Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [59]
It was a curious thing about Taselda’s smile. It was wide, and flat, and at first sight little more than a stretching of the lips. But after a moment, looking at it across the rim of the wineglass, it came over Luke that it was very similar in some ways to old Ben’s: quirky, gentle, amused with human nature. He wondered who this woman reminded him of. Aunt Beru, a little; Leia, a little; and someone else, a woman he had only the dimmest traces of in deep-buried memory. His mother?
The deep sense of warmth was the same, the giving kindness and the comfort of boundless, unselfish love.
“Where is she?” he asked, sensing that this woman knew and understood all. “Can you take me to her?” The wine was sweet now on his tongue, subtle with resonances he had not comprehended before. He drank deep of it, and she refilled the glass. It soothed his weariness, as her smile did, and like her smile left him thirsty for more.
“Of course. I have been waiting for you, since she spoke your name.” She reached out and took both of his hands in both of hers again. “There’s a cave in the hills, not so very far from here. The Force is strong there. It’s one of the places where the ground lightning emerges. I sent her there to meditate. I’ll take you, for it’s impossible to find without guidance.”
She got to her feet and drew a deep breath, as if steadying herself, pulled her raggedy romex dress more closely around her, and looked vaguely in the corners for her shoes. Luke noticed, as if from a great distance away, that her feet were filthy and her toenails overgrown, like yellowed claws. His flash of disgust was followed immediately by his memory of Yoda—unprepossessing to say the least—and then by anger at himself.
How could he think so about Taselda?
And when he looked again her feet did not seem that dirty at all.
He stood, too, and set his goblet on the edge of the table. To his own surprise he almost missed the corner. It must be the dim lighting in the room, he thought, for the wine she’d given him had cleared his head rather than clouded it. Cleared it, it seemed to him, as if for the first time in his life.
“Have you a speeder?” she asked, and he nodded.
“I have to get it fixed, but I can do that in a day or so.” It crossed his mind that he hadn’t the money to do such a thing—he’d intended to sell the grounded vehicle for cash to get himself and Callista off the planet. But now that didn’t seem to matter. His heart pounded faster even at that mental phrase: Himself and Callista.
“And weapons?”
He touched the blaster and the lightsaber at his belt.
Taselda’s face fell. “It isn’t enough,” she said softly. “We will have to wait.” Her brow creased in a frown.
“Wait?” Luke felt a twang of panic. The hills were dangerous. Callista would come to harm if he didn’t get there soon. They might arrive and find her gone once more, or dead. It was unendurable, to be so close. “What’s the problem?”
Taselda shook her head, with the air of one not wishing to burden a friend with her troubles, and averted her face a little. A droch crawled out of sight behind her collar. “It’s nothing.”
“Can I help?”
“I couldn’t ask you to,” she said. “It’s my affair alone.”
“Tell me.” The world would be a bleak and terrible place if he didn’t aid her. He might not find Callista. And somehow it had become important to him that she not seek the aid of another than he. “Please.”
Her smile was shy, and a little self-deprecating. “It’s been a long time since I had a champion. Your Callista is lucky, Owen.” She raised those flower blue eyes to his again and touched his chest with confiding fingers.
“It’s an old story, a long story, my friend. When first I came to this world—oh, many years ago—I had only intended to accomplish the minor mission the Masters of the Jedi had ordered for me and to depart. But seeing the way the people here lived, squabbling endlessly over pump rights, and tree