by Claudia Gray
He settled back in his wroshyr-wood chair, teacup still in hand, though he hadn’t drunk from it in so long that the tea had to be cold. “It truly is a pleasure to meet you, Your Highness. I met your father a few times during the Clone Wars.”
Leia brightened. Ever since the earliest days of her childhood, she’d thrilled to her father’s stories of adventure during the wars. When she’d been tiny, he’d kept the stories simple—tales of narrow escapes, or dashingly heroic Jedi Knights. As she grew older, he’d talked to her more about the diplomacy, the complexity, and the tragedy of the battles. Still, she couldn’t resist thinking of the Clone Wars as exciting. “Did you serve together with him and General Kenobi?”
As soon as the name left her mouth, she wanted to bite her tongue. Not everyone in the galaxy wanted to remember the Jedi. Palpatine certainly didn’t, and Panaka was loyal to his emperor.
But Panaka nodded. “I knew Kenobi as well, though that was before the Clone Wars began. Before he was a full Jedi Knight, even.”
“Really?” There might be dozens of other stories about the great Obi-Wan Kenobi, ones even her father had never known.
Before Leia could ask, however, Panaka shifted slightly in his chair to look at her straight on. “Forgive me if this is a personal question, but—I believe I remember hearing that the viceroy and his queen adopted their child. Is that true?”
“Yes, of course. It’s not a personal question at all. My adoption was celebrated publicly on Alderaan.” It was a weird question, though. What did that have to do with anything?
Panaka nodded, as if considering her words very carefully. “How many years ago was that, now?”
“I turned sixteen a few months ago. My parents took me immediately after my birth.”
“Sixteen years almost exactly.” Panaka’s eyes had regained the intensity of the moment he’d first seen Leia. “And your biological parents were—”
That was a personal question, but one Leia didn’t mind answering. The little information she had was known by many on Alderaan and elsewhere. “I’ve been told my biological father died in one of the last battles of the Clone Wars. My birth mother was badly injured and lived only long enough to deliver me.”
“Do you know their names?”
“No,” Leia said. “I’ve never asked.”
“Why not?” That question came from Dalné, who valiantly tried to soften the conversation, to move it from the specific to the general. “Aren’t you curious? Most adoptees are.”
Leia shrugged. “If either of my birth parents had survived, I’d want to know them. But they were lost before I was even one day old. My adoptive parents are the only family I’ve ever had and the only ones I’d ever want. Not every adoptee feels that way about it, but for me—my family is complete, just as it is.”
“The disintegration of the Republic was a dangerous, chaotic time,” Panaka said. His eyes had never left Leia. “So many were lost, and it was difficult to know what had become of them. One heard so many rumors, and could never be certain which to believe.”
“I’m sure.” Leia wasn’t quite sure how to take this digression, but at least he wasn’t digging into her biological parentage anymore. Was he adopted as well, or had he adopted a child himself? Either explanation made sense, but neither entirely satisfied her.
Their strange tea party ended shortly afterward. Moff Panaka walked them to the front door himself, making pleasant chitchat, though he continued to watch Leia carefully the entire time. In irritation she wondered if he thought she was going to steal a teacup.
“Thank you again for your audience and your kind attention, Moff Panaka,” Dalné said.
Panaka’s smile for her looked entirely genuine. “For many years, I served queens of Naboo. It is a privilege to serve you as well.”
“Today you’ve also served a princess of Alderaan.” Leia held out her hands, and Panaka took them. His grip felt uncomfortably tight, but her facial expression never betrayed her discomfort. “I’m reassured to know that someone in authority is looking out for the miners’ interests.” Finally, she added, but only in her head.
“Meeting you has been a…unique experience.” Panaka cocked his head, still studying her with that laser gaze. “I shall speak to Palpatine himself about this.”
“About the miners?” That was much more than Leia had dared hope for.
Panaka shook his head. “About you, Your Highness. I think he should know that the Organas adopted a daughter of such distinction.”
Whatever that meant, and now he was focused on adoption again. Leia managed to politely extract her hands from Panaka’s grasp. “If you’d mention the miners too, I’d appreciate it.”
He seemed to catch himself. “Of course. I meant what I said, Princess Leia. The miners’ supervisors won’t be getting away with such petty thievery ever again.”
With those words, the whole peculiar afternoon was made worthwhile.
After he turned to reenter the chalet, Leia and Dalné descended the steps toward the Polestar. The winds that rippled the grass around them tugged at their robes and capes, and hopefully muffled their words as Leia muttered, “What was all that about?”
“I can’t imagine. Do you think that perhaps”—Dalné hesitated—“that your father and Moff Panaka were once friends, and had some kind of falling out? He might be angry about any good fortune for an enemy, even the adoption of a child.”
That seemed like a stretch to Leia. Still…“My father’s an open critic of Palpatine’s. If Panaka’s extremely loyal to the Emperor, probably he resents—”
A wall of heat slammed into Leia and knocked her off her feet as the world turned brilliant white. Roaring sound swallowed every other noise until Leia’s ears rang too much to hear anything else. Dalné was a blur next to her, tumbling down the steps beside Leia, and the only other sight she could make out in the glare was that of plumes of flame stretching high into the pale pink sky.
Explosion, she thought. That was the only coherent word she could come up with.
Leia hit the ground hard, flat on her belly, and couldn’t inhale for what felt like far too long. Dalné crawled to her side, long locks of her black hair dangling free of her silver headdress and tears dissolving her white makeup. She said nothing, only gripped Leia’s hand.
Something exploded, Leia thought in a daze. The moff’s chalet. But that doesn’t make any sense. It was a house built of wood, not a ship or station—
Which meant the house had been destroyed by a bomb.
Sitting upright, Leia looked around to see mayhem. Smoldering droid parts lay scattered across the lawn beside burning chips of wood and debris. The chalet itself, or what remained of it, couldn’t be seen through the thick black smoke billowing into the sky. Stormtroopers were running toward the fire, no doubt in an attempt to save Quarsh Panaka, although it seemed impossible anyone could’ve been closer to the blast and lived. Ress Batten, too, ran toward them, only steps behind.
In the distance, one man was running away.
It’s the civilian worker, the one with the breathing mask! Leia tried to rise to her feet but couldn’t. She lifted her hand to at least point toward the escaping figure—
—until she realized this was an attack on an Imperial official. An attack on the Empire.
That meant this could possibly be linked to her parents’ shadowy activities on Crait.
Leia couldn’t identify the bomber as long as there was any chance this was connected to her family. Never had her loyalty to Bail and Breha Organa wounded her, but it did as she sat there, forced to let a murderer get away.
Had her parents become murderers too?
The chaos after the explosion left Leia badly off balance for the better part of an hour. One moment she was staring at the burning chalet, thinking, I was just drinking tea inside there, with a man who’s dead now. The next, a medical droid was hovering around her, scanning for injuries; by the time the droid was done, she had synthplast over the few bad cuts sh
e’d received and a binding field around her ankle, which throbbed menacingly. Then she remembered the masked man who had run away—wondered if he was tied to whatever shadowy group her parents were a part of, whether they’d known this would happen to Quarsh Panaka and anyone who stood near him—and thought of the shamefaced way the miners’ leader had spoken of reaching out for “help”—
“You, there.” The stormtrooper’s metallic voice jolted Leia back into the here and now. He stood over her, smudges of soot marring his white armor. The way the sunlight hit his mask, she could almost see the human eyes within. He gestured with his blaster rifle toward an area where a few shell-shocked, grimy people were being cordoned off by his fellow troopers. “Assemble with the other suspects.”
“Suspects?” Her temper returned to fiery life, but before she could speak, Queen Dalné of Naboo stepped in, already dusted off to a semblance of her former grandeur.
“This is not a suspect,” Dalné said in the deeper, flatter voice that meant she spoke not as an individual, but as monarch. “This is Leia, princess of Alderaan, daughter of their queen and their representative in the Imperial Senate. It would be absurd to accuse her of terrorist activities.”
With a jolt, Leia realized she was closer to the true cause than anyone else nearby.
But Dalné’s explanation worked for the stormtrooper. The strict hierarchies of Imperial service meant the average soldier of the line was quick to defer to authority. “Excuse me, Your Majesty, Your Highness. I wasn’t informed.”
“It’s quite all right,” Leia said as smoothly as she could manage. “I think we’re all shaken up.”
The stormtrooper was clearly torn between wanting to seize that excuse and not wanting to admit he was “shaken up” in front of two teenage girls. Finally he simply waved toward the Polestar, where Ress Batten had been forced to wait.
Leia got to her feet, wincing as she put her weight on her ankle. Upon seeing her discomfort, Dalné quickly took her arm. As they walked toward the royal yacht together, Dalné murmured, “If we hadn’t been who we are, we’d be carted off to detention with the others.”
“What if none of them are guilty?” Leia hadn’t seen the masked man again; he’d timed his getaway well.
Dalné’s scowl creased her thick makeup. “One of them will be, before the local legal officer is through. They’ll want blood for this, and they won’t dare report to their superiors that they couldn’t solve the terrorist murder of a provincial governor. A moff.” She shook her head as if in wonder. “Someone must have known Naboo and Onoam well, to have thought this out so well. There are few other places where a moff would be so unguarded.”
Another pang of fear wrenched Leia’s heart. Her father had mentioned visiting Naboo several times; apparently he’d had friends here in the days of the Clone Wars. Although he’d never gone into any detail about his time on Naboo, he could feasibly have traveled to Onoam. He might know this area well.
Bail Organa could have been in league with whoever planned this attack.
He didn’t set it up for sure—he knew I was coming here—but he didn’t remember what planet Onoam orbited. Maybe he only knew the attack would be on one of Naboo’s moons—
Dalné, apparently unaware of Leia’s disquiet, kept talking. “Soon they’ll put this entire system on lockdown. Your royal status will protect you from arrest, but they could still hold you here.”
“We’ll leave immediately,” Leia promised. The winds had calmed, and the high grasses around them seemed like impenetrable walls of green, the pathway through a maze she hadn’t known they were in. “But you—”
“Yes?”
“If—if they’re going to lock the planet down for a while—that means no other Imperial authority will be able to seize control very soon. For a few days, or even weeks, maybe the queen of Naboo can be a true queen again. You might have the power to help the miners after all.”
Almost as soon as Leia had spoken the words, she realized how risky that direction would be for Dalné. Even a temporary assertion of power by an individual planet might be seen as insurrection. The smoldering building on the horizon had shown her how dangerous, even vicious, a revolution against the Emperor would be, but she needed no such example to demonstrate how cruel the Empire was. She knew that as well as every other citizen of the galaxy.
Dalné had to know it too. Yet instead of refusing or pretending not to hear, she lifted her chin. “Maybe there’s a chance,” she said to Leia. “It’s worth trying, at least for the miners’ sake.”
Leia took her new friend’s hand. “You’ll always have an ally on Alderaan.”
“And you’ll always have one here.”
The return home was tense. For the first time in her life, she dreaded a reunion with her parents. She had to ask them more hard questions, harder than ever before, and this time, she wouldn’t be put off by talk about how she needed to be wiser or more responsible or a corpse halfway in the grave before she’d earned the right to hear the truth. If Leia had nearly lost her life because of her parents’ work—if they had murdered Moff Quarsh Panaka—then she needed to know that.
What if they did? whispered a traitorous voice in her mind. What are you going to do?
She could never report her parents. Never. That was impossible.
But she couldn’t go on as she had before, either. Not if they were guilty.
“Thank the Force you’re alive,” Ress Batten said as they disembarked in the Aldera spaceport. “If I’d had to come back and report to your mother that you’d been killed on our watch, I’d have been reprimanded for sure.” Then she caught herself. “What I mean is that I would’ve been distraught with grief.”
“It’s all fine,” Leia said absently. The buzz of the busy spaceport around her might as well have been mere holograms, flickering and insubstantial, visions of someplace much farther away. “Thanks for everything.”
Batten frowned. “Your Highness, are you sure you’re all right? I could take you to a hospital, or find the nearest medical droid—”
“No, really, it’s nothing. I just need some rest.” With effort, she smiled for the pilot. Batten didn’t look convinced, but contented herself with dropping her off at the palace.
When Leia walked into the private area of the palace, the only one waiting for her was WA-2V, who flung her metal arms open wide. “Your Highness! It’s amazing!”
“I was amazed, I guess, though that’s not how I’d word it….”
“Yes, it’s dirty, but this is by far the most beautiful gown you’ve ever worn!” 2V wheeled up to her, reaching out skinny metallic fingers to touch one of the pale pink veils on the cape. “Of course anyone who knows anything about fashion knows that Naboo is the place for formalwear, but I hardly thought you’d pick up so much so quickly!”
Her grooming droid’s single-minded dedication to hairstyles and clothing usually amused Leia. Today, it took all her self-control not to snap at 2V. It’s her programming. She didn’t get to choose her programming. “Sorry, TooVee. I borrowed this from Queen Dalné. We need to have the gown cleaned and returned to her.”
2V’s joints went slack in disappointment. “Oh. Oh well. At least we have a wonderful example to draw from, don’t you think?”
“Sure, fine. Where are my parents?”
“The queen and her viceroy are in the library, but really you should let me tidy you up before you present yourself to them. Though maybe it’s worth letting them see the dress! Then they might approve a shopping expedition back to Naboo.”
“Let’s not ask them about that yet.” By which she meant, not ever. Leia felt as though she’d prefer never to be near the Naboo system again.
She managed to send her droid off to lay out comfortable nightclothes and fold down the coverlets, though she felt certain she wouldn’t be going to bed for hours yet. Evening had fallen, and exhaustion made every muscle of Leia’s body ache—but it was impossible for her to rest until she had talked with her parents.
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Leia approached the library more slowly as she saw that one of the tall bronze doors remained open, and heard her parents talking to each other in pitched tones that betrayed their terror, or anger, or both.
“—a stand, immediately,” said her father, who paced back and forth along the wooden floor. “Otherwise, soon there will be no controlling the partisans, and no telling how far they might go.”
Her mother spoke in the tone that Leia recognized as the one for delivering harsh news. “Saw’s judgment is faulty, but it’s time to ask ourselves how far—Leia!”
They both wheeled around to see her as she stepped through the door. Firelight flickered through the great hall of the library, very nearly the only light in the room, but Leia could tell how stricken her mother looked. Her father, however, looked…angry.
Furious.
Her mother spoke first. “Are you all right?”
“I’m not injured much,” Leia answered. That wasn’t the same as yes, and both her parents would know it.
Breha came toward her daughter, hand outstretched, the hem of her deep red robe whispering as it brushed along the floor. Yet she stopped a few paces short of Leia, her expression unreadable. When she spoke again, her words were low and even, the way they’d been when Leia had fallen as a child and scraped her knee. “Sweetheart, is there a particular reason you chose to go to the Naboo system? Were you interested in that world because of something you haven’t wanted to share? You can tell us.”
After everything that had happened, how was that her mother’s first question? “You two said I couldn’t go to a planet that would be politically sensitive. I figured the Emperor’s homeworld was about as far from that as I could get, especially since I was only on one of the moons. It’s not like I knew someone was going to assassinate a moff.” When her mother flinched, Leia feared she had her answer. “Did you?”
“What?” Bail snapped.