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The Ferroans rarely ventured out before midday, and then only for long enough to gather firewood or effect repairs to their cliffside dwellings. Most of them avoided the Jedi whenever possible or, when not, exchanged few words. None, however, had issued further demands that Harrar be turned over to them. Luke assumed that young Maydh had allayed fears that the Yuuzhan Vong priest was a threat.

He gazed through the cabin’s aft windscreen at the wounds Zonama had suffered. Quakes had opened deep trenches in the savannas, landslides had altered the course of rivers, fires had ravaged vast tracts of tampasi. Luke had considered taking Jade Shadow up to survey and catalog the damages—perhaps attaining orbit for just long enough to survey the nearby stars, as well—but he couldn’t trust that the planet wouldn’t jump into hyperspace again, as it had after its initial reversion to realspace.

Covertly he looked at Jabitha, then at Harrar. He couldn’t recall a time when he had been so close to a Yuuzhan Vong and not engaged in fighting for his life—save perhaps on the occasions he had stood close to Nom Anor. But then, any moments spent with Nom Anor constituted a duel, of sorts.

For the tenth time since the airship journey had begun, Luke tried to see Harrar in the Force, but perceived only an absence. Despite Vergere’s assurances to the contrary, Harrar—and by extension all Yuuzhan Vong—did not seem to exist in the Force. There the priest sat, not three meters away, and Luke couldn’t sense him. Harrar was nothing more or less than what he appeared to be: a tall, sinewy humanlike man, absent some of his fingers, and marked with tattoos, scars, and other modifications.

Luke knew that he could use the Force to levitate Harrar, to pirouette him about the small cabin, but he couldn’t see him in the same way he could see Mara, Jacen, Saba, and Jabitha—as a luminous being; not as the crude stuff of flesh and bone, but as an egg-shaped being of light. Vergere, who had willingly spent fifty years among the Yuuzhan Vong, had maintained that the seeming invisibility of the Yuuzhan Vong owed not to any inherent failure of the Force, but to the way Luke and his fellow Jedi perceived the Force. The implication was they had somehow failed to grasp that the Force was grander and more far reaching than they understood it to be.

Luke could accept that. His training had been rushed; and with the deaths of Obi-Wan and Yoda he had been obliged largely to pursue his own counsel, and find his own way to mastery. He would have been the first to admit that his understanding of the Force might be limited or incomplete; that he had perhaps become more a Master of the Living Force than what the late Vergere had called the Unifying Force. But even that deficiency should not have prevented him from being able to see Harrar.

Either Vergere had left something out of her lectures—which Luke wouldn’t have put past her—or her own understanding of the quandary was incomplete. Luke didn’t for a moment doubt that the Fosh Jedi had somehow succeeded in tutoring herself to a kind of mastery—despite having been forced to conceal her Jedi abilities from her captors—but the matter of the Yuuzhan Vong’s invisibility ran deeper than Vergere knew, or had allowed. Perhaps she believed, as Yoda had at times, that her responsibility ended with setting Luke on the proper path. Perhaps that was the way among the Jedi of the Old Republic. For all the education and practice each had undergone, the achievement of mastery was ultimately the outcome of a personal quest for understanding.

If any of the new Jedi order grasped this on an intuitive level, it was Jacen. Long before his reeducation by Vergere—some said reindoctrination—Jacen had sought to reach a personal understanding of the Force. In that, he was much like Leia, a Knight in her own right, who had for her own reasons resisted taking up the path of the Jedi.

It was Jacen who had insisted that Harrar accompany them on the journey Jabitha had proposed a day earlier,