Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [61]
She drew in a shaky breath and shoved back the dirty mane of hair from her face again with both hands. “I dare not.”
Rage filled Luke at the sight of the bruises on her arm, self-righteous fury that anyone would have hurt this gentle, beautiful woman mingled with anxiety that they—whoever they were—would take out their anger at Taselda on Callista, should they come upon her alone. He said, “Where would your lightsaber be, in Ashgad’s house?” Its high, glittering white walls came again to his mind, arrogant among the small cottages of the Oldtimers.
“There is a treasure room beneath the kitchens.” Taselda’s indigo eyes brimmed with grateful tears. “The entrance is through the kitchen courts, here.” She turned away, and did something at a small table. Coming back, she handed him a sheet of coarse local paper, on which was inked a plan of the house.
Luke saluted her with it, feeling light and buoyant within himself, as if his bloodstream were filled with sparks of fire. He grinned at her like a boy. “I’ll be back. We’ll be out of town by nightfall.”
“She told me that I could trust you, Owen,” said Taselda softly. “I saw the light in her eyes, when she spoke your name. I think you need have no fear of what you will find.”
Callista. Luke’s whole body seemed to be singing, as he strode away down the ill-paved back streets of the Oldtimers town. Whatever dark the world may send, still lovers meet …
I’ve found her, I’ve found her, I’ve found her! ‘I saw the light in her eyes …’
His steps slowed.
‘… when she spoke your name.’
But Callista would not have known that he would be calling himself Owen Lars.
He stopped and realized he had missed his way among the near-identical white houses.
And he thought, quite calmly, There was something in the wine.
Luke had never been much of a drinker, and once he’d begun to study and understand the Force he had given it up altogether. It simply took too much edge off his concentration. Although, of course, Taselda’s wine wasn’t like other wine, still it surprised him that he’d imbibed the quantity of it that he had. Now as he turned his concentration inward on his own metabolism, to clear some of the alcohol from his system, he realized that there was something else there as well.
A synthetic mood-enhancer, he thought, leaning against a wall with one hand and closing his eyes. Pryodene or pryodase, or maybe Algarine torve weed—the kind of thing that made one accepting and friendly. Leia had told him there had been a time when consumption of pryodase had been de rigueur before dinner parties among the nobility of Coruscant, as a counter to the fad for dueling, and there were always accusations in labor disputes and divorce proceedings that one side or the other had slipped it into their opposite number’s coffeine just before negotiations.
It was harmless and nonaddictive. It simply lowered one’s guard.
Luke thought, How wise of her, to use that method to overcome my prejudices so that I could see her as she truly is.
He walked two steps, trying to reorient himself toward Seti Ashgad’s house, and then thought, What did I just think?
A throb of pain seized him. Not physical pain, but the pain of loss, of abandonment, the deep-seated pain of a child who suspects from earliest awareness that his mother had given him away like a stray puppy, for reasons he could not understand. The pain of Callista’s flight. The pain of losing the dream of the father he had invented in his lonely fantasies.
Cold flooded him, cold and anxiety. He couldn’t lose Taselda …
Through the child’s fear of loss, a voice came to him.
Search your feelings, it said, a black voice speaking out