• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

They have become more concerned with avoiding the oversight of the Senate than they are with winning the war …

Anakin inclined his head. “I understand.”

“I’m not sure you do.” Mace Windu leaned forward, staring into Anakin’s eyes with a measuring squint.

Anakin was barely paying attention; in his mind, he was already leaving the Council Chamber, riding the turbolift to the archives, demanding access to the restricted vault by authority of his new rank—

“You will attend the meetings of this Council,” the Korun Master said, “but you will not be granted the rank and privileges of a Jedi Master.”

“What?”

It was a small word, a simple word, an instinctive recoil from words that felt like punches, like stun blasts exploding inside his brain that left his head ringing and the room spinning around him—but even to his own ears, the voice that came from his lips didn’t sound like his own. It was deeper, darker, clipped and oiled, resonating from the depths of his heart.

It didn’t sound like him at all, and it smoked with fury.

“How dare you? How dare you?”

Anakin stood welded to the floor, motionless. He wasn’t even truly aware of speaking. It was as if someone else were using his mouth—and now, finally, he recognized the voice.

It sounded like Dooku. But it was not Dooku’s voice.

It was the voice of Dooku’s destroyer.

“No Jedi in this room can match my power—no Jedi in the galaxy! You think you can deny Mastery to me?”

“The Chancellor’s representative you are,” Yoda said. “And it is as his representative you shall attend the Council. Sit in this Chamber you will, but no vote will you have. The Chancellor’s views you shall present. His wishes. His ideas and directives. Not your own.”

Up from the depths of his furnace heart came an answer so far transcending fury that it sounded cold as interstellar space. “This is an insult to me, and to the Chancellor. Do not imagine that it will be tolerated.”

Mace Windu’s eyes were as cold as the voice from Anakin’s mouth. “Take your seat, young Skywalker.”

Anakin matched his stare. Perhaps I’ll take yours. His own voice, inside his head, had a hot black fire that smoked from the depths of his furnace heart. You think you can stop me from saving my love? You think you can make me watch her die? Go ahead and Vaapad this, you—

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan said softly. He gestured to an empty seat beside him. “Please.”

And something in Obi-Wan’s gentle voice, in his simple, straightforward request, sent his anger slinking off ashamed, and Anakin found himself alone on the carpet in the middle of the Jedi Council, blinking.

He suddenly felt very young, and very foolish.

“Forgive me, Masters.” His bow of contrition couldn’t hide the blaze of embarrassment that climbed his cheeks.

The rest of the session passed in a haze; Ki-Adi-Mundi said something about no Republic world reporting any sign of Grievous, and Anakin felt a dull shock when the Council assigned the task of coordinating the search to Obi-Wan alone.

On top of everything else, now they were splitting up the team?

He was so numbly astonished by it all that he barely registered what they were saying about a droid landing on Kashyyyk—but he had to say something, he couldn’t just sit here for his whole first meeting of the Council, Master or not—and he knew the Kashyyyk system almost as well as he knew the back alleys of Mos Espa. “I can handle it,” he offered, suddenly brightening. “I could clear that planet in a day or two—”

“Skywalker, your assignment is here.” Mace Windu’s stare was hard as durasteel, and only a scrape short of openly hostile.

Then Yoda volunteered, and for some reason, the Council didn’t even bother to vote.

“It is settled then,” Mace said. “May the Force be with us all.”

And as the holopresences of Plo Koon and Ki-Adi-Mundi winked out, as Obi-Wan and Agen Kolar rose and spoke together in tones softly grave, as Yoda and Mace Windu walked from the room, Anakin could only sit, sick at heart,