Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [393]
In the months since he had arrived on Tatooine his hair and beard had grown quickly, and his face and hands had turned nut brown. In his soft boots and long robe, its cowl raised over his head, no one would have taken him for a former Jedi, let alone a Master who had sat on the High Council. In any case, Tatooine wasn’t a world where questions were asked. Residents wondered, and they gossiped and theorized, but they rarely inquired about the reasons that brought strangers to remote Tatooine. Coupled with the fact that the world was still largely under the sway of the Hutts, the prevailing frontier etiquette had made Tatooine a refuge for criminals, smugglers, and outlaws from star systems galaxywide.
Many of the locals were just learning that the former Republic was now an Empire, and most of them didn’t care one way or another. Tatooine was on the fringe, and fringe worlds might as well have been invisible to distant Coruscant.
Months earlier, when he and Anakin had been in pursuit of clues they had hoped would lead them to Darth Sidious, Obi-Wan had told Anakin that he could think of far worse places to live than Tatooine, and he still felt that way. He took in stride the ubiquitous sand that had so rankled Anakin. Tatooine’s double-sunset skies were always a marvel to behold.
And the isolation suited him.
All the more because Anakin had been subverted by Palpatine and, for a brief time, had served this new Emperor.
Given everything that had happened since, the one image Obi-Wan knew he would never be able to erase from his memory was that of Anakin—Darth Vader, as Sidious had dubbed him—kneeling in allegiance to the Dark Lord, after having gone on a murderous spree in the Jedi Temple. If there was a second image, it was of Anakin burning on the shore of one of Mustafar’s lava flows, cursing him.
Had he been wrong to let Anakin die there? Could he have been redeemed, as Padmé had believed to the last? These were questions that plagued him, and pained him more deeply than he would ever have thought possible.
And now, all these months later, here he was on Tatooine, Anakin’s homeworld, watching over Anakin’s infant son, Luke.
Obi-Wan’s reason for living.
Watching from afar, at any rate. Today was as close as he had come to the child in weeks. Just across the street, Luke sat in a front carrier worn by Beru while she purchased sugar and blue milk; neither she nor her husband, Owen, was aware of Obi-Wan’s presence on the cantina veranda, his vigilant though covert gaze.
As Obi-Wan brought the water glass to his mouth and sipped, a HoloNet news report caught his ear and he swung to the cantina’s display, simultaneous with a torrent of static that interrupted the feed.
“What was she saying?” Obi-Wan asked a human seated two tables away.
“Band of Jedi were killed on Kashyyyk,” the man said. Close to Obi-Wan’s age, he wore utilities of the sort affected by docking bay workers in Mos Eisley spaceport.
Had the HoloNet reporter been referring to Jedi who had been on Kashyyyk with Yoda—
No, Obi-Wan realized when the feed suddenly returned. The reporter was talking about more recent events! About Jedi who had obviously survived Order Sixty-Six and been discovered on Kashyyyk!
He continued to listen, growing colder and colder inside.
The Empire had accused Kashyyyk of plotting rebellion … Thousands of Wookiees had died; hundreds of thousands more had been imprisoned …
Obi-Wan squeezed his eyes shut in dismay. He and Yoda had recalibrated the Temple beacon to warn surviving Jedi away from Coruscant. What could the ones discovered on Kashyyyk have been thinking, banding together like that, drawing attention to themselves instead of going to ground as they had been ordered to do? Did they think they could gather enough strength to go after Palpatine?
Of course they did, Obi-Wan realized.
They hadn’t realized