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“Tell her what, my friend?” Liegeus’s voice was gentle. “That you love her? She knows that. It is the one thing that she has never doubted.”

“You spoke to her?”

He moved his head a little, Yes, thin hands folded on his chest.

“Then you know that I have to see her.”

“Do you think she thinks so little of you, that she believes you’d turn against her for her lack of power?” From the darkness his voice came, tired and disembodied. “Many years ago I loved a woman—a girl, really. She was very young. It was … like nothing I have known, before or since. At times it felt almost as if we were brother and sister, two halves of the same whole, and at others it seemed as if our passion for one another colored the world like firelight. I can’t explain it, if you haven’t felt the same.”

Luke whispered, “I have felt it.”

“Like me she was a wanderer, wanting to know what lay beyond the stars. Like me she was adept with machines and tools. A bit of a cynic, like me, but with a passionate heart.

“But she had her own road,” he said. “I don’t think she ever loved me less, but it was a road that I could not follow. I did try. But sometimes … you have to let them go.”

“Not this.”

Not Callista.

Not the one thing in his life that he’d wanted … That he’d ever wanted this badly. The words came hard. “I can’t.”

“Well, every case is different.” Liegeus’s deep voice was so thin that Luke risked illuminating the glowrod on his torn and ragged flightsuit, so that he could check the philosopher’s fingertips and eyelids. His pulse was weak but steady, his breathing shallow and slow.

“I went after her.” Under the discolored lids his eyes moved, as if he could still see her face. The brows pinched. “Like a fool I thought I was the only person who could ever teach her what I thought it was she had to learn in this life, that I was the only person who could give her what she needed for all that long and winding road of the human span. And all I managed to do, in clinging to her as I did, was hurt her terribly.”

Luke said nothing. Callista’s face came back to him in the morning light of Yavin Four’s temple tower, and the voices of the adepts playing with the image tank that she herself had instructed them in.

“In the end,” said Liegeus, “I understood that the most truly loving thing that I could do would be to let her go, to seek her own road. I suppose it was vain of me to believe myself the only guide she would ever have or need. Or to believe that she was the only one I would ever love.”

Luke was silent for a time, his whole soul crying out against the darkness of the past eight months. At last he whispered, “Was she?”

Liegeus smiled, and touched his wrist. “I think the human capacity for loving is too great for a single loss, however enormous, to blight. At least I hope that’s the case. You do not believe me now, but I have walked this road, Luke. I can tell you, if you keep walking, you do come out of the dark at last. The love I have for your sister is no less for the love I felt for both my wives, bless their long-suffering hearts. There is always love.”

Not like this, thought Luke. Not like this.

He had meant to stay awake, to fight the drag of weariness that seemed to be pulling him to the edge of a bottomless dark well. In any case it seemed impossible to sleep with the itching crawl of electricity tingling in his flesh, cleansing the vile energies of the drochs, and with the night’s unplumbed cold. But he found himself nodding, dragged himself awake with all his strength only to nod again. As darkness gathered him in the voices that had, it seemed, all this time been whispering in his mind stepped to the fore again, like men and women stepping out of shadows, and as he drifted from the mooring anchors of his consciousness he could hear what they said.

They spoke of time and of still, tideless waters imbued with life and heat. They spoke of the heartbeat of the moonless world, and of the stars. This was a deep-colored