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“She’s lying,” Siadem Forte said before she could respond.

Two of the Wookiees snarled in plain displeasure.

Cudgel looked from Forte to Starstone. “Lying? See, now you have everyone really confused, ’cause we always thought of the Jedi as truth tellers.”

The Wookiees spoke among themselves, then one of them barked an outpouring at Cudgel.

“Guania, here, points out that you arrive in a military transport. You look as though you can handle yourselves. You start asking questions about Jedi … He’s thinking that you might be bounty hunters.”

Starstone shook her head back and forth. “Check the transport. Under the navicomputer console, you’ll find six lightsabers—”

“Means nothing,” Cudgel cut in. “You could have taken them off your quarries, just the way General Grievous did.”

“Then how do we prove it?” Starstone said. “What do you want us to do, perform Force tricks?”

The Wookiees issued a yodeling warning.

Cudgel lowered his voice to say: “In the unlikely event that you are Jedi, that might not be such a good idea out here in the open.”

Starstone forced an exhale, and looked up at the Wookiees. “We know that Masters Yoda, Luminara Unduli, and Quinlan Vos were here with brigades of troopers.” When she saw in their deep brown eyes that she had their full attention, she continued. “We’ve risked a lot to come here. But we know that Master Yoda had good relations with you, and we’re hoping that still counts for something.”

The Wookiees didn’t actually lower their weapons, but they did disable them. One of them lowed to Cudgel, who said: “Lachichuk suggests we continue this conversation in Kachirho.”

Starstone asked Filli and Deran to remain with the ship; then she, Forte, Kulka, and the others began to follow Cudgel and the Wookiees toward the gargantuan wroshyr that stood at the center of Kachirho tree-city. No sooner had they left the landing platform than Cudgel’s attitude changed.

“I heard that none of you survived,” he said to Starstone as they walked.

“It’s beginning to look like we’re the only ones,” she said sadly. Putting the edge of her hand to her brow, she gazed up at the huge balconies that tiered the tree, some of which showed evidence of recent damage.

“Do you know if any Jedi died here?”

Cudgel shook his head. “The Wookiees haven’t told me anything. For a while it looked like Kashyyyk was going to have its own garrison of clone troopers, but after the Sep droids and war machines shut down, the troopers decamped. Ever since, the Wookiees have been making good use of everything that was left behind.”

“For weapons?”

“You bet, for weapons. Seps or no, they’ve still got enemies—species that want to exploit them.”

Cudgel led everyone into the hollowed base of the tree, and finally to a turbolift that accessed Kachirho’s upper levels.

Similar to everything she had seen since leaving the landing platform, the turbolift was an ingenious blend of wood and alloy, the technology that drove it artfully concealed. And at each tier, her astonishment only increased. In addition to the exterior platforms that grew like burls from the bole, the tree contained vast interior rooms, with shimmering parquet floors and curved walls inset with wooden and alloy mosaics. There didn’t seem to be a straight line anywhere, and everywhere Starstone looked she saw Wookiees engaged in building, carving, sanding … as devoted to their work as Jedi had been in fashioning the Temple. Except the Wookiees hadn’t enslaved themselves to symmetry or order; rather, they allowed their creations to emerge naturally from the wood. In fact, they seemed to invite a certain kind of imperfection—some detail to which the eye would be drawn, setting off an entire wall panel, or an expanse of floor.

Covered walkways and bridges crisscrossed the tree’s interior shaft, and irregular openings brought verdant Kashyyyk inside. At every turn, every staircase spiral or turbolift stop, exterior views of the lake, the forest, and the sheer cliffs were framed by finely worked apertures and clefts. What Kachirho lacked in color, it made up for in luster