“Durasteel,” he said, “and so is this one, because we both want to see our grandchildren grow up. Come on.”
“So you think I should try to face down my brother with a real saber,” Jaina said, hefting it and testing the weight.
“No, I think you should learn a different technique, because you’re predictable.”
“Because Jedi all learn the same basic moves?”
Beviin demonstrated a few mock lightsaber passes. “It’s all long sweeps. Every part of the blade cuts, so you don’t have to think about the angle, and it’s light, so you don’t put much weight into the blow. And you spend a lot of energy leaping around opponents, just trying to get past their defense. See what happens if you get used to a beskad. It’ll change how you handle that shiny stick.”
Jaina examined her beskad; a blade forty-five centimeters long, maybe five or six centimeters wide, with a single cutting edge curving to a point—and much heavier than it looked, perhaps more than two kilos. The leather-bound grip with its plain guard and weighty pommel made it feel like a well-balanced hammer—no, more like an agricultural tool, meant for hacking down grain or undergrowth. She could see how easily it could embed itself in a Yuuzhan Vong’s skull.
Jaina tested her balance to allow for the extra weight. Immediately she missed the reach of the lightsaber—two-thirds of it, in fact—and she also found that she couldn’t grip the saber two-handed. It made her feel suddenly exposed. Beviin just stood relaxed, tapping his blade against his thigh plate. If he’d been a Jedi … both of them would have adopted opening stances and begun the careful maneuvering to find the optimum moment and angle for the first strike.
Beviin stood still for so long that Jaina found herself unable to stay back, and began sidling up to him, not sure what to do with her left hand other than extend it for balance. As she swung the beskad around in a horizontal arc into his chest, she felt the tip hit his plates—she was too far back, still thinking with a longer weapon—and he simply smashed his saber arm down on top of hers, brought his left fist up into her sternum and punched her back a few paces. He followed through and flattened her simply by jumping on her. It was over in two seconds, and he hadn’t even used his blade.
“Great start, Solo,” she said. It was the first time she had been taken down in a saber fight of any kind for years. Beviin jumped to his feet and pulled her up. “I can’t be that stupid … can I?”
“The only point I’m making,” Beviin said kindly, “is that you know none of my moves—yet. I made you come to me, and that led to a few mistakes. Next time, anything goes as long as we don’t hit unarmored body parts. Ready?”
“Ready.”
This time she just took a couple of steps back and slashed diagonally without squaring up. The blade rang on impact, painfully loud, and suddenly his beskad was in his other hand, she couldn’t get past his blocking move, and he ducked low to ram her with helmet and shoulder. Every time she got up, she ended up flat on her back again after a few thrusts and slashes, and yes, he used that left hand a lot; a follow-on punch, a one-two maneuver after a bone-shaking saber blow, kilos of dead metal slamming into her. The blade didn’t even have to cut her. She was being hammered every time she was hit. All she could do was Force-leap out of the way.
Beviin was heavy, confident, and used his greater body weight as another weapon, as a battering ram. She couldn’t find a way to get inside his reach that wasn’t blocked by his free arm—armor changed the game, making any limb both a shield and a weapon—and didn’t leave her wrong-footed. Eventually the only way she got in two consecutive blows and still stayed standing was to Force-push him to compensate for her lack of weight and momentum. She knocked him down and pinned him with the Force, panting.
“I wondered … when you’d do … that,” he said, equally breathless.
“You’re taller … and heavier than me.”
“Not saying … you cheated.”
“What have I learned?” She knelt to one side, and he sat up. “This is like nothing I’ve ever seen. You break every rule of close combat.”
“Exactly.” Beviin gripped the beskad by hilt and tip, holding it up to the light as he lay on his back. “I use it like a hammer that also cuts when you pull it back, and you’re expecting conventional blade techniques. And you’re hampered by muscle memory. You’ve been so well trained that your body responds instantly without consulting your brain, every time.”
“Oh, we’re even trained not to think, just to feel intuitively in the Force.” Jaina felt a little robbed. “Hey, I’m teaching you how to kill Jedi. Smart guy.”
“I already know. A Jedi taught me.”
“Well, aren’t you Master Useful …”
“Don’t tell the galaxy, but Fett and me, we fought alongside a Jedi Master plenty of times in the vongese war.”
“My enemy’s enemy is my friend, right?”
“My enemy’s always my enemy but we can both get smart and put that aside while we deal with a common threat.”
Jaina had to know. She kept thinking of the old man in armor, strong in the Force, and whether anyone knew what he was. “And am I your enemy, Goran?”
Beviin sat up, saber across his lap. “I’m not Fett. First, I’ll ask who you’re fighting for. It’s not the Mando way to judge someone on their genetics.”
“Fett’s not like the rest of your people. I can see that even after a few days.”
“No. He’s a Fett. He’s his own species.” He stood up and changed the subject. “So, here you are, a master at a very demanding martial art, and you’ve had your shebs kicked by an old scruff-bag of a Mando merc. Because you had no idea what I was likely to do. Because you never fight that close in and I was right up in your face, inside your reach, so all your parrying skills didn’t help. Because I don’t use a saber like a saber. In a week, though, you’d end up killing me, because you’d get good at this, you’re young, and you’d use the Force.”
And she wasn’t likely to take a beskad to hunt Jacen. She tried to filter the welter of impressions from that morning and leave only the lessons that brought her up short. “If you met me in a real battle, would you kill me?”
“Yes.” Beviin didn’t even pause. “Sorry. And you’d better be able to look me in the eye and kill me, too.”
Jaina eased off her helmet and wiped her face on her sleeve. “You’re a nice man. I’d have to really think you were going to kill me before I went that far.”
“So, how the shab are you going to tackle your brother? Because it’s going to be even harder to capture him than kill me. It always is. There’s plenty of ways to kill someone without even going near them.”
Jaina didn’t need a translation. “Ah … well, he doesn’t draw the line at hurting his own. Ask my cousin Ben.”
“But could you look into his face, and then cut his legs from under him with that lightsaber of yours? Because if you want to grab him, you’re going to have to lure him into a trap, or injure him so badly that you can get beskar manacles on him.” Beviin stood up and prodded her leg with his boot. “And then what are you going to do with him?” He kicked her casually again, this time in the base of the spine, just under the edge of the back plate. “Put him in a beskar cage for the rest of his life?”
“I don’t know,” she said, getting annoyed with the kicks. He was trying to get some reaction, and she found herself automatically suppressing anger. “Ow, cut it out.”
“You think Jacen will cut it out?”
“Okay, point made—oww!”
This time, the kick really hurt. She was on her feet in a heartbeat and ready to put the beskad hilt-deep in him. She shut the anger down right away.
“Sorry, I seldom lose my temper in a fight.”
“You lot think that anger leads to the dark side, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So how come you’re taught to feel a fight and not think it?”
“That’s how we use the Force. It guides us if we surrender to i
t.”
Beviin mimicked a Twi’lek dancer’s circling hips. “That’s dancing talk, Jedi.”
“We still win a lot.”
“Okay, try it my way. Visualize your actions before you even draw the blade, start to finish. Then just go at it and don’t stop short, not for anything.” He took the blade from her and rummaged in the pannier of the speeder, pulling out two short wooden sticks. “These won’t hurt, so you can really, really go crazy with them. Okay? Learn to let go, and not to the shabla Force. To wanting to finish off your enemy.”
“Hate,” Jaina said, taking the club. It felt like a feather after the beskad.
“No, not hate. Me or him. Total war.”
It sounded rote; it sounded like what she’d been warned to avoid from the time she first held a lightsaber. About Briila’s age. Yes, I was. It was just another way of saying that you didn’t give up when you got knocked down. It was resilience. Jaina stood a couple of meters back from Beviin, less self-conscious now and ready to give him a pounding. She couldn’t kill him with this.
Jaina lunged first, smashing Beviin as hard as she could Force-unaided across shoulders, forearms, even his head when he dropped his guard. It was such a light stick. She drove him back, grunting with the sheer effort of putting all her weight into the blows and not feeling that they were making any impression. He didn’t fight back. She ground to a halt, pulse pounding.
“Good try.” Beviin sounded a little different. “Now feel this.”
He came straight at her, stick raised, with an animal explosion of breath. Instantly she felt him change in the Force into complete lack of all emotion except a single … word, yes, almost a word: end. He closed in and rained blows on her like a machine, no style, no grace, no pause, until she fell back and he still kept hammering her while she lay in a ball and instinctively shielded her head. She wondered for a terrifying irrational moment if he really was going to beat her to death with this small stick. Was he ever going to stop? There was no hatred in there, just a terrible focus, the rest of the world shut out. Then something flipped a switch in her and she threw him back with the Force, scared for both of them.
When she finally uncoiled and looked up at him, he had his helmet in one hand and his face was red. He felt embarrassed. She could sense it.
“There,” he said, getting his breath back. “Just as well you did that. I’m not getting any younger. If I dropped dead after a Jedi hit me with a shabla twig, I’d never live it down.”
“You’d be dead anyway.” Jaina laughed, not finding it funny but on that edge between giggling and tears.
“So … I wouldn’t stop in battle until I saw you were dead or completely out of action. Did that feel different to you? I lost it.”
“If you’d had a saber … yes, I can feel the difference.”
“Can you get yourself into a state of mind where nothing, but nothing will stop you? Not even your opponent screaming at you to stop? When all you can see is blood and stuff that’ll give you nightmares?”
The silence that followed was the lesson, and she learned it. Beviin seemed quite disoriented by it.
“Food,” he said, packing away the weapons and hauling her upright to take off her plates. “Medrit hates it when I keep the kids waiting for lunch.”
Jaina swung onto the saddle behind him and couldn’t pin down what she felt. They skimmed over fences and hedges, catching strong scents of cut wood, manure, and wood smoke. Nerfs seemed to be watching suspiciously in every other field. “Can we talk about what just happened?”
“Scared you, did I? Scared me, too. Always does.”
“You went nuts for a few minutes. And then you went sane again. And you can choose when?”
“It’s a technique. We start young.”
Well, that’s a new one in meditative technique. “First guy to die loses, huh?”
“Pretty much. I don’t see anything except the end of the fight. I don’t even see a living being. I don’t have any connection to the opponent at all. I just see something I have to remove, stop, get past, any way I can, to get what I want—or die.”
“Wow.”
“Some fancy doctor said we can switch on psychopathy.” Beviin banked the speeder bike so steeply that Jaina had to hang on with both hands and her knees. “We all seem to have that trait, whether we inherit it or learn it. Maybe we even adopt kids who show it. I don’t know. But we’ve been a fighting culture for so many centuries that we’ll never really be sure.”
He started whistling to himself, a pretty tune whose rhythm Jaina couldn’t work out because he kept breaking and picking up again. Jaina had heard of many cultures where the warriors stoked up their aggression with strange herbs and infusions before going into battle, but this berserker tactic was new. They seemed to visualize their way into psychopathy.
Do I have to do that?
This was the dark side. It truly was. Beviin could switch it on when he really needed it, and then switch it off and become a man that anyone would welcome as a neighbor or uncle. Jaina wondered if this was how Jacen started, with just a quick desperate need to win, to survive, and then he fell to it a step at a time.
It all sounded so reasonable. She couldn’t hate her brother; she’d just seen how it could happen.
But Beviin stopped. Jacen hasn’t. And if I can learn to do that—I’ll have to learn to stop, too.
And Beviin was just an ordinary human, with no Force powers to exploit, just his hands and whatever mundane weapons he could use.
“You still held back, anyway,” he said suddenly. “If I’d had Force powers, I’d have used them, too.”
Tell me they’re not telepaths. Please. “You have no idea,” she said, “how much you’re teaching me.”
Medrit was standing at the table with his arms folded when they got back. Dinua, Jintar, and the two kids were chattering in Mandalorian—Mand’oa—and seemed excited. The kids were instantly riveted when they saw Jaina.
“Ahhhh, she’s got a cut on her nose!” Shalk gasped, fascinated. “Wow!”
“Loose helmet,” Beviin said, washing his hands in the duraplast bowl on the counter. “And I’m going to be covered in bruises tomorrow. Fett can have her back before she does me some permanent damage.”
Medrit sliced the nerf joint with pretty impressive violence himself. “You showed her your no-prisoners.”
“Nasaad murci’t!” Shalk said. “No prisoners!”
“Jedi use reasonable force,” said Beviin. “With a small f. It’s not good for them.”
Dinua laughed. This was the one who had fought Yuuzhan Vong at fourteen. She could afford to. “The trouble with getting attached to Jedi, Buir, is that it’s like making pets of the nerfs and nuna—really upsetting when you have to slaughter them.”
Everyone laughed. Jaina managed to as well, a little stung, but that was just their humor. Nothing personal; no worse than all the head-rolling jokes her father had made about Jango Fett’s demise. They ate heartily, totally at ease with her.
“If you ever get a Force-using Mandalorian,” she asked carefully, “how would they be treated?”
“They’d be in demand for getting stuck lids off cans,” Medrit said. “Or improving crop yields.”
None of them reacted as if they knew what she was getting at. She was being eaten by her desperate curiosity faster than she was devouring the chunks of nerf and vegetables. “Who are Venku and Gotab? Why that armor?”
“Oh, Venku …” Beviin put down his fork. “Kad’ika. Nearest we have to a political agitator. He’s the one who’s been pushing the Mandalore-First agenda for years. You know, let the galaxy find some other dumb mercenaries to die for it. We’ll stay home, look after our own, strengthen the Mandalore sector, and laugh.”
“And the armor?”
“Tradition. Extreme version. We often wear a plate of a loved one’s armor after they die, sometimes during their lifetime, too. He wears his whole family.”
“He’s nuts,” Jintar muttered.
>
“He’s right,” said Beviin.
“Yeah, he’s right as long as the new beskar ore lasts.”
“Fett listens to him, Jin’ika.”
All families were alike at meals. Jaina’s mind was now a blur of new and disorienting combat tactics, political argument, wondering if it was polite to grab an extra slice of nerf, and wanting to weep because she remembered Aunt Mara.
“And Gotab?” she said casually.
“One of the Kyrimorut wild men, like Venku,” Beviin said, rolling his eyes. “Don’t even ask what they do up there. They keep apart. They come and go, but they’re there when we need them to fight, so no questions asked. Fair bit of Fett clone blood up there, because the place was a haven for deserters during the wars. Like Venku’s dad, I assume. Now Fett says Gotab’s a Kiffar. He read the heart-of-fire stone. Kiffar—Sintas is Kiffar, too.”
If only he knew.
“Can all Jedi do healing?” Dinua asked.
Jaina shrugged. “We can heal ourselves, but some Jedi are better than others at healing other people.”
“You’d be so useful …”
Jaina had to put on the mental brakes to see what was happening. Mandalorians were compulsive adopters, and not just of kids. They seemed to want to collect skills, qualities, technology, any advantage that wasn’t nailed down. And it was all too easy to let them. Maybe that was how Gotab had found himself stranded here in a metal suit.
“So …” She was piecing it together now. “What happened to the Jedi you fought with in the Vong War?”
“Kubariet,” Medrit said, looking sad for a moment. “He’s dead. I wonder how many folks know even now that we fought secretly for the New Republic.”
“I know,” Jaina said. “And I’m very sorry that you never got any help from Coruscant after the war.”
“I’m not. It means we don’t owe you naas.”
So Gotab wasn’t Kubariet. There was something in his Force presence that stuck in her mind. It wasn’t the resentment and suspicion, which was odd enough in a Jedi, but the … the …
It was like identifying a few bars of a tune; familiar enough to re-create the whole song, but just out of reach of memory—