Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [134]
The Empress walked toward her, Palpatine’s robe billowing around her like wings of smoke containing the flame of her golden harness. “Give it to one of us,” she commanded. “Give it to me.”
Leia backed away, frightened of the woman’s power. Even as bad as I am with this, I could kill her here. She deserves it, for what she did to my father. She wasn’t sure why she thought this or of whom she actually spoke. If she gave it to the slave, the Empress would only take it from her. Besides, the slave was a crawling weakling, sobbing miserably, not raising her face. Leia felt a stab of shame and embarrassment, knowing that, too, was her.
I could kill her. I could kill them both.
She backed farther, holding the lightsaber in both hands, her breath coming fast. The auburn eyes—her own eyes, raised to the glory of suns—stared into hers, compelling her, as Palpatine could compel. On the dais, the slave girl groveled and wept. Leia clutched the weapon’s hilt, not willing to surrender it, yet feeling she must. She was almost panting with fear, and the thin choke of gas in her throat was what brought her to her senses.
It isn’t real. Her father—her true father, the father of her heart—had said. It’s just something he wants you to feel.
She stepped sideways, out of the Empress’s path.
“I don’t have to give it to anyone,” she said. “It’s mine, to do with as I choose.”
And turning her back on them, she walked out of the palace, out of the cave.
19
“Luke was able to confront Vader,” said Callista. “To be defeated by him—to cut off his hand, as his own had been cut off—to accept that this was his father. To surrender that fact, and go on from there. You never had that chance.”
“It’s not an experience I’d stand in line for,” remarked Leia drily. “I knew Vader. I saw him tagging after Palpatine every time I went to Court. Believe me, I’ll never accept that he was my father.”
“Then you’ll always be the slave to his shadow.”
Anger sprang to Leia’s eyes. For a long moment they met the other woman’s gray gaze in the campfire’s wavering glow, the chilly flare of sodium lamps set here and there around the Theran camp. Most of the cultists had lain down around the mouth of the largest of the glittering caves, when the aftermath of the Force storm had blown itself out. Save for a few mounting guard farther up the canyon, they had given themselves up to sleep. Bé had disappeared, to commune with the night, someone said. Apparently this was what Listeners commonly did, because everyone just nodded.
Leia and Callista, apart from the others, were virtually alone.
It was Leia who looked aside first. Her nightmares came back to her, the shape and face of her fears. She recalled the rage that came over her, the need to prove herself other than Anakin Skywalker’s daughter. She had taken and used his weapon, the Noghri, for her safety and that of her children and to repair the damage that he had done them; but she flinched from the thought of standing up and saying, I am Lord Vader’s daughter.
“I don’t know what it would mean,” she said slowly, groping for words, “if I accepted it. If I made him a part of me, the way Luke has.”
“You mean for others?” Callista wrapped her long arms about her knees, sitting perched on a smooth hunk of crystal like fused glass, her dark hair frayed by straying winds across the crimson leather of her jacket. “Those who would ask what his daughter was doing ruling the Council?”
“Maybe,” said Leia. “Mostly for myself. And for the children. It will take time.” The thought of it revolted her, furious anger succeeded by the heat of tears in her throat.
“No one is asking you to do it tomorrow. But if you know what parts of him are inside you, you can know what to build a wall around and what to take into yourself. Because you cannot afford not to be strong, Leia,” she said. “You cannot afford to let this kind of thing happen to you, ever again.”
“No,” she said softly. “I know that.”
Callista stood and unhooked the lightsaber from her belt. The sun-yellow blade slid forth