And yes, the air in the Plawal Rift was extraordinarily damp, plastering Leia's dark linen shirt to her arms and back as she leaned on the railing of the terrace where Han and the Wookiee were working to take advantage of the daylight--Jevax's promised engineers had yet to arrive to repair power in the house and completely unstick the welded shutters. If they worked on anything like the MuniCenter's schedules, thought Leia, they wouldn't see them until the packing plants shut down for the night again.
And yes, secondhand machinery not designed specifically for work in hyperdamp climates did develop the occasional flutter.
But presumably the mechanics would install dehumidifier packs in everything--they were certainly present in all the kitchen's quaintly old-fashioned blenders and choppers. And Artoo had spent considerable time in the marshes of Dagobah without becoming homicidal, a restraint of which Leia wasn't sure she would be capable, after hearing Luke's account of that green, snake-ridden world.
As her old nanny had phrased it, something about it all just didn't listen right to her.
Whatever programmers said, thought Leia, perching herself on the stone rail of the balcony, a "mechanical flaw" might possibly account for Artoo's running amok and trundling off the path into the trees... but by no stretch of the imagination could it cause him to perform a complicated series of specific activities like closing doors, sealing locks, crossing wires within wall panels and blasters.
It was definitely Artoo: The serial numbers on his main block and motivator housing matched. Chewbacca--his arms and shoulders criss-crossed with strips shaven in his fur and synthflesh patched in beneath but otherwise little the worse for the events in the caverns last night--hadn't found any kind of relay mechanism inserted into Artoo's motivators that would have given him instructions from the outside.
And in any case, when would such a thing have been installed? He hadn't been out of Leia's sight last night for more than a few moments, and for part of that time she'd heard him moving.
"So whaddaya think?" Han wiped his fingers on an already unspeakable rag.
Chewbacca pushed back his eyeshades and groaned noncommittally. The Wookiee had reassembled the engines of the Millennium Falcon when they'd been in worse shape than this and the thing had flown; Leia, regarding the loose piles of wire and cable still spread around the stone flagging of the terrace, had her doubts.
Artoo rocked a little on his base and managed a faint, reassuring cheep.
"What did you think you were...?" began Han, and Leia reached over to touch his shoulder, stopping further words. Artoo had to be feeling utterly wretched already.
"Can you tell us about it?" she asked gently.
Artoo rocked harder, swiveled his top, and beeped pleadingly.
"Can he tell us about it?" demanded Han. ”I can tell you about it! He tried to kill us!"
The droid emitted a thin, despairing wail.
"It's all right," said Leia. She knelt beside Artoo, touched the droid on the join of base pivot and body, disregarding her husband's muttered commentary. "I'm not mad at you, and I won't let anything happen to you." She glanced over her shoulder at Han and Chewie, a sinister-enough-looking pair, she supposed, leaned against the stone railing with their arms full of drills and grippers. "What happened?"
All Artoo's lights went out.
Leia turned back to Chewie, who had pushed his welding goggles back onto his high forehead. ”Are you sure you got his wiring back the way it's supposed to be?"
"Hey, he works, doesn't he?" retorted Han.
Leia stepped back while Chewbacca knelt and went to work again. Though not much of a mechanic--Luke had taught her to break and reassemble a standard X-wing engine in a pinch, and on a good day she could even identify portions of the Falcon's drive system--Leia had the impression the Wookiee was redoing some of the repairs he'd done half an hour ago. But Han and Chewie, like Luke, were mechanics, and thought in terms of mechanical failure.
She found herself wondering if there was a way of getting in touch with Cray Mingla.
It occurred to her that she had heard nothing from Luke or any of his party in days.
Something moved in the orchard below. A bright-yellow manollium burst out of the ferns like a startled flower and went winging away through the trees, and Leia--who had never lost the watchfulness of those years on the run between the battles of Yavin and Endor--looked automatically for what had startled it.
She didn't see much, but it was enough. A ghostlike impression of movement faded at once into the mist, but there was no mistaking the white gown, the night-black tail of hair. From the balcony behind her Han's voice said, "I never asked you last night, Leia--you find anything in the city records?"
"Yes," said Leia briefly, swinging herself over the balcony rail and dropping lightly the meter and a half to the thick ferns below. "I'll be back...."
In the mist it was impossible to see more than a few meters clearly. Tree stems, vines, beds of shrub and fern made dim, one-dimensional cutouts in the glassy grayness. Half closing her eyes, Leia reached out with her senses, as Luke had been teaching her to do, and picked up the subliminal stir of fabric among leaves, the squish of wet foliage underfoot... the trace of perfume.
Her hand moved automatically to check for the blaster usually holstered at her side, even as she moved in pursuit. Nothing there, of course. Still she didn't turn back. Not swiftly, but steadily, she worked to keep up with the woman whose face she'd seen under the lamplight of the path through the orchard last night.
She remembered now where she'd seen her before.
She'd been eighteen, newly elected the youngest member of the Imperial Senate. It was customary among the old Houses to bring their daughters to Coruscant when they emerged from finishing school at seventeen--or sixteen, if their parents were ambitious to start the long and elaborate jockeying for a good match at Court. Her aunts, she remembered, had been horrified when she'd refused, doubly appalled when her father had backed her up in her decision not to be presented to the Emperor until she could do so as a Senator in her own right, not simply as a young girl in the Court marriage market...
She wondered what they'd think now, those aunts, if they could see her married to a man who'd started life as a smuggler, whose parents had been nobody-knew-who. If they could see her as Chief of State, after years of dodging around the galaxy in the company of a ragged gang of idealistic warriors with a price on her head.
She honestly didn't know whether they would have been aghast or proud. When she was eighteen, she hadn't known them well; hadn't known them as an adult knows other adults.
And they had all died before she could.
She stepped from among the trees of the orchard. The white dress was at the far end of Old Orchard Street, moving swiftly. Heading for the market square, Leia thought.
For a long time she'd tried not to know whether it had been day or evening in the capital of Alderaan when the Death Star had appeared in the sky. Somebody had eventually told her that it had been a warm evening late in the spring. Aunt Rouge had undoubtedly been having her hair dressed for dinner in front of that gilt-framed mirror in her boudoir; Aunt Celly would have been lying down indulging in her daily bout of hypochondria, and Aunt Tia would have been reading aloud to her or talking baby talk to the pittins. Leia even remembered the pittins' names: Taffy, Winkie, Fluffy, and AT-AV-?All-Terrain Attack Vehicle." She'd named that last one. It had been pale candy pink and small enough to fit in her cupped hands.
The pittins had all died, too, when somebody had pulled that lever on the Death Star.
And everything else had died as well.
Everything else.
Leia gritted her teeth as she moved along the steep slant of the street, keeping close to the jumble of old walls and prefab shops, fighting the sting behind her eyes and the dreadful tightness of her throat. Her aunts had made her girlhood an intermittent burden, but they'd deserved better than that.
It had been her father who had presented her
to the Emperor--in the Senate rotunda, as junior representative of Alderaan. She remembered as if it were yesterday the evil dark eyes peering like a lizard's from that desiccated face in the black hood's shadow. But her aunts were the ones who had insisted on taking her to the levee at the palace that night.
That was where she'd seen this woman--this girl.
She herself had been eighteen, clothed in the spare, formal white of Senatorial office, as her father had been. There had been few other Senators there, and the crowd in the pillared hall had been an autumnal flower bed of dull golds and bronzes, plum and dark green. Among the usual courtiers, the sons and daughters of Governors and moffs and the scions of the ancient, aristocratic Houses, whose parents were trying to arrange alliances, Leia had noticed a half dozen women of truly startling beauty, exquisitely gowned and jeweled like princesses, who did not seem to belong with either the bureaucrats' wives or the more elite groups of the old Houses and their vassals. She'd asked Aunt Rouge about them and had gotten a very superior, "Whom the Emperor wishes to invite is of course his business, Leia dear; but one is not obligated to speak with them."
Leia had realized they were the Emperor's concubines.
This woman--this girl--had been one of them.
Leia was catching her up. The woman glanced behind her as she threaded swiftly through the barrows of vegetables, jewelry, cosmetics, and scarves in the market square, like a small fish hoping to lose a larger one among bright-colored rocks. She began to run, and Leia ran after her, dodging vendors and shoppers and the occasional lines of antigrav wagons on their way in from the orchards. The woman--who must be only a few years older than she, Leia thought--ducked down an alley, and Leia ran on past its mouth, then doubled down the narrow lane beyond. The houses around the marketplace were old, built on the sunken foundations and lower stories of the original dwellings of the town; Leia descended a short flight of steps at a silent run, dodged through the squat pillars of what had once been a hot-spring hall and was now a sort of open cellar under the gleaming white prefab of the upper house, knee-deep in swirling ground mist and smelling faintly of sulfur and kretch. At the far side she sprang up into the alley again.
The woman had concealed herself behind a stack of packing crates and was watching the mouth of the alley to see if Leia was going to come back that way. She was still slender and small, almost childlike, as she had been eleven years ago. Her exquisite oval face was unlined, her slanted black eyes unmarred by wrinkles--Leia remembered inconsequentially Cray's vast catalog of such products as Slootheberry Wrinkle Creme and Distilled Water of Moltokian Camba-Fruit designed to preserve such perfection. The black hair that hung down her back in a heavy tail ringed with bronze--the hair that had been piled into the elaborate, mask-like headpiece at the Emperor's levee--”
untouched by gray.
All the way from the house in the orchard, Leia had been trying to recall the woman's name, and as she stepped from between the lava pillars and up into the alley she finally did. "Roganda," she said, and the woman spun, her hand going to her lips in shock. In the drifting, shadowless mists it was hard to see her eyes, but after a moment the woman Roganda Ismaren stepped forward and sank into a deep curtsy at Leia's feet.
"Your Highness."
Leia hadn't heard her voice before. Aunt Rouge had seen to that. It was soft, and pitched rather high, with a lisping, childish sweetness.
"I beg of you, Highness, don't betray me."
"To whom?" asked Leia practically, and gestured for her to rise. The old hand movement, drilled into her by her aunts' deportment teachers, came easily, a whisper from the dead past.
Roganda Ismaren wasn't the only one in danger of betrayal here. Leia and Han would probably find themselves far less able to pursue their investigations--if there was in fact anything to investigate--were it known who they were.
Roganda got to her feet, the hem of her gown stirring the mists that drifted up from the old house foundations, the lower end of the mossgrown street. ”Them." She nodded toward the bustling noises of the market, half invisible in the fog, and her gesture took in the stone foundations of the houses around them, the patched-in white cubes with their terraces, their trellises, their steps. Her every movement still retained the implicit beauty of a trained dancer's. Like Leia, she had been well taught how to carry herself.
"Anyone in this town. The Empire laid it to the ground not too long ago, and even those who came in afterward have cause to hate even the unwilling servants of the Emperor."
Leia relaxed a little. The woman was unarmed, unless she had a dagger or an extremely small blaster under that simple white linen gown, and the liquid drape of the fabric made even that unlikely. As Palpatine's concubine, Roganda would have found herself very much in the crossfire between the Emperor's enemies and his friends. Leia wondered how she'd gotten out of Coruscant.
"This place has been my refuge, my safety, for seven years now," Roganda continued softly. She clasped her hands in a gesture of pleading. "Don't force me out, to seek another home."
"No," said Leia, embarrassed, "of course not. Why did you pick this place to come to?"
She was thinking only of the Emperor's levee, of the jeweled headpiece Roganda had worn, massy gold and layered with a galactic dazzle of topaz, ruby, citrine; remembering the elaborate bunches of shimmersilk skirts, held in swags and volutes with gemmed plaques the size of her palm; the chains of jewels, fine as embroidery thread, dangling row on row from the curved golden splendor of her concubine collar. Roganda's hair had been augmented and amplified by swags of lace, swatches of silk in every shade of gold and crimson, her small white hands a glory of scintillant rings.
But Roganda hesitated, seemed to draw back. "Why do you ask?" Then, quickly, "It was out of the way.... No one knew of it, no one would look for me here. Neither the Rebels from whom I fled when I left Coruscant, nor the warlords who tried to take it back. I wanted only peace."
She gave a shy smile. "Since you've come this far, will you come to my rooms?" Roganda gestured back along the alley. "They aren't elegant--you can't pay for much elegance on a fruit packer's wages--but I do pride myself on my coffee. The one remnant of earlier glories."
The coffee served at the Emperor's levee was one of the things that had stayed in Leia's mind. The Emperor had had special farms on a number of suitable worlds to provide the beans solely for the use of his Court, including several that produced vine-coffee, a variety notoriously hard to rear. The transition to this provincial town among its orchards couldn't have been an easy one.
"Another time," she said, shaking her head. ”Surely there were other places you could have gone?"
"Few as out of the way as this." Roganda half smiled, and brushed aside the tendrils of dark hair that trailed across her brow. Her complexion was the clear, pallorous white of those who live without sunlight, on starships, or underground, or on worlds like this where the only thin sunlight that leaked down through the mists had to be magnified by the crystal of the dome.
"Even smugglers rarely bother anymore. I knew I wasn't going to be welcomed in the Republic--his name was too hated, and those who haven't been... coerced, as he could coerce... would not understand that there was no question of refusing him."
Leia remembered what Luke had told her of his days serving the Emperor's clone, and shuddered.
"And as for going to the worlds, the cities, still under the rule of the Governors and the new warlords, or the worlds where the old Houses still hold sway..."
She shivered, as if chill winds blew down the alley instead of the dense warmth of the drifting fogs. "He lent me to too many of them... as a gift. All I wanted to do was... forget."
"What were you doing outside the house?"
"Waiting for you," said Roganda simply. "For a chance to speak to you alone. I recognized you last night, when your droid malfunctioned.... I hope you got it back to the path without mishap? I almost came down to help you, but... on other worlds where I thought to take refuge,
I've had bad experiences with those who remembered me from the Emperor's Court. And I admit I was...unhappy enough to do some foolish things in those days."
She averted her face, twisting on her finger the small topaz ring that was probably the only jewel she had left of those days. Maybe, thought Leia, the only thing left unsold after her passage here had been paid. Her hand was still white and small and fragile as a cage-reared bird.
"I lost my nerve," she concluded, not meeting Leia's eyes. "Then last night I began to fear that you had recognized me. That you might speak of it to your husband, and he to others here. I... I made up my mind to come to you in private. To beg for your silence."
A bright drift of music keened from the market as the jugglers started setting up their pitches. A busker cried, "Step right up, ladies'an'gennelmens... three turns and turn 'em over..." Somewhere Leia heard the dim, skeletal clatter of a mechanical tree feeder being walked out of a repair shop back to the orchards, and a musical Ithorian voice sang, "Fresh tarts! Fresh tarts! Podon and brandifert, sweetest in town..." while high overhead the vast, flower-decked gondolas of the silk and coffee beds glided along their tracks, lifting and lowering, silent as birds beneath the crystal of the dome.
"But you didn't."
Roganda looked down at her hands again, turning her ring. "No," she said. Her long black lashes trembled. "I can't... explain, exactly. I've been so afraid for so long. It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't been through what I've been through."
She raised pleading eyes to Leia's, darkness and old memories shimmering in them like unshed tears. "Sometimes it seems I'll never cease being afraid. The way it seems some nights that I'll never cease having nightmares about him, for as long as I live."
"It's all right." Leia's voice sounded gruff and awkward in her own ears, shaky with the memory of her own nightmares. "I promise I won't betray you to those who live here."
"Thank you." Her voice was barely a whisper. Then she smiled tremulously. "You're sure you won't have coffee with me? I make it rather well."
Leia shook her head. "Thank you," she said, and smiled back. "Han will be wondering where I've gone." She started back for the market square, then turned, remembering something else. Something her aunt Celly had whispered to her in a corner when Aunt Rouge was over lecturing the head of the House Elegin about the proper deportment of its scions...
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