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“Not honorary,” she corrected. “Novice.”

“Novice, then. But there’s an exception in your oath for people like me?”

“Every adept has the right to judge and the duty to teach,” she said. “I’ve made my judgment.”

“And the rest?” Luke asked. “We’ve had many hours together—why haven’t you started to teach me?”

“But I have,” she said. “I’ve asked you to think about what you know and believe. To go beyond that, the novice must ask for the door to be opened. But you aren’t ready to think of yourself as a student again—not yet. You run too well and easily to go back to crawling.”

“No,” Luke said, shaking his head. “To be a Jedi is to be a seeker. A Jedi is always learning. It’s only on the dark side that one becomes obsessed with knowing, and impressed with doing.”

“There’s a touch of the dark side,” Akanah said slowly, “in the way you cling to the privilege of killing, and resist the teaching I’ve offered you. A hint of a mind that has settled on answers and resents being challenged with new questions.”

Luke toyed with the lacing on his longshirt as he considered her words. “You may be right,” he said finally. “I found the Force at a time when what I needed was power. I wanted a weapon to protect my friends, not enlightenment. I was thinking of war against the Empire, not peace with the universe. Perhaps something of that lingers in how I see myself. I’ll think on it.”

“Good,” she said. “Your words give me hope. And hope is the beginning of everything worthwhile.”

Luke sat up and turned toward her. “Akanah—I do want you to teach me,” he said. “I want to learn to read scribing. You were able to help me see it. Can you teach me to see it without your help?”

“Yes. But that isn’t the first lesson,” she said. “That will come later.”

“Don’t you think there’s reason enough to change the curriculum?”

“What reason?”

“Insurance,” Luke said. “If we’re going to follow your way, the marked way, to the circle, finding and reading the signs left in the Current is crucial. But if only one of us can read them—”

“I won’t miss any signs,” Akanah said, shaking her head. “Or misread them.”

“What if we become separated? You said that in your mind, I’m Fallanassi. If that’s so, then these signs are meant for me as well.”

“Commitment must be based on more than need,” Akanah said. “I’m sorry. The time isn’t right for what you ask.”

Luke frowned. “Are you afraid that I’ll go off and try to finish this journey without you?”

“No,” said Akanah. “Would you allow your student’s impatience to dictate the sequence and timing of his instruction? Would you give him the secret that could most compromise you before he had affirmed the principles that most define you?”

“Do you want me to take the oaths of the circle, too?”

“Yes,” she said. “But only when you’re ready, and you are not ready—and only for the right reason, and this is not the right reason.”

“Then how can I give you the assurances you want? How do I show you that I’m ready?”

“Choose to leave your weapon behind when we land at Atzerri,” she said. “If you do that, you will have shown me something. That would be a beginning.”

Resting his elbows on his knees, Luke pressed a fist into a cupped hand and stared down over it at the deck. “I’ll have to think about that, too,” he said finally, standing. “If I do it, I want it to be for the right reason—not just to pay a tutor for my next lesson.”

She smiled warmly. “I knew I was right about you,” she said. “You will be welcomed by the circle, when the time comes.”

He nodded, lips pressed together, as he edged between the couches and toward the bunk. But his face must have said something more to her, for she stood and called after him, “Are you having doubts about me, Luke?”

Luke paused, one foot in the bunk’s step-up, and looked back. “There are things I don’t understand, and things I wonder about,” he said. “Is that the same as ‘having doubts’? I don’t know.”

“It is,” she said. “Why don’t you ever ask me about these ‘things’? I’m not afraid of your questions. Are you afraid of my answers?”

“Hardly that.”

“Of giving