Chapter 10: The Heir of Serenno (Patreon)

The Vandaleur boardroom had been built to intimidate, but in truth it only served mostly to remind occupants how uncomfortable it was to sit around a table that was far too large and in chairs far too straight-backed, even if said chair and table were carved out of a Wroshy tree and transported at great cost to New Carrick Station.

The room has too much glass as well, in obsidian black carved sculptures and the massive viewport that looked down on the planet Onderon.

Truly, the room was far too fanciful, considering the state Kaeli Dooku knew the finances of the Free Banking Clan were in. The whole eastern wall looked out over the orbital docks of New Carrick Station, a recent construction, and every so often a hauler slid past close enough that the light shifted in scintillating patterns across the table.

The positioning was obvious. It was supposed to remind the people at that table what they owned. As far as Kaeli could tell, it only reminded them what they were about to lose.

"Section fourteen," the Muun at the head of the table said slowly. His voice was soft and very tired. "The transfer of the dockyard leases, the tug fleet, and the lane charters through the Hydian approach. Upon signature, House Dooku will hold a controlling interest of fifty-three percent."

"Fifty-four," Kaeli corrected absentmindedly.

The Muun blinked slowly, glancing down at his datapad for a moment. "The draft says fifty-three."

"The draft was written before your subsidiary on Onderon missed its second quarterly payment." She did not look up from her datapad. "The Count's lawyers have already included the default. Page nineteen."

Page nineteen was turned to, eliciting the usual reaction: quiet, unhappy murmurs went around the table, but what else were they supposed to do?

She let them murmur. She couldn’t complain when she already had them over a barrel.

She let her attention spread outward while they read. Greed at the table trickled around her, which was normal. Resentment ebbed through the air, which was fair. A thin thread of fear came from the younger Vandaleur heir at the far end, who had clearly hoped his father would refuse, but that was also to be expected.

"Your house is buying a great deal of freight capacity for a family that sells timber and minerals to the core worlds," the Muun said at last, setting his stylus against the datapad without signing.

"We're a family that is tired of paying other people to move our timber and minerals," Kaeli said. "And paying Coruscant's tariffs for the privilege. You're tired of it too I would imagine.”

"Our margins are adequate."

"They could be more than adequate." She smiled at him, which she had been told softened her face.

She suspected that was a lie told by people who wanted to be kind about the disconcerting nature of her white hair and the pale eyes. "The Count isn't interested in running your docks, Magister. He's interested in the Outer Rim being able to move its own goods without asking permission from a Senate that can't pass a budget. You and he want the same thing. He simply has the money to want it faster. This deal is mutually beneficial."

The Muun studied her for a long moment. Then, with a slow, deliberate, almost annoyed movement, he signed.

It went quickly after that. Signatures, seals, the grave little ritual of handshakes between people who did not like each other but had put aside their differences for the almighty credit. The younger Vandaleur didn't offer his hand, and she didn't make him.

Afterward she stood alone staring at the glass for a while, watching the haulers flowing off the planet.

Fifty-four percent of the Hydian approach, the shipping lane that led back toward her home of Serenno.

The fourth acquisition this year. Docks, charters, a foundry on Vassek that nobody was supposed to know about yet. He had never told her outright what it was for, but that was perhaps because if she couldn’t figure it out for herself, she wouldn’t have been much use to him in the first place.

A hauler passed, and the light from its engines slid across the room in a pale blue hue. For a moment, without any reason she could name, she thought of snow.

She took her personal shuttle home, and as she descended through the clouds of Serenno, she felt a pressure at the back of her mind, like the feeling of being watched from a doorway. Kaeli sat with it for most of the descent, trying to pin it down. Not danger, exactly. Danger had edges, and this didn't. It was more like a room in a house she knew well, where someone had moved the furniture to make room for something else.

The estate came up out of the dark in all its elegance and finery. The landing pad lit up as she approached, and she noted that there was a ship on it already.

A small Corellian freighter, bulbous and unlovely, but not without utility.

She walked down the ramp into cold air and stopped, ignoring the protocol droid that had come out to greet her.

The Force was moving, a low, thick current through the air.

Usually it lay over the estate like still water, because her master liked stillness and the grounds had taken on his temperament over the years. Tonight it had a current. Something enormous and cold was slowly rolling under the surface, the way a river keeps moving beneath its ice.

"Welcome home, my lady," the silver protocol droid called RN-7P said at her elbow having remained silent until her eyes fell upon him

"There are guests," Kaeli said.

"Yes, my lady. The Count has asked that you be told he will see you in the morning, and bid that you rest."

"Who are they?"

The droid's head tilted a precise number of degrees. "Jedi, my lady. A Master and a Padawan, and another woman traveling with them."

Jedi.

Kaeli breathed out, and her breath clouded in the cold air for a moment.

She made her way through her home and into the gardens. The droids were at their night pruning, their servo motors humming lightly in the dark air. She followed the stone path toward the eastern fountains, where the pull seemed strongest, and found nothing there but a table.

Her hand drifted across the surface, and the impression of two glasses left on it returned to her along with the scent of a Chandrillian whiskey. One of her master's good bottles, at that; he wouldn’t even break one of those out even for board meetings, so it was curious that he had opened one now.

He'd been sitting out here with someone; that person had left the faintest chill to the air… something almost familiar, yet she couldn’t say why. She shook the thought away and finished walking through the garden, then slumped onto her bed in her room, resting on the finest silks she could buy from the Core.

In the morning she stirred from her huddled slump in her covers and made her way to the table for breakfast, which was rather unlike him. RN-7P droid said he was taking it in his study and would send for her when he was ready for her to meet his guests.

She found evidence of them everywhere, difficult not to, with her abilities and each indication stranger than the last.

A second cup set out beside her master's on the terrace. A long white hair caught in the carving of one of the garden benches. White, like hers.

The training ring on the cliff was even more worrisome.

Someone had used it recently, and not just for saber work. Ten probe droids sat neatly by the shed, powered down and still slightly warm from their power cells.

Scuffs in the dust of the grey circle said bare feet, two sets, one larger than the other. Grapples and throws across the dirt, then a long dragged mark where somebody had been driven backward. Echani footwork.

She'd know it anywhere; it was the only thing about her body her master hadn't taught her, and she'd learned it from holos in the library at fourteen out of what she thought of at the time sheer stubbornness.

Someone else had learned it too. She could see it in the prints. Correct in every detail just like hers.

The current was very strong here. She stood in the middle of the ring, closed her eyes, and let herself reach for it properly, the way she almost never allowed herself to.

For a moment she stood on ice.

A wide white plain, wind and snow, and far off a sound like water moving under a frozen surface. Then something noticed her, gently, the way you'd notice a bird landing on your windowsill. It wasn't hostile. It was deliberately careful, as if it were trying hard not to startle her.

She came back to herself on one knee in the dust with her heart pounding.

When she looked up, a dark-skinned woman in black was standing at the white arch that led to the arena, watching her with her arms crossed and an expression like someone who had just seen something she didn't expect.

"You all right?" the woman said.

"Fine." Kaeli stood and brushed off her knee. "You must be the guest who isn't a Jedi."

"Brianna." A pause. "And you must be Dooku’s heir." Another pause, longer, and those pale blue eyes moved over Kaeli's face, her hair, and then away to the empty ring, and something complicated passed through them. "Huh."

"Is something wrong?"

"No," Brianna said slowly. "No. He left maybe ten minutes ago. You just missed him."

"Who?"

Brianna looked at her strangely for a moment. Then she shrugged. "Jacen. He went to the library, I think." She started to turn away, then stopped. "For what it's worth, he's not what you'd expect."

She left before Kaeli could ask what that meant or why she would even want to meet this Jacen.

Regardless, the library was empty when she reached it.

A reader was still warm on one of the long tables, left open to an old treatise on Jedi Tràkata. Beside it was one of her master's datapads, with a map of the Outer Rim and a list of names down one side, some crossed out.

She didn't read it, merely letting her fingers trail over the datapad and getting the faintest of impressions of deep and dedicated focus.

In the corridor, another protocol droid found her P3-42. "My lady. The Count asks that you join him in the western conference room. His guests will be attending as well."

"Of course," Kaeli said. Her voice came out entirely normal, which was a relief, because inside she felt as if she'd been chasing echoes all morning, and it was beginning to frustrate her.

The western conference room was her master's favorite place to be purposely difficult with people. It had one table, black stone, and windows that looked down the valley to the river so he could do so in style and comfort.

He was already seated at the head. At his right was a woman with a long black braid and warm brown eyes, who sat so still that Kaeli immediately placed her as the most dangerous person in the room, though only after the Count. The dark-skinned woman from the ring slouched back in her chair a little further down the table.

And across from Kaeli's own seat, standing at the window with his hands folded behind his back, was a young man with white hair.

He turned when she came in.

He was tall with a Padawan braid falling over one shoulder and pale blue eyes that met hers without any particular expression. Nothing moved in his face. It was the stillest face she'd ever seen.

And the current stopped.

Not faded. Stopped, as if something had frozen it solid in a single breath. The pressure she'd carried in her head since the shuttle simply wasn't there anymore, and its absence was so sudden she nearly missed a step.

"Kaeli," her master said. "Our guests. Master Celeste Morne, of the Jedi Order. Padawan Jacen Sol. And Brianna, whom I believe you've met."

Sol.

It wasn't an uncommon name. There were Sols all over the Rim.

"Padawan," she said, and inclined her head.

"My lady." He bowed, bending at the waist, his arms still behind his back. Perfectly correct and almost unfeeling. "Thank you for your hospitality."

She waited for his first move, a question maybe, the kind of curiosity that a Jedi would show about the Count's heir. Especially considering Dooku’s history with the Order.

He didn't ask anything, merely gave her a faint smile and then turned back to the window.

Kaeli glanced at her master. The Count looked at his folded hands with mild interest, as though he were reading something on a datapad. He said nothing at all.

Brianna, at the end of the table, looked back and forth between Kaeli and the Padawan, and then something seemed to flicker through her eyes, some kind of thought or knowledge, and her eyes focused on the Padawan.

With little else to do, Kaeli sat.

"The Council of Dukes," her master began, "has requested Jedi mediation over the matter of the Carrick tariffs, among other grievances. That is why our guests are here; at least, that is the public reason for our guests' presence. Kaeli, you closed the Vandaleur purchase?"

"Fifty-four percent,” the only detail that mattered from three days of her life.

"Good." The eyelids lowered. The single nod. "Then the question of the tariffs becomes considerably more interesting, since we will be the ones paying them."

"You bought a shipping line in the middle of a tariff dispute you've asked the Jedi to mediate," Master Morne said. There was no accusation in it, perhaps a small amount of interest, but that was all the attention Master Morne seemed to have reserved for the discussion.

"I bought a shipping line because the dispute exists," her master said. "If the Republic will not let the Outer Rim govern its own trade through policy, the Rim will find other avenues."

"You don’t think that will concern the Republic," the Padawan said.

It was the first thing he'd said since sitting down, his voice soft but with an undercurrent of something that Kaeli didn’t understand beneath it.

"Since when has the Republic cared for the Outer Rim?" Kaeli said, before her master could answer, raising an eyebrow sharply at the Jedi, challenging him as much as her training allowed.

He turned those pale blue eyes on her, and she found herself reaching out for a moment to attempt to read him. She felt nothing from him. Nothing at all, like a hand pressed to the smooth surface of glass.

"The Republic does what it is able,” he replied obliquely.

"Able?" She leaned forward. "The Senate doesn't legislate for the benefit of the Outer Rim, Padawan. It taxes the Rim. It sends Jedi as enforcement when the Rim becomes inconvenient. When was the last time Coruscant sent anyone out here who wasn't there to settle a dispute to further a Core World’s interests?"

"About three days ago," he said mildly, and Kaeli frowned at him, befuddled, but he didn’t seem inclined to elaborate as he continued, “But I would admit it doesn’t occur very often, and I would understand if you didn’t consider our presence particularly heartening.”

Brianna snorted. Master Morne's mouth moved very slightly.

Kaeli did not visibly shift her expression, but she did sit back. She was annoyed to find she liked him a little for it; there was perhaps more humor in him than she expected from either his appearance or profession.

"You don't disagree," she challenged.

"No. I don't disagree that the Senate is broken, perhaps even irreparably." He turned back to look out the window. "How many seats sit with corporations? How many worlds and even systems are unrepresented here in the Outer Rim? I don’t think it’s my place to decide for anyone, though, how we move forward from this.”

Kaeli glared at the man. “So you would abdicate responsibility?"

"No," he said. “But it will take more than Jedi to fix it, and I am many things, but I can never be more than that.”

Kaeli laughed, and it came out sharper than she meant it to. "The Jedi. The Jedi haven't fixed anything in a thousand years. They signed away their right to fix anything at Ruusan, and they've been grateful ever since because it means nobody can blame them. The stagnancy of the Order has done more than disservice to the Galaxy.”

The Jedi inclined his head. "You speak like someone who knows the Order,” he replied.

"I speak like someone the Order turned away at the door." She snapped out, but instantly regretted it. She hadn't meant to say it. It was out now, lying on the black stone between them.

She elaborated against her better judgment at his interested look, "I was six. I was too old, apparently. Six years old and too old to learn how to be what I already was." She lifted her chin. "So forgive me, Padawan, if I'm not waiting on the Jedi to save the galaxy."

For the first time, she thought she saw something move in his face. It was so brief she couldn't be sure. A flicker at the corner of the eye, like a crack running through ice under a heavy weight.

"Then that was the Order's failure," he said quietly, "and not yours."

Silence. Her master reached for his cup, took a long swallow, and set it down again with a small click on the stone. He had the look he got when he was watching one of the duels he had stored in the library.

"What makes someone a Jedi to you?" Master Morne suddenly asked, interjecting into the air and breaking the silence with seemingly no care.

Kaeli hesitated, feeling oddly trapped by the question; still, she responded, “Those of the Coruscant Jedi Temple, who engaged in their beliefs and traditions, for one thing.”

Master Morne nodded in response, "I only ask to get your own thoughts. It's an older question than the Order's current rules. My own Master would have said it wasn't the Temple or the robes or the Council's permission. It was the choice to put yourself between innocent life and that evil which would take it and to keep making that choice until you became one with the Force."

"Is that really the Order?" Kaeli retorted, glaring challengingly at Master Morne. “After all, the Order as it stands is more a proxy for the Senate and its own interests than anything.”

"That is what the Order is currently," the Padawan said. "But the blessing of the Force, or what they do with it. That’s a far more personal question."

He was oblique about it, but Kaeli instantly understood what he meant. "You'd say I was a Jedi?"

He focused on her, considering her. It was an odd feeling, being considered by that face. Like standing in front of a very still lake, yet something about it touched her own memory… some familiarity.

"You have been trained by a former one. I don't think anyone who's touched the Force that way can be the same again," he said. "Whether you call that being a Jedi is up to you. Count Dooku certainly doesn't call himself one anymore, after all."

"Count Dooku," her master said dryly, "is sitting immediately before you and to the right.”

"And you're still a Jedi, Master," the Padawan said without turning, continuing even as Dooku opened his mouth to respond, for the first time almost rudely overriding him, “Whatever your personal feelings about the Order, I don’t think it’s a commitment so easily abandoned."

Her master's mouth thinned, and his face grew severe, but he said nothing else.

"And if I did call myself one," Kaeli said slowly. "Then what? The Order doesn't want me. The Senate wouldn't let me govern anything; I would have to cede my father's estates. You tell me the Jedi should fix the Republic, and the Jedi are at the same time forbidden from leading it."

"Forbidden from leading it as Jedi," her master murmured.

It was the first thing he'd offered all morning. Kaeli looked at him, then back at the Padawan, and saw that the Padawan was stiller than he had been before, not truly noticeable normally, but then again she was Echani and so was he.

He was looking at her the way you look at a Dejarak board when you've just noticed a piece you'd been ignoring might have much more value than you’d first assumed.

It lasted a heartbeat. Then his eyes returned to the window, and whatever he'd been about to think, he didn't finish thinking it where she could see the thought.

"That," he said after a long moment, "is a larger conversation than one morning."

"It usually is," her master agreed, and something satisfied in it made Kaeli want to kick him under the table because she couldn’t ignore the almost burning curiosity it had ignited in her.

They talked for three more hours on considerably lighter topics, though that was true only in a comparative sense. The tariffs, the Dukes, which families could be persuaded for whatever it was the Jedi wanted, which they carefully didn’t say, and which would need to be outmaneuvered.

The Padawan knew more about the Senate than any Jedi his age had a right to, and less about credits than a child of any star system.

Master Morne said little, and every time she spoke, the conversation shifted a few degrees and never shifted back. Brianna fell asleep sitting up, rigid as a statue, and woke up the same, without an apology.

The Padawan never raised his voice. He lost two arguments to her outright and admitted it both times, easily, without rancor, the way you'd admit a touch in a friendly bout. He won three, which bothered her more than she could really say.

By the end, her throat hurt from talking, and she realized she hadn't felt the current once since walking in. Not once. As if something across the table had put its whole weight on it to hold it still.

When the meeting came to an end, he bowed to her again.

"Thank you, my lady," he said. "You've given me a great deal to think about."

"You've given me a headache," Kaeli said dryly, but her words weren’t as caustic as she would have liked.

He smiled. It was small and brief and very warm, and it was the first time his face had moved all day. It changed him completely, making him look remarkably kind, almost sweet, and for the briefest of moments Kaeli forgot what it was like to actually debate the man.

Then it was gone, and he followed his Master out.

Kaeli stayed sitting at the table. Her master hadn't risen, which likely meant they weren’t done.

"Well?" he said.

"He's insufferable," she said. "And he's wrong about the Order."

"Yes."

"And he's the best argument for it I've ever met."

Her master said nothing. He looked out the window of the room, gazing down the forested valley toward the river.

"He reminds me of something.”

Dooku remained quiet, but she could tell he was listening.

“There’s an old memory I have of ice on an Eshan River," Kaeli said, without knowing why she said it, but for some reason thinking it best to get the memory and thought out before it faded. "I used to play on it; sometimes I think I was supposed to be watching someone."

"Were you?" her master said, but there was something odd in his tone.

"I don't remember." She shook her head. "It doesn't matter. I'm tired. I'll see you at dinner."

She left, exiting into the halls of her home, which still did not quite feel the same as she remembered.

It must be the Jedi.

-

I did not go back to my room.

Celeste would be there, or would be soon, and I needed this one moment to decide for myself what I was feeling. I walked the long way through the gardens, submerged in the heavy, warm afternoon air, quietly observing the verdant grounds as they hummed to my senses.

I walked out under the white arch to the ring on the cliff, where the probe droids still sat stacked by the shed and the dust still held the scuffs of Brianna driving me backward.

New prints were in the dust now. Smaller. Boots, turning in a slow circle in the very center of the ring, and then a place where one knee had come down hard.

She had stood here this morning and reached for the Force, and I had felt her find me. The brush of her presence against the edge of my mind, cautious and sharp and so familiar that for one moment I had forgotten how to hold my own thoughts still on the surface of the ice.

I hadn't wanted her to know her, and I was truly unsure of the situation Dooku intended to engineer, because I was certain there was an even larger purpose than he had yet told me.

Kaeli did not remember me, not really; I could tell by her presence in the Force and the look in her eyes.

If I told her who I was, all I would be doing was handing her grief and loss, and I would be unsure if I even had the ability to fix or replace it.

And I did not yet know what the Force wanted of her or of me, because there was a reason we had crossed paths again in the vast Galaxy but I wasn’t sure I would like that reason.

I found myself on the cliff again looking out over the forest below, and I delved into my own thoughts.

The Separatists needed a Jedi. Not a Sith; the Republic could hate a Sith, and even Sectors that might feel at odds with the Republic would perhaps not be so keen to follow one.

They needed someone who looked like the Order's conscience turned against it, someone whose very existence was an accusation of our arrogance. Sidious had used Dooku for that purpose in the Galaxy I knew: the Lost Twenty's most famous name, a Jedi Master who had walked away and could say, with more credibility than anyone else, that the Order had failed.

Here, Dooku had walked away… and found her.

He had found a six-year-old girl the Order had refused, a girl that so happened to be my sister.

He had trained her. He had made her the heir to his own house here in the Outer Rim. He had taught her to be something that was not Jedi yet…

He had given her thoughts and grievances so clean and so sympathetic that I couldn't truly answer them.

A Jedi who was never a Jedi. Forbidden from nothing. No duty to the Order. Able to lead, outside of Ruusan.

A riposte, he had called her.

I understood now that Dooku had built exactly the piece the war could use, the Sith could use. And that he had built it with the best intentions, and that he hadn't truly needed a Sith Lord's hand on his shoulder to do it.

The Galaxy seemingly would produce its own Separatist leader even if no one else did.

I let the thought sit on the surface of the ice, where I could see it without being moved by it. Isolated entirely from passion and emotion.

Underneath, something shifted, heavy and cold, the current slowly shifting and subsiding within me.

Sidious, if he so desired, could have far more than one apprentice.

"Stop brooding; it’s no good for a handsome man to scowl like that.”

I didn't turn.

I had felt Brianna making her way across the garden for some time, the cord between us bright and restless on her end, tugging at me in odd ways.

Still, I didn’t have to let her tease me without response.

“Decided to talk to me again, have you?"

"Shut up," she replied elegantly. She came and stood beside me, arms crossed. Her mouth tightened. "She's your sister."

"Yes."

“Does she know?”

“Unlikely.”

"You won’t tell her."

"No."

Brianna was quiet for a moment, which, for her, must have been some kind of achievement, though I wasn't sure whether it was hers or mine.

 "I figured it out in about three seconds," she said finally. "Same hair. Same eyes. Same way of standing like you're both waiting for someone to try something. She's going to figure it out too, Jacen, and she's not going to thank you for letting her do it alone."

"I know."

"Then why?"

I considered ending the conversation there, not wanting to tread on this fresh wound, but the cord would have told her anyway.

"Because the last time the Force gave me a choice about her, I was two, and I didn't get to make it," I said. "I would like her to get to make this one."

Brianna looked at me for a long moment. I felt her reach across the bond, clumsy and careful at once, and touch the edge of the ice. She didn't try to break through. She just stood there with her hand against it in a metaphysical sense, at least.

“You and your kriffin choices,” she replied dryly.

I let loose a small chuckle, and Brianna looked surprised.

"That was almost a feeling," she said.

"Don't tell anyone; I do have an image to uphold."

She snorted. Then, without looking at me, she spoke abruptly all at once as if afraid the words wouldn’t get out fast enough, "The bond. Don't cut it."

I looked at her, and despite myself, I was taken aback; it was a decision I hadn’t expected.

"I thought about it all night," she said shortly. "You asked. I'm answering. Leave it." Her jaw worked. "My father was supposed to have the Sun Guard at his back and died alone anyway. If I’m going to help you on this mission of yours, I want you to be able to find me and-“ she shook her head, not continuing aloud, but I understood the message.

"It may not be something I can undo later," I said. "Not after yesterday."

"Good," Brianna laughed quietly. "Then I don't have to decide again."

She turned and walked back toward the arch before I could say anything else, which I was beginning to understand was how Echani said important things: quickly, and then leaving before you could make them discuss it.

Or perhaps that was just how Brianna was.

I watched her go and felt, very faintly, something warm move in the water under the ice, and despite my better judgment- I let it.

-

Dooku's study smelled of old paper and older nerf leather, and Celeste thought that it was the first room on the estate that felt lived in, but that was also perhaps because the estate was so massive.

Everything else in the house had the carefully planned perfection of a coruscanti museum: droids, polished stone, gardens trimmed to the millimeter. Here the desk was covered in datapads, and flimsiplast and Force forfend a real book, bound in something that might once have been nerf hide, left open face down with its spine cracked. A cup of tea that had gone cold at his elbow hours ago.

"The Outer Rim," Dooku said, touching the holomap between them so that it expanded, "is too large to search, Master Morne, even for one of my resources. Certainly the Order has known this for a thousand years, and even they have not pretended otherwise. If what you seek has hidden itself well, you will not find it by searching there."

"Then how do you suggest we find it?"

"By looking where it has been." He touched a sequence of worlds, and each lit a dull red. "These planets are the last known locations of every Jedi who has vanished from the Order's registry in the past twenty years. Not died; vanished. It also includes every temple site the archives list as abandoned and every one they conspicuously do not list. Every world where a Jedi sent to mediate came back and declined to file a full report."

Celeste studied the constellation of red lights for a long moment. She noted the names listed out on his Datapad.

"You've been keeping this for a while."

"Since Naboo." His voice did not change, but the Force did. "Qui-Gon was killed by a Sith, Master Morne."

"And Master Fay?" she asked instead. "Jacen mentioned her name last night."

Dooku's eyebrows rose a fraction. "Did he? Interesting." He touched the map again, and a scatter of pale points bloomed along the far edge of the Rim, dozens of them, with no obvious pattern at all. "Fay's known locations over the last two centuries. You may notice she is not at any of them now. If the boy believes there is something he needs from her, he will have to wait and hope the Force sends her his way."

They worked together for another hour, taking note of each point and the data attached to it, musing together as Jedi did, mulling the Force as they looked about.

Dooku was precise, patient, and entirely without warmth, and Celeste was reminded not unpleasantly of her time with the Covenant, which was strange unto itself.

Only when they were finishing did he say, without looking up from the map, "You are concerned about my heir."

Celeste's hands stilled on her datapad for less than a second.

"She's his sister," she said.

"Yes."

"He felt it before she walked into the room. I felt him feel it." Celeste kept her voice level because she wouldn’t let anything else slip in front of even an ex-Jedi, even if he already suspected the relationship she shared with Jacen. "And you sat across from them for four hours and said nothing."

"It is not my truth to tell."

"You told him."

"He asked me why I left the Order." Dooku finally looked up. "The answer was her. I did not tell him anything he would not have learned the moment he saw her face. If even my brightest pupil is too dim to see the truth in front of her just because I do not lead her to it, then I am already lost."

Celeste considered him.

"You told him you were incapable of such attachments," she said.

Something moved behind his eyes. It was quick, but noticeable.

"I did."

"You took a girl the Order rejected and made her your heir. You taught her." Celeste tilted her head. "Master Dooku, I've watched Jedi fall in three different wars, and every single one of them told themselves that what they felt was not attachment. It was duty. It was correction. It was the will of the Force."

"And what do you tell yourself, Master Morne?"

The question was pleasant, and the intent was not unkind, but Celeste had to restrain her first reaction anyway.

"I don't," she said. "I stopped pretending." She stood and gathered her datapads. "I'm not asking you to tell her. I'm asking you to stop pretending you're only her teacher. She'll need someone who admits to loving her when this comes out, and I don't believe it will be Jacen.”

Celeste deliberately didn't finish the sentence.

Dooku did not say a word in response, though his face looked a touch more tired than usual and Celeste turned and walked away.

She was almost to the door when he spoke.

"You are an unusual Jedi, Master Morne."

"I'm simply how we used to be," Celeste said. "But I’d understand if the Order had forgotten."

-

The Council of Dukes met in Carannia, in a hall that was older than the Republic's claim on Serenno by several hundred years.

It was round, which I suspected was a very deliberate choice, and domed in dark stone carved with the crests of houses that no longer existed. Twelve seats ringed the floor.

Nine were filled. The three empty ones had been left empty for so long that dust lay on the cushions, and no one looked at them, not even in passing now that they were part of scenery.

Dooku had not taken his seat. He stood at the back of the hall with his hands folded, a spectator in a room he could have bought outright, and let his heir sit in the chair of House Dooku, chin lifted and datapad in her lap.

Kaeli did not look at me as we came in. I felt her notice me anyway, the faint sharp brush of her attention against the edge of my mind.

"Master Jedi," said the Duke at the head of the circle. Ardan D'Asta was old and heavy-shouldered, with the kind of face that had been handsome forty years ago and had aged to impressive grandeur. "The Council thanks the Order for its attention. We did not expect it to come so promptly."

"We were in the area," I said, lightly smiling as I noticed the small ripple my casual response elicited.

Someone in the ring laughed. It was not a kind laugh, but it was not unkind either; it was the laugh of people who knew perfectly well no Jedi had been in the Serenno area in a decade.

Celeste inclined her head to D'Asta. "Perhaps the Council would summarize the dispute."

A summary, it turned out, was still far closer to an hour than I think either Celeste or I liked.

In essence, it went like this. In the wake of the Naboo crisis, the Senate had finally passed the taxation of the trade routes to the outlying systems, the same tax the Trade Federation had blockaded a planet to protest. The Federation had been punished for the blockade; the tax had passed anyway. Serenno's exports now paid a levy at the Hydian approach, assessed by a Core shipping authority, collected by a Core bank, and spent, as far as anyone on Serenno could tell, entirely in the Core.

That was already bad enough for those assembled but as usual it was worse than that.

Serenno had no Senator of its own. It shared a seat with eleven other worlds of the D’Astan sector, and the sector's Senator had voted for the tax. He had also, D'Asta noted with heavy disgust, been reelected by the sector's delegates, most of whom lived on D’Astan Prime, did not export anything at all, and instead engaged in services to the Republic that did not suffer the same raw material tax.

So the Dukes at the table were divided three ways.

House D'Asta and three others wanted to pay the tax and petition the Senate for relief, as loyal subjects of the Republic had done for a thousand years.

Duchess Illa Merrow and two others wanted to stop paying. Merrow had a militia and a great many opinions about what it could do to a Core customs cutter; they believed the Republic so weak and broken that no real response would be forthcoming.

And House Dooku, through its heir, had just secured fifty-four percent of the tugs, docks, and lane charters at the Hydian approach, and had not yet said what it wanted, which is why everyone kept looking at Kaeli with eyes that ranged from distrustful to openly interested.

"The Jedi are here to keep the peace," Merrow said when D'Asta had finished. She was a narrow-faced woman in a military-cut coat with greying hair, and I appreciated that her dislike of me was clean and total, based on my affiliation and nothing more. "Very well. Keep it. Tell the Senate to stop robbing us, and there will be no need for my militia."

"The Jedi do not tell the Senate anything," D'Asta said. "They simply do the Senate’s bidding, don’t they?"

"Then what use are they?"

I felt the fractures open before me as they always did, cracks of light spreading from this moment like a sheet of ice under a boot. Most of them ended the same way, though this time it was unusually clear. Merrow's militia would fire on a cutter; the Senate would, in fact, send the Judicial Forces.

Serenno would join the list of worlds that had stopped believing in the Republic, and a few years from now that list would have a name, a flag, and an army of droids.

 In some of them, Kaeli stood in front of that army; I could see her staring boldly forward, a curved silver-hilted saber at her side, and I could already guess the color.

Only a few futures went anywhere else.

"Duchess," I said, "may I ask a question?"

Merrow waved a hand. "The Jedi may ask,” she said blandly.

"When your sector's Senator voted for the tax, was anyone of your planet there to advocate for what Serenno desired?"

There was a pause.

"No one," D'Asta said heavily, and for a moment the man broke slightly, looking older than he had before. "He did not ask, and we did not have the standing to insist."

"Why not?"

"Because a sector delegation votes as a block," Kaeli said. It was the first thing she had said. Her voice was very cool. "Serenno is one world of twelve. The Senator answers to the delegates, and the delegates answer to D’Astan Prime. Serenno could shout at Coruscant for a century and never be heard, Padawan. Surely you knew that."

"I did," I said. "I wanted the Council to hear it said aloud."

Her eyes narrowed very slightly, probably at my blatant words about what I had done.

"Here is what I see," I went on, turning so I was speaking to the whole ring, not just her. "The Duchess is right that petitioning will fail. Duke D'Asta is right that fighting will fail. And House Dooku has bought the approach because it believes the only way the Rim will ever be heard is if the Rim owns something the Core can't ignore or tax out of existence."

"And the Jedi?" Merrow said. "What do the Jedi believe?"

"I believe,” I emphasized carefully, “that you have an answer you haven't noticed because it's been sitting under your own dust." I looked at the three empty chairs. "How many worlds of the D’Astan sector share your complaint?"

D'Asta frowned. "Seven. Perhaps eight."

"And how many other sectors on the Rim are represented the way you are?"

The silence this time was longer.

"Some number of them," Kaeli said slowly, “No one of real economic significance.”

"Not alone, maybe,” I allowed, “But together? The Senate's charter allows any sector to petition for division when its representation fails to reflect its constituent worlds," I said. "It has been done eleven times since Ruusan. The last time was a hundred and forty years ago. It requires a formal grievance, supported by a majority of affected worlds, and it requires an independent report of the conditions that caused it."

"And who writes this independent report?" D'Asta asked. "The same Senate?"

"Historically," I said, "a Jedi."

The hall went very quiet.

I did not look back at Dooku. I didn't need to; I could feel him focusing on me, a sudden sharpening of attention at the back of the room like a blade coming off a guard.

"The Ruusan Reformation made Jedi servants of the Senate," I said. "It made us unable to lead. It did not make us unable to testify. A Jedi mediator's report is part of the record. The Senate must receive it, and the Council must forward it. No one has used that clause in a century and a half because no Jedi has been willing to write a report that says the Senate itself is the cause of the dispute."

I gave the assembled group a somewhat self-deprecating smile. “It is a bit of a sticking point to some in the order.”

"And you are?" Merrow said. She sounded, for the first time, almost interested.

"I am here to keep the peace, Duchess," I said. "I don't think the peace is kept by telling people who are being robbed that it isn't happening. I could indeed argue and debate with you for the rest of the day, but you can only tell a person those kinds of falsehoods so long before they cease to ring true for even the most credulous of ears.”

Celeste made a very small sound beside me that might have been a laugh.

"It could take years," D'Asta said.

"Yes."

"And there is no guarantee the Senate would grant it."

"None."

"Then why would we wait?" Merrow demanded. "Why not simply stop paying now?"

"Because if you stop paying now, you give the Senate the right to send the Judicial Forces,” I said calmly, "and everyone in the galaxy, or at least in the Core Worlds, who hears about it will think Serenno started it. If you petition with a Jedi's report behind you, and the Senate refuses, then the whole galaxy knows who refused." I spread my hands. "One of those makes Serenno a rebel. The other makes it a system with a legitimate grievance. I would rather Serenno be heard and no lives be spent."

Kaeli was watching me now in her careful, cautious way. "And House Dooku?" she said, her voice cool, practically chilling in the air. "We would still own the approach."

"You still own the approach," I agreed. "Which means when the sector petitions, the Senate will know that the Rim can move its own goods if it is refused." I smiled at her. “A strong position to negotiate from, wouldn’t you say, my lady?”

"But we still have to negotiate and struggle under the Republic’s corrupted rule for now.”

"Is it so terrible to try democracy when the alternative is armed conflict?" I asked as gently as I could.

She held my gaze for a long moment, and I felt her reach out to me in the force, very lightly, the way she had in the ring. This time I did not pull back. I did not open, either. I let her find the ice and stand at its edge.

Something in her face changed, very slightly. Her brow furrowed, as if she were trying to remember a word on the tip of her tongue.

Then she looked away, toward the back of the hall, where her master stood.

"House Dooku," she said, "will support the petition. On the condition that the Jedi's report names the D’Astan Senator, the Core shipping authority, and the Banking Clans as the central issue in the resolution to this problem."

Merrow barked a laugh. D'Asta covered his eyes with a hand.

I stiffened my resolve as I jabbed another finger into the Sith’s eye.

"Done," I said.

-

Dooku found me in the gardens again that night, standing on one of the balconies that seemed to be practically everywhere.

He did not bring the whiskey this time, which was a shame because I had rather enjoyed the prior bottle. He simply came and stood beside me on the marbled stone outcropping that overlooked a reflecting pool, and together looked out over the gardens toward the mountains.

"The division clause," he said at last. "Where did you learn of it?"

"The archives," I said quietly. "I have spent a great deal of time in the archives, perhaps only a bit less time than I have spent with my saber work."

"So I gather." He was quiet for a moment. "I was on the Council of Dukes for almost twenty years. I was aware it existed, but I did not think it would be something to actually apply."

"No one uses it."

"No one uses it," Dooku agreed, "because no one in the Order would put their name to that report. There are some on the Council who will be furious."

"The Council," I said, "will receive it, and I believe they will forward it because that is the correct procedure; they may look very disapproving when they do so, though.”

Something almost like a laugh moved in his chest.

"You understand what you've done," he said. "You have given the Rim a way to be heard that does not require it to leave the Republic. If it works, the worlds that want to break away will lose half their argument, maybe even more."

"And if it doesn't work?"

"Then you will have given them a list," Dooku said, "of every world with a grievance, signed and sealed, and a Jedi's report proving the grievance just, and they will know where to begin recruiting." He looked at me. "You know this."

"I know this."

He studied me for a long moment as if trying to piece together a puzzle, but now with far more pieces than before.

"When I left the Order," he said slowly, "I believed the Jedi had two choices. Serve the Senate as it was, and rot with it. Or step outside of it, and build the thing that came after." His hand tightened on the railing. "It did not occur to me that there was a third. That a Jedi might stand inside the Senate's own law and bear witness to its failures, and make it listen," he dryly laughed, “Or at least attempt to do so,” he shook his head, “You remind me of my Padawan.”

"It's not a new idea," I said. "It's a very old one. We used to be the ones who told the Republic the truth. Ruusan didn't take that from us. We gave it up because it was easier and we had less power.”

Dooku was silent for a long time. Below us, the droids moved through the garden, pruning in the dark as they did seemingly nigh constantly.

"I have spent twenty years," he said, "building a weapon for a war I believed was coming. I told myself I was preparing. I think now I was only waiting to see if I would truly have to use it.”

The truth, unfortunately, was he may still have to.

“The Echani way is combat,” I said quietly. “But in truth I have no love for open warfare; I would not spend a single life before I had exhausted every avenue,” I sighed. “War is evil, Master Dooku; it is innocents who pay the price before any other.”

Dooku remained quiet at my words.

"She agreed with you today," Dooku said. "In the end, I do not think she particularly enjoyed doing so, but she did.”

"She drove a hard bargain,” I replied, letting amusement seep into my tone and stance.

"She did." A pause, then he stiffened, becoming more focused and directed. "You did not tell her."

"Neither did you."

He was quiet.

"Master Morne," he said musingly, "suggested to me that I have been less than honest about my attachments."

I turned and looked at him.

He did not look back. His profile in the dark was sharp and strong and so very tired. For a moment I could see the man the Order had lost: not the Count, not the fallen Master of the history I remembered, but a Jedi who had carried two white-haired children off a frozen world, handed one of them over, and taken the other home because he had known no other way.

"She's right," I said.

"Yes," said Dooku. "I believe that it is not an uncommon experience for her. It is rather tiresome."

I laughed. It surprised me; it rose from the water under the ice before I could catch it, and for a moment it was simply there, warm and unguarded.

Dooku glanced at me sidelong, and something in his face eased.

"She will be at breakfast," he said. "I would take it as a kindness if you did not argue tariffs before she has had her caf; she is remarkably bitter when she has just woken, even with the Force."

"I'll try."

"You will fail, of course," Dooku replied with a chuckle, deep and almost disconcerting. "She will start it."

He left me there, walking back into his home, though for once he did not seem as burdened.

I stood on the balcony a while longer and looked out at the mountains.

Somewhere far out in the current of the Force, too far to see, but close enough to feel, something vast and patient turned its attention toward Serenno, its attention resting on me, but it was not a thing of darkness.

It was absolute light.

I felt it, and I did not look away.

-

On Coruscant it was raining, which it did only when the weather control grids decided the lower levels needed washing, or so the old worn-out joke went. Master Obi Kenobi stood at the window of the Council antechamber and watched the water run down the glass.

"You’re doing it again," Ani said from the bench behind her.

Obi did not turn. "Doing what?"

"Pretending you aren’t worried." Ani drew her feet up under her and fiddled with a hydrospanner she had no reason to bring to a Council summons. "You've been doing it since Jacen left."

"I am not worried about Padawan Sol."

"I didn't say you were worried about Jacen," Ani said, very innocently.

Obi turned and gave her apprentice the look. Ani gave her one of her own back, and Obi, not for the first time, reflected that the Chosen One of prophecy was also the most insufferable Padawan in the Temple.

Though Jacen Sol was beginning to edge closer to that territory, thankfully he wasn’t in the Temple to contest the title.

"Master Kenobi," Mace Windu said. "The Council will see you. Alone."

Ani's face fell. Obi touched her shoulder lightly as she passed, then went in.

The chamber was half empty; most of the Masters were off-world. Yoda sat in his chair, eyes half closed. Windu took his own seat and did not waste time.

"We've received a request," he said. "From Mandalore. The Duchess asked for you by name."

Obi was very glad she had long ago learned to keep her face still, and similarly shamed that she had kept enough track of Satine to know exactly who they meant.

"Did she say why?"

"She says she has had reports of armored warriors operating off-world under Mandalorian colors," Windu said. "Mercenaries, taking contracts on Coruscant. She would like it very much to be understood that they are not acting on behalf of her government." He paused. "One of them was reported fighting Padawan Sol in the Senate District not long ago. Silver armor. Crimson markings."

"I see," she said.

"Do you?" Yoda opened his eyes. They were very old and not sleepy at all. "Go to Mandalore, you will. Take your Padawan, you should." A small smile. "Much, I think, the Force has yet to reveal to us."