constantly wonder why his life wasn’t “normal,” not realizing that everyone asks themselves that question. And then, when he discovered who his father was, it turned out that his father was the trusted henchman of the galaxy’s most hated individual. His father had not only killed people, but he had been the betrayer of the most noble tradition in the galaxy. He determined he would save his father and did, just in time to lose