Children Of The Jedi by Hambly Barbara

Author:Hambly, Barbara [Hambly, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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—whicho 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

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