Star Wars_ Young Jedi Knights 02_ Shadow Academy - Kevin J. Anderson [25]
When they had finished with the Hutt information broker on Borgo Prime, Luke and Tenel Ka decided their best hope for finding Jacen, Jaina, and Lowbacca lay in going directly to Dathomir, home world of the original Nightsisters. Their only clue was the mysterious Nightsister, and they had to find out who she was and whether she had the twins and Lowbacca.
Luke had urged Tenel Ka to get some sleep while they made their journey.
It was the first opportunity she had had to rest since her friends had been kidnapped, and Tenel Ka gratefully accepted.
And so she had slept, sealed away from light and sound, in one of the berths aboard the Off Chance, but her rest had again been disturbed by shadowy dreams. She touched a switch by her head and winced as bright cabin light flooded the sleeping cubicle. She rolled onto her stomach, swung her legs over the side of the bunk, and dropped a meter and a half to the floor of the cabin. Shaking back her tumble of loose red-gold hair, Tenel Ka stretched to her full height and noted with pleasure the freedom of movement that her tough, supple lizard-hide armor afforded her. She was glad to be dressed as a warrior again.
The uneasy feeling left by her dream persisted as Tenel Ka made her way to the cockpit and lowered herself into the copilot's seat next to Luke.
She gazed through the front viewport at the swirling colors that indicated the Off Chance was traveling through hyperspace.
Luke looked up from the controls. "Did you get some sleep?"
"This is a fact." She fastened the crash webbing around her, then grabbed a thick clump of her hair and began plaiting it into a braid, adding a few feathers and beads that she kept in a pouch attached to her belt.
"But you didn't sleep well?"
She blinked at this, somehow surprised that he had noticed. "This is also a fact."
Luke did not reply. He simply waited, and with growing discomfort she realized he was waiting for her to explain.
"I ... had a dream," she said. "It is not important."
His intense blue eyes searched her face. When he spoke, it was in a low voice. "I feel fear in you."
She grimaced and shrugged. "It is a dream I have had before."
His eyelids fluttered shut briefly, and he tilted his head as he might have done had he been studying her with his eyes open. "...the Nightsisters?" he said at last.
"Yes. It is childish," she admitted as color rushed to her cheeks, staining them with embarrassment.
"Strange ... I dreamt about them, too," Luke said.
Tenel Ka looked at him in disbelief. "I used to think they were just a story that mothers and grandmothers on Dathomir told to scare children.
But the Nightsisters were all destroyed. How could there be any left?"
"The people of Dathomir are often strong in the Force, and it would not be difficult for someone else to train them in the ways of evil," he said. He leaned back in the pilot's seat and stared out at hyperspace as if summoning an old memory. "In fact, many years ago-before you were born-I traveled to Dathomir searching for Jacen and Jaina's parents, Han and Leia. That was when I met your mother and father, and we all joined forces to defeat the last of the Nightsisters."
Tenel Ka looked at him curiously. This was a part of the story her parents spoke little about. "My mother thinks very highly of you," she said, hoping he would elaborate.
Luke slid her a teasing glance. "But did she ever tell you how we met?
That she captured me?"
"You don't mean-" Tenel Ka began. "She couldn't have expected ..."
Luke chuckled at her discomfiture. "This is a fact."
"Oh, Master Skywalker!" Tenel Ka gasped in chagrin at the very idea of Luke submitting to the primitive marriage customs she had always viewed as quaint and provincial. On Dathomir, a woman selected and captured the man she wanted to marry. Her mother, Teneniel Djo, had done that to Luke Skywalker?
It brought a renewed flush