Yoda (29 page)

Dooku brought his blade down toward the diminutive Jedi Master and Yoda parried, locking his blade against Dooku's. Yoda breathed, calming himself. “And yet, even here on Vjun, where the dark side whispers and whispers to me…love you enough to destroy you I do.”

Pushing Dooku back yet again, blades flashed and flared stutters of light, blood red and sea green.

Sweat ran in streams through Dooku's beard as he countered Yoda's every move, and his lips were white. Holobattles raged around them as the consoles showed Obi-Wan and Anakin clashing with wave after wave of battle droids. Dooku shot a quick glance at the red button on his desk and, with a Force push, he punched it in.

Yoda cocked his head. “A choice made, have you, Count?”

“I notice I am no longer your
apprentice,
” Dooku said between breaths. “There was always a chance you could overpower me, of course.” Yoda attacked: Dooku parried. “So I put a missile in high orbit, slaved to this location. It's falling now. Gathering speed.” Dooku stepped warily back to the open window casement. “Can you feel it dropping? A thorn, a needle, an arrow. Faster all the time.” He paused to get his breath. “Obi-Wan and your precious Skywalker and your little Padawans will be wiped out when the missile hits. So what you need to decide is, what means more to you, Master Yoda? Saving their lives—or taking mine?”

And with that he leapt backward, out the window. Yoda bounded after him. In the dark Vjun air it was all he could do not to leap after Dooku, to fall on him like a green thunderbolt and annihilate him utterly.

…But already he could feel the missile, too, dropping in a red scream through the atmosphere, two hundred armored kilos of explosive aimed for Château Malreaux. With a snort, Yoda turned his eyes to the sky and picked out the glowing dot racing in from the horizon.

Below him, Dooku landed softly on the ground and melted into the rose gardens.

The missile was coming in with terrible speed and power: too much coming at Yoda too fast ever to wholly stop it, even if he had time and perfect peace. But he reached out to pull up the Force binding even Vjun's bitter green moss and twisted thorn-trees, and let it flow through him like a wind: the breath of a world, gathered and released in a push-feather game with all their lives on the line, not to oppose the missile's force with force, but to touch it gently on the side—just enough to send it screaming by the broken window casement to plunge a kilometer offshore into the cold and waiting sea.

A long instant later, water fountained from the ocean in a blaze of light three hundred meters tall, and then fell back.

The château and all those inside it had been spared: but Dooku was gone.

Moments later, Yoda trotted down into what had once been the great entryway of Château Malreaux, now a shattered and smoking ruin.

Obi-Wan was thoughtfully toeing the remains of a prime combat droid that his partner had cut in half. “Nice work, Anakin.” He looked around generally, surveying the carnage. “If you were considering a career in interior decoration, though, you might want to take a few more classes.”

“Oh, no,” Anakin remarked. “This is the New Brutalism. I think it will be all the rage if these Clone Wars don't end soon.”

“Master Yoda!” Obi-Wan said, running across the hallway as the old one came down the great curving staircase. “Are you all right?”

“Sad am I, but unhurt.” The old Jedi sighed. “So close, I was!”

“Did you almost kill Dooku?” Anakin said sympathetically. “How frustrating!”

Yoda gave him an odd look—almost angry.

Anakin didn't notice. “Perhaps we can still catch him—he must be around here somewhere. I thought we were going to get Ventress once and for all, but she gave us the slip. This place is crazy—honeycombed with secret passages.”

“And battle droids behind every wall,” Obi-Wan added. The familiar rumbling sound of a starship engine coming to life started up in the distance. Obi-Wan headed for the front door.

“Masters!” Anakin hissed. He put a finger over his lips, signaling the others to keep quiet, and edged along the wall of the entry hall until he came to a doorway that led into the mansion's interior. Touching his lightsaber to life, he leapt into the corridor with a bloodcurdling yell—at exactly the same moment that Scout and Whie leapt from the other direction. For a long, comical instant the three of them were frozen in battle stance, lightsabers glowing, screaming at one another.

Yoda doubled over, wheezing with laughter.

Anakin was the first to recover. “Hey—it's the small fry!”

“Glad to see you, am I!” Yoda said. “But hurt you are,” he added, his long ear tips furled with worry. Whie's robes were scorched and slashed by stray fire from Solis's death throes, and Scout's hair was clotted with blood.

“It's nothing,” Scout said, grinning. “We couldn't be better.”

Whie laughed and threw his arms around Anakin in sheer joy. “I'm so glad you're not coming to kill me!”

Anakin clapped him on the back, bemused. “Me, too.” Looking back over his shoulder, he said, “You might want to check this one for a head injury, Master.”

“Anakin?” Obi-Wan said.

“Yes?”

“You remember that the first time I met Asajj Ventress, I stole her spaceship?”

“On Queyta, right?”

“And then we met again, and we took her ship again?”

“Right. Why do you mention it?” Anakin said, coming to stand in the doorway beside Obi-Wan.

Together the two of them watched their lovely Chryya rise slowly into the weeping Vjun sky and head for space, accelerating hard. “Oh, no reason,” Obi-Wan said.

12

O
bi-Wan's hands played over the controls of the secondhand Seltaya Yoda had purchased in the Hydian Way. After hours of haggling, the Master had gotten an excellent price, once they included the trade-in value of the two Trade Federation gunships they had hijacked to get off Vjun. “Ready to drop out of hyperspace?”

“More than ready,” Anakin said.

The older Jedi glanced over at the young man, who was grinning with anticipation.
I envy him,
he thought, surprised.

“What are you thinking, Obi-Wan? I saw you smile.”

“Do you remember Yoda's little maxim about humility?”

“Humility endless is,”
Anakin quoted.

“That's the one. Did you ever hear Mace Windu's translation?” Anakin shook his head.
“You're never too old to make another big mistake.”

Obi-Wan set the controls for the drop into subspace. “Coming out of hyperspace into Coruscant space on three: two: one.”

The starship lurched as if taking a wave, the smeared stars collected back into twinkling points, and Coruscant hung burning in the blackness before them as if lit by the souls of her billions.

Anakin looked hungrily at the image of the planet growing larger on the viewscreen, as if, even from the very edge of the solar system, he could almost pick out a particular street, a certain residence, one lit window where another pair of eyes looked up into the stars, waiting for him. “I'm so glad to be home,” he said.

At the far end of the ship, Scout and Whie were looking at the same viewscreen image. Scout shook her head. “Funny to think we'll be back in the Temple tomorrow. I wonder if it will all seem like a dream.” The instant she said it, she regretted the word
dream.

“No, we're awake now,” Whie said quietly. “The Temple was the dream.”

“Maybe…maybe it won't come true, your last vision,” Scout said. “Or maybe you misunderstood.”

“Maybe.” She could tell he didn't believe it. “But it's all right. I'm afraid of dying,” Whie said. “But I was even more scared that I was going to…” He trailed off. “Still, that didn't happen, thanks to you. What you said—it was like you gave me myself back. You gave me permission to be good.”

Scout shook her head. “No mind tricks here, Whie. I didn't do anything. I just knew which way you were going to choose.”

Whie smiled. “Have it your way. Actually, it's kind of interesting seeing you be humble. I think it's…
cute.
”

Scout Force-slapped him upside the head, but only a little. Not nearly enough to stop him laughing. “Vermin,” she said with dignity.

Yoda bustled in from the galley carrying a tray with a bottle of something amber-colored and three glasses. “Worry not,” he said. “Chances to be bad will you have again.” He cackled, pouring out a glass for each of them. “And good. Every instant, the universe starts over. Choose: and start again.”

Scout lifted her glass and peered dubiously at the contents. Yoda snuffed indignantly. “Something nasty Master Yoda would give, think you?”

Scout and Whie exchanged looks. Gingerly, they tilted their glasses and sniffed. The fragrance of fine Reythan berry juice stole through the little cabin, sweet as sunshine on millaflower. “Almost home,” Scout said, bravely tilting her glass and sipping. The juice went down like honeyed summer rain.

“Thanks to you,” Whie said grinning. “I can't wait to tell everyone how you commandeered those ships at the spaceport to get us off Vjun. ‘Quick, Lieutenant—the Jedi assassins are getting away in their Chryya! We've got to scramble up some ships and follow them!'”

“It was you guys doing your Mind Thing that sold it,” Scout said modestly, flushing with pleasure. It was nice of Whie to make her feel as if she had really contributed to the mission, rather than being nothing but the excess baggage Jai Maruk had expected her to be.
Jai and plenty of others,
she thought, remembering Hanna, her white Arkanian eyes full of contempt during the Apprentice Tournament. She sipped her juice. “Whoa. I just found myself missing Hanna Ding.”

“The Arkanian girl who gave you such a hard time?”

“She's worried she might be killed in this war,” Scout said, surprising herself. “She doesn't want to die for nothing. The Jedi matter to her. To all of us. The Order is the only family we have.”

For the second time in as many minutes, she clapped her hand over her mouth. Whie gave her a pained smile.

Yoda snuffed. “Hard it was, I think: to meet your mother after Dooku had fled.”

“All those years she had been waiting,” Whie said. “But the funny thing is, it wasn't me she was waiting for. Not really. What she lost was her baby, and that baby is gone. When she saw me, she saw a stranger.”

“It was like that when everyone went to Geonosis,” Scout said unexpectedly. “The Temple was just deserted. We tried to do our lessons and be good, but really we were just marking time, waiting for them to come back. Only they never did.” She sipped the juice. “I don't just mean the ones who died. Even the ones who survived came back different people. Grimmer.”

Whie swirled his juice around in his glass. “Do you think we'll…
fit,
when we get back? I just can't imagine doing the same classes, talking to the same people as if nothing had happened. Everything feels different to me,” he said, and his voice was troubled.

He has changed,
Scout thought. He used to be the boy who knew everything. Now he sounded much less certain, but it made him seem older. He wasn't a boy pretending to be a Jedi anymore; he was a young man beginning to grapple with the shifting, uncertain, grownup world in which a real Jedi Knight had to live.

Whie glanced over at her. “So—are you still worried about being sent to the Agricultural Corps?”

And to Scout's surprise, she found she wasn't. “Nah,” she said comfortably. “I think the Jedi are stuck with me now.”

“I guess we can learn to live with that.” Whie smiled, but his eyes were haunted. “You know,” he added, after a moment of silence, “I chose to leave Château Malreaux. I chose to come back to Coruscant. I was hoping it would feel like home to me—like Vjun did when I first stepped on the planet. But it doesn't.”

He looked at the planet rapidly swelling in the viewscreen. “It feels as if I've come
unstuck.
I don't belong on Vjun, I know that: I couldn't go back there now, no matter how much my mother wanted me to. I'm not Viscount Malreaux, I'm me, Whie, Jedi apprentice. But I don't feel like I belong on Coruscant, either. Is that a Jedi's destiny?” he asked Yoda. “To wander everywhere and never be at rest? If so, I accept that. I pledged my life to the Order and I won't take that back, but I guess…I guess I didn't know it would be so hard. I guess I didn't know I could never be at home.”

Yoda refilled Whie's glass, and sighed. “
Never step in the same river twice can you.
Each time the river hurries on. Each time he that steps has changed.” He furled his ears, remembering. “On many long journeys have I gone. And waited, too, for others to return from journeys of their own. The Jedi travel to the stars: and wait: and hope, with a candle in the window. Some return; some are broken; some come back so different only their names remain. Some choose the dark side, and are lost until the last journey, the one we all must take together. Sometimes, on the darkest days, feel the pull of that last voyage, I do.” He threw back his glass of juice and glanced at Whie. “The dark side within you is: you know this.”

Whie looked away. “Yes.”

“But other things, inside you there are.” Yoda tapped him gently on the chest. “The Force is inside you. A true Jedi lives in the Force. Touches the Force. It surrounds him: and it reaches up from inside him to touch that which surrounds.” Yoda smiled, and Scout felt his presence, warm and bright in the Force, like a lantern shining in the middle of the cabin. “Not a pile of permacrete, home is,” Yoda said. “Not a palace or a hut, ship or shack. Wherever a Jedi is, there must the Force be, too. Wherever we are, is home.”

Scout raised her glass, and clinked it gravely against the others': tink,
ting.
“To coming home,” she said, and they drank together.

Far, far away, on a minor planet in a negligible system deep behind Trade Federation lines, Count Dooku of Serenno walked along the shore of an alien sea, alone. He had established his new headquarters here, and in an hour he would be back in the camp, surrounded by advisers, droids, servants, sycophants, engineers, and officers, all vying for his time, all presenting their schemes and stratagems, sucking like bees on the nectar of his power. Possibly Asajj Ventress, his protégée, would be there, clamoring to be made his apprentice. He had a meeting scheduled with the formidable General Grievous, who was even more powerful than Ventress, but a great deal less interesting as a dinner-table conversationalist. And of course at any time his Master might summon.

What are we?

On the surface of the bay, water heaped and rolled, landing with a white crash to run hissing up the cold sand.

What are we, think you, Dooku?

The sea foamed up around his boots and then withdrew, leaving an empty shell half buried in the sand. Dooku picked it up. He had a sudden vivid memory of doing this back on Serenno when he was still a tiny boy, before the Jedi ever came. He could remember the smell of the sea, the thin salty mud trickling from the shell as he held it to his ear: and in this memory something wonderful had happened, something magical that filled him with delight, only he could not now recall what it had been.

He shook the shell to dry it, and held it up to his ear. An old man's ear, now: that child he had been had lived long ago. He felt his heartbeat speed up, as if—absurd thought—he might hear something in the shell, something terribly important.

But either the shell was different, or the sea, or something inside him was broken beyond repair. All he heard was the thin hiss of wind and wave, and beneath it all the dull echoing thud of his heart.

In the end, what we are is: alone.

Alone,
the shell whispered.
Alone, alone, alone.

He crushed the shell in his hand, letting the fragments drift down to the beach. Then he turned and started walking back to camp.

Whie's mother sat in the big study chair in the broken shell of Château Malreaux, looking at the sunset. The window Dooku had smashed with her body had not been repaired; ragged spikes of glass showed around the edge of the casement like teeth in a howling mouth. The glass had slashed her pink ball gown to ribbons and spattered it with blood. She didn't care. The Baby was gone.

When she first read her future in the broken glass, she wept. Then the time for tears was past. There was nothing left, now. Nothing to do but sit at the window.

The sun sank. With the coming of night, the wind turned to a rare land breeze, and the ever-present clouds rolled back. The sun touched water: floundered: drowned. Darkness crept over the sky, clear for once. The stars overhead like chips of ice. Her boy out there, somewhere. Never coming back.

Full dark fell, but she did not move to put a light in the window.

Dark now, and colder still. The little Vjun fox whined and nosed around her stiffening legs.

By morning, it, too, was gone.

Light.

Gray at first, touching the spires of the Jedi Temple, the tall peaks of the Chancellor's residence. A soft light the same color as the sleepy trantor pigeons just sidling from their roosts in the great ferrocrete skyrises of Coruscant. The low, continuous hum of traffic began to swell as the first commuters hurried to their early-morning jobs at bakeries and factories and holocomm stations. Then the rim of the sun peeked up over the horizon. The light turned pale watery gold, splashing across windows. Dew sparkled on parked fliers; their sleek metallic sides took on the day's first blush of warmth.

Dawn on Coruscant.

A bell rang in the depths of the large suite housing the Senator from Naboo, and a few moments later the second handmaiden of Padmé's entourage hurried into the main room, still struggling into her dressing gown, to find her mistress standing at the window. “You rang, m'lady?”

“Put on some water for tea and set out a suit of clothes, would you? Something I can wear outside, but it must make me look
wonderful,
” Senator Padmé Amidala said, and she laughed out loud.

The second handmaiden found herself grinning. “Wonderful it is, m'lady. Can I ask what the occasion is?”

“Look!” A kilometer away, a ship had settled on the landing platforms of the Jedi Temple. Little figures came down her ramps; other little figures ran forward to greet them. Padmé turned. The smile on her face was radiant. “They're home,” she said.