because the boy was nursing a broken leg at the time, and had been fighting in a
brace.
She stalked past a little clump of Talkers, face flushing painfully at the
memory. "Hey, Scout," one of them said, but she ignored him. No time for talking
today. Today was all business.
Anyone with the brains of a Sevarcosan prickle-pig could figure she was out
of chances to screw up. The fact was, the Force was weak in Tallisibeth
Enwandung-Esterhazy. Oh, it was there, all right. Strong enough to make an
impression on Jedi talent scouts when she was a toddler—although from something
one of the Masters once said, her family had been dirt-poor, and her parents had
begged the Jedi to take their daughter away from a life of grinding poverty. She
was haunted by the idea that her mother and father, her brothers and sisters—if
she had them—were all trapped in the slums of Vorzyd V while she alone had
escaped. She alone had been given this one incredible chance to make good. It
would be unbearable to fail.
But somehow, as she grew in body, she had not grown in the ways of the Force.
She did have a gift for anticipation. When she was sparring, for instance, and
open to the Force, she would have flashes where she knew what opponents were
going to do next even before they knew it themselves. Her habit of scoping out a
situation and reading it just a little faster than everyone else had earned her
her nickname. But even that could fade out on her if she was flustered or upset,
and as for the rest of the Jedi's traditional abilities with the Force .. .
Some days she could pull a glass off a counter with her mind and bring it to
her hand . . . but more often it would slip on the way and smash on the floor.
Or explode as if squeezed. Or go rocketing into the ceiling and fall in a shower
of blue milk and splinters. You didn't have to be a Mrlssi to catch the way the
Jedi Masters talked together in low voices when she went by. You didn't have to
be very smart—and Scout was smart—to notice how the other apprentices rolled
their eyes at her, or laughed, or, worst of all, covered up for her mistakes.
By the time she turned thirteen, she had all but given up hope of becoming a
Jedi. When Master Yoda summoned her for a private talk in the Room of a Thousand
Fountains, she had dragged up there with feet of permacrete, stomach churning,
waiting to hear which branch of the Agricultural Corps they would assign her to.
"Worthy work," people always said. "Honorable work." The hypocrisy of it made
her furious. As if it weren't humiliating enough to fail at the only thing she'd
ever wanted, they had to make it worse by pretending a hoe was the same as a
lightsaber, and the mud of a potato field was as exciting as the dust of a
hundred planets beneath her feet.
By the time she'd entered the room, her face had been slimy with tears and
there was a big wet splotch on the arm of her tunic where she kept wiping her
sniveling nose. Master Yoda had looked at her, his wizened, round face wrinkled
with concern, and asked why she was weeping. "Only Jedi have to strive for
nonattachment," she'd said defiantly between snuffles. "Farmers can cry all they
want."
Then he'd told her that Chankar Kim had asked that she be her new Padawan,
and Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy, known as Scout to her friends, was left
with what she later decided was the classic post-Yoda feeling: breathtakingly
stupid, heartbreakingly happy.
Three months later Chankar Kim was dead.
If her whole life hadn't been a struggle, Scout thought, that would have
broken her. It was sheer will that kept her going, sheer bloody-minded
un-Jedi-like rage, against the Trade Federation, against Fate, against herself.
"I'll let you come along on the next mission," Master Kim had said with a smile.
"Let's polish off a few more of those rough edges first. You can come next time,
I promise." Only here was the joke: Chankar Kim bled her life out on a distant
planet, and next time was never going to come.
And so Scout was an orphan, an aging apprentice with no Master anymore. The
only way she could become a Jedi was to be made a Padawan, taken on missions,
given a chance to prove that she could make a difference. And the only way to do
that was to gain the other Jedi's trust.
She drove herself to the top of class after class, practiced joint locks on
herself until her wrists were numb, went sleepless late into every night until
star maps danced before her aching eyes. She trained harder than she had ever
trained in her life—astrocartography, unarmed combat, hyperdrive math, comm
installation tech, lightsaber technique. She was slightly built, and her girl's
body was agonizingly slow to gain muscle, but she worked out until the sweat ran
in rivers down her back because she had to, she had to: she couldn't rely on the
little cheat the rest of them had, the Force.
And still every day there was the torment of classes in using the Force;
Scout grouped together with the eight-and nine-year-olds, looming among them, an
awkward bumbling giant: and every day, as hard as she tried to fight back
despair, her footsteps came more heavily, as if she were already slogging
through the muddy potato fields that were her destiny.
"Hey, Scout—relax!" The voice pulled Scout's attention back to the here and
now: combat chamber. Tournament day. It was Lena Missa calling, a good-natured
Chagrian girl Scout's age. "You're wound so tight I can hear you squeak when you
walk."
Easy for Lena to say—she, too, had lost a Master in the last year, but Lena
was witty and well liked, and her touch with the Force was deft; Jedi Masters
had been lining up for the right to choose her as their Padawan as soon as an
appropriate grieving period was up. Scout forced a tight smile. "Thanks. I'll
try," she said.
Lena leaned in confidentially, so her forked tongue flickered between her
blue lips, and her soft lower horns swung forward. "Scout, don't worry. You're
really good at combat. Just relax and use—" She hesitated. "Just trust your
ability."
Scout forced a smile. "You're only being nice to me in case you end up in my
bracket."
Lena grinned back. "You bet. My elbow is still tingling from that arm bar you
put on me last week. You wouldn't hurt a friend, right?"
There were thirty-two apprentices entered in the tournament. An apprentice
had to be at least ten years old to enter, with the majority of entrants in the
eleven- to twelve-year-old range. The younger kids weren't quite ready to
encounter the big kids in full-contact sparring, and the older ones who had made
Padawan were mostly busy with their duties. Lena hadn't originally meant to
enter, but they had needed one more to make an even number.
The apprentices had been given the choice of a layered tournament or a
sudden-death elimination format, in which the first loss meant you were done.
Scout had been strongly in favor of single eliminations. In the real world, she
had argued, no enemy offered to go best three matches out of five. Privately,
she also felt the win-or-go-home format would play to her strengths. A
s good as
she was at the physical elements of combat, the Force was weaker in her than in
anyone else in the field. For her to do well, she would need to out-think her
opponents. Trickery was usually most effective the first time you tried it; the
fewer matches she had to fight, the better her chances of winning.
Master Iron Hand adjusted her tunic and picked her way to the center of the
combat room, passing the Talkers and the Warm-ups sprinkled around the white
chamber. We look like so many weevils wiggling in a box of flour, Scout thought.
Where the Master passed, the apprentices fell silent. In the center of the room
she announced that the first two rounds of the tournament would take place here,
but when they were down to the Round of Eight, the remaining matches would be
moved to less artificial environments. Students looked at one another, eyebrows
raised. "You wanted lifelike," Iron Hand said dryly. "We decided you should get
it. Now—to determine the first-round matches." She consulted her datapad.
"Atresh Pikil and Gumbrak Hoxz."
Atresh, a lithe black-skinned girl of twelve, stepped forward, along with
Gumbrak, a thirteen-year-old Mon Calamari boy whose salmon-colored skin was
already speckled with excitement. The Mon Calamari was stronger, but he had
grown a lot in the last year and still had a tendency to stumble over his webbed
feet. If Atresh used her quickness to keep dancing out of range until he
tripped, she should be fine. Of course, Atresh wasn't a very calculating
fighter. Like many of the more gifted apprentices, she tended to trust to her
own strengths instead of doing the kind of detailed preliminary observations
that had earned Scout her nickname. The other kids used to laugh at her
relentless calculation, but then, they could afford to. Scout needed to do her
homework. She had spent many hours over the last six weeks watching the other
combatants spar, sometimes openly and sometimes in secret. She had a plan for
tackling each of them, and, if not confident, she was at least prepared.
"Flerp, Zrim," Master Xan called. "Page, Gilp. Horororibb, Boofer."
Scout wondered if the matches had been assigned by computer simulations
designed to find the most even contests, or by some other criteria known only by
the Masters, designed to test each student's weaknesses. "Chizzik,
Enwandung-Esterhazy."
Scout's heart sank. Pax Chizzik was an eleven-year old boy of enormous spirit
and charm. As a fighter he was strong in the Force, smart, a little chunky, and
without the best footwork, but with exceptionally quick wrists. He had a very
fast parry, and most kids his age with that gift scored their points on the
counterattack, but Pax was also imaginative on the attack, with the hand speed
and creativity to launch complex and rather beautiful feint-and-cut sequences.
High-spirited and good-natured, he was a natural leader, born to play a dashing
prince in some romantic epic of the last age. Everybody liked Pax. Scout liked
him enough that she had taken time out of her relentless study to help him
practice the Twelve Intermediate Knots when he was having trouble in Master
Bear's Climbing and Ropework class. She had several ideas for how to beat him in
the tournament, but some of them weren't very nice things to do to a kid, and
she had really been hoping she wouldn't have to face him.
Which is probably why they'd been paired, she thought sourly. She shot a
suspicious glance at Iron Hand. The Master met her eyes blandly and went on with
her list.
The matches were open combat, no holds barred, with sparring to continue
until one person surrendered by tapping the floor three times or took three
burns from the training lightsabers, which were dialed to their lowest power
settings. Even at low power a cut from a training lightsaber was no joke. The
touch of the blade was shockingly painful, a searing kiss that made one's
muscles jerk and one's nerves howl, and it left a red welt that took days to
heal. Scout knew because every day for the last three weeks she had gone to a
private spot in the unused kitchen gardens and touched herself on the flank or
shoulder or leg with her own lightsaber at low power. Pain, as Master Iron Hand
was fond of pointing out, was extremely distracting, and Scout, knowing she was
likely to get hit, was determined not to let the pain make her lose focus.
She couldn't afford to lose.
The first matches began. Scout tried to pay attention, watching for any
obvious weaknesses in case she met the winner in a later round, but the cramping
anxiety in her stomach made it hard to focus, and after a couple of bouts she
joined the ranks of the Meditators, thinking only of her breath, of silence, of
the deep calm of blood washing through her body like a hidden tide. She could
feel the Force there, too, filling the room like a fat electric charge. Twice it
jumped like a spark from one fighter to another, leaving the victor and the
vanquished both blinking as if struck by lightning. Scout didn't even try to
open herself to it. The Force was not an ally she could trust, not when so much
depended on this.
Her lips were dry and there was a bitter, metallic taste in her mouth. Get a
grip, she told herself. Come on, Scout. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Suddenly it was time. Her palms were sweaty and her legs felt like jelly
underneath her as she walked into the center of the chamber. Her lightsaber
handle dangled from a loop on her tunic, bumping against a welt on her thigh.
She went through the opening rituals, bowing to Master Xan and presenting her
lightsaber for inspection. The Master checked the power settings and handed it
back to her. Pax bowed deeply in his turn, then presented his weapon with a
theatrical flourish. As Iron Hand looked it over, he shot a merry glance at
Scout and tipped her the slightest wink. It was impossible not to smile. I'm
glad it's you, he mouthed.
They reclipped their weapons, parted, faced one another, and bowed. "May the
Force be with you," Pax said, and she knew he meant it.
The murmur of conversation in the chamber died away as Iron Hand held up a
small red handkerchief. Now that the horrible waiting was over, Scout was
calmer. She felt her attention relax and grow broad, seeping into the whole
room. Her breathing slowed down, and she was aware of everyone in the room, even
the ones standing behind her back. At the back of the room a door opened, and
she felt the presence of Master Yoda, glowing like a lamp.
Master Xan let the red cloth slip between her fingers. Down it fell,
fluttering, dipping, ever slower as time stretched out for Scout and Pax, until
at last, gentle as a snowflake, the first edge touched the floor.
Two lightsabers blazed to life; clashed; whirled; clashed again; held
motionless, humming and sizzling in the middle of the room. Pax laughed, and
Scout could feel herself smiling back. She felt a little ashamed of all her
scheming. It was hard not to wish Pax well.
I could let him win.
Scout blinked, turning over this new idea. She could throw the match. If she
made it just obvious eno
ugh that she had "let" him win, it would imply that she
could have beaten him, if she really wanted to. It wouldn't be as if she'd
actually lost.
I could let him win.
Relief flooded through her. Pax would advance to the next round, enjoying
himself hugely, and for the first time in six weeks Scout would be able to stop
worrying about this tournament and join in the celebration of his victory.
Pax cut a little flourish in the air with the humming green blade of his
lightsaber. "Ready, Scout?" he said, and he let his tip drop just a little, as
if inviting her in. I should let him win.
The humming silence was broken by a small horking noise from the corner of
the room: Master Yoda's testy snuffle.
Scout blinked again, as if waking from a dream. "By the black stars," she
whispered. "You almost had me." Pax had been using the Force on her.
She shook her head to clear out the cobwebs. Pax was no sly manipulator—he
probably wasn't even aware of what he was doing. But make no mistake, he willed
people to like him. Always had.
Scout laughed and made a mystical pass with her fingers. "This is not the
victory you were seeking." Pax looked at her, baffled. "Yeah, I'm ready," she
said. Then she attacked.
She ran in fast on a slant, testing his footwork. She got in with a bind that
locked their blades together and let her use her size and weight to shove him
hard. He stumbled backward, and she tried to drive home her advantage. He let
his body go loose and tumbled backward, his blade slipping out of her bind and
slashing up at her neck. She barely managed an awkward parry. It wrecked her
balance and she pitched forward over his tumbling body. She somersaulted over
him, hit the floor with a shoulder roll, and bounced to her feet, whipping her
lightsaber around in a high parry that caught his blade in a shower of sparks.
Oh, boy. That was too close.
He fell back en garde, grinning hugely. Clearly this was the best fun he'd
had in ages. It was only a game to him, of course. Nobody was ever going to send
Pax Chizzik to the Agricultural Corps. No, twenty years from now they'd all be
reading breathless accounts of his daring deeds as a Jedi Knight. Written by
love-smitten journalists, no doubt.
It was enough to make her want to spit.
He attacked.