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“So why did you make me part of it when you finally did leave?” Luke asked. “You didn’t need me to find the Fallanassi, or to get to them—though you tried to make me think that you did. The Imperial agents on Lucazec—they were another lie, weren’t they? We were never being hunted.”

“No,” she admitted. “They were never there. It was a test. I had to know who you were—what I could expect from you, where to begin.”

“The blood,” Luke remembered.

“A mistake,” she said. “I felt your surprise and thought I had betrayed myself. I had never seen a lightsaber strike flesh. I had to draw your attention to me, to Nashira, or I would have lost you then.”

“Lost me for what? I still don’t understand. What was the deception meant to gain you?”

Sad-eyed, Akanah shook her head slowly. “It was not for me, Luke. What you gave me, what this has meant to me—that just happened, unexpected—that wasn’t planned.”

“Then why?”

“Because I have been afraid of you,” she said simply.

“I don’t understand.”

“Luke, I have seen the underside of war, where there are no heroes, only victims. I’ve seen what power is about, how it’s used, what it means not to have it in a world where that’s all that matters.” The weight of her words was echoed in her sad eyes. “I was ten years old when the Emperor’s stormtroopers swept across half the galaxy—I had a childhood in paradise and an adolescence in hell. I have good reason to fear power.”

“You thought—think—I’m the same kind of threat the Emperor was, the same as the stormtroopers?”

“It is not just you,” Akanah said. “You are training others to follow your path. Where there was one, there are now many, and there will be many more. I had to know you. I had to see what inside you balances the power you have—I had to see what I could give you of what the Circle had given me. I did not lie to you about my purpose. Something has been missing, something of the Light, something of peace, of acceptance. I tried to help you find it.”

“By lying to me,” Luke said, his restless emotions bringing him to his feet.

Akanah smiled ruefully. “As you have seen, the Fallanassi are not above using deception.”

“So Nashira was nothing but your fantasy? A reflection of what I wanted her to be?”

“No,” said Akanah. “She was more than that.”

“Akanah—” Wialu said in a cautionary tone.

“I have to tell him,” Akanah said with sudden anger. “A secret is too much like another lie.” She stood and took a step toward Luke. “In the second year, a woman came to see Isela on Carratos. She was Fallanassi, but I did not know her—she had not been with the Circle on Lucazec. She stayed with us for five days, and spent hours alone with my mother, talking.”

Then she turned toward Wialu. “I think that she was sent by the Circle to try to persuade my mother to let me go. Perhaps she would even have taken me away with her when she left, if my mother would have agreed to it. I’ve wondered if my mother got her to agree to something else—a sum of money to be sent later, perhaps, to buy a child’s passage, and a child’s freedom. Who would expect that she would take the money and leave the child?”

Wialu’s impassive face offered neither confirmation or apology. After a long moment of staring expectantly into her eyes, Akanah turned back to Luke.

“This woman’s Circle name was Nashira,” she said. “She was beautiful, and kind to me—enough to remind me of everything that Isela was not. She talked to me as if I mattered, and she shared her heart with me. When I asked her why, she said that the Emperor had taken her children from her—a boy and a girl. And all she could do was try to love the children who were near her, and hope that someone was doing the same for hers. When you asked me about your mother, I pictured the woman I wished had been mine. I told you about Nashira.”

“But it was all about you,” Luke said, shaking his head. “Your pain—your fantasies—”

“Are they so different from yours?” she asked. “I have seen inside your heart, too, Luke Skywalker. I could only deceive you by knowing you. I could only deceive you with the truth.”

Luke