• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Hey girlie!” His boots crunched closer. He was panting. “Where you go? Don’t be shy.”

Don’t breathe.

“I got bottle of urrqal. You want to have party?” He had a remarkably large vocabulary for a Weequay, all of it centered on his baser needs. “I fun when you get to know me.”

I should have waited for it to get dark. I could influence his mind, try to make him leave.

But she hadn’t. And she couldn’t, try as she might to concentrate. She was too full of adrenaline and uncontrolled panic.

“Come on, you scrag-end, where are you? I find you …”

He sounded as if he was kicking his way through the crop, and getting closer. If she got up and ran for it, she was dead. If she stayed where she was, he’d find her—eventually. He wasn’t going to get bored, and he wasn’t going to give up.

“Girlie …”

The Weequay’s voice was close, to her right, about twenty meters away. She sipped a strangled breath and clamped her lips shut again, lungs aching, eyes streaming with the effort.

“Girlie …” Closer. He was going to step right on her.

“Gir-leeeeee …”

She knew what he’d do when he found her. If she was lucky, he’d kill her afterward.

“Gir—”

The Weequay was interrupted by a loud, wet thwack. He let out a grunt and then there was a second thwack—shorter, sharper, harder. Etain heard a squeal of pain.

“How many times have I got to tell you, di’kut?” It was a different voice, human, with an hard edge of authority. Thwack. “Don’t—waste—my—time.” Another thwack: another squeal. Etain kept her face pressed in the dirt. “You get drunk one more time, you go chasing females one more time, and I’m going to slit you from here to—here.”

The Weequay shrieked. It was the sort of incoherent animal sound that beings made when pain overwhelmed them. Etain had heard too much of that sound in her short time on Qiilura. Then there was silence.

She hadn’t heard the voice before, but she didn’t need to. She knew exactly who it belonged to.

Etain strained to listen, half expecting a heavy boot to suddenly stamp on her back, but all she could hear was the swish and crunch of two pairs of feet wading through the crop. Away from her. She caught snatches of the fading conversation as the wind took it: the Weequay was still being berated.

“… more important …”

What was?

“… later, but right now, di’kut, I need you to … okay? Or I’ll cut …”

Etain waited. Eventually all she could hear was the breath of the wind, the rustling grain, and the occasional fluting call of a ground-eel seeking a mate. She allowed herself to breathe normally again, but still she waited, facedown in ripe manure, until dusk started to fall. She had to move now. The gdans would be out hunting, combing the fields in packs. On top of that, the smell that hadn’t bothered her while she was gripped by terror was starting to really bother her now.

She eased herself up on her elbows, then her knees, and looked around.

Why did they have to manure barq so late in the season anyway? She fumbled in the pockets of her cloak for a cloth. Now if only she could find a stream, she could clean herself up. She pulled a handful of stalks, crushed them into a ball, and tried to scrape off the worst of the dung and debris stuck to her.

“That’s a pretty expensive crop to be using for that,” a voice said.

Etain gulped in a breath and spun around to find a local in a grubby smock scowling at her. He looked thin, worn out, and annoyed; he was holding a threshing tool. “Do you know how much that stuff’s worth?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Sliding her hand carefully inside her cloak, she felt for the familiar cylinder. She hadn’t wanted the Weequay to know that she was a Jedi, but if this farmer was considering turning her in for a few loaves or a bottle of urrqal, she’d need her lightsaber handy. “It was your barq or my life, I’m afraid.”

The farmer stared at the crushed stalks and the scattered bead-like grains, tight-lipped. Yes, barq fetched a huge price in the restaurants of Coruscant: it was a luxury, and the people who grew it for export couldn’t afford it. That didn’t