Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....

No one is quite sure exactly how long ago or how far away, especially because time and space are rather famously – relative. Time can move strangely between places, and as some people could tell you, sometimes there can be an entire world inside a wardrobe.

An indeterminate time ago, in one of many galaxies, on one of many planets. This one orbited a duo of stars, was covered in deserts, and was known as Tatooine.

On said planet, there was a city (at least in Tatooine terms it was considered a city, although people from less backwater planets closer to the galaxy's Core might call it just a town) named Mos Eisley. And in the city of Mos Eisley, there was a cantina. It did not differ much from any other cantinas in Mos Eisley: it was fairly crowded, filled with odd lights and shadows, and with the clanking of glasses, the hum of the voices of many species, and music.

In a booth halfway from the main entrance, strategically facing both the entrance to their left, the bar in front of them, and the barely visible back door to their right, sat two people who were ever so slightly set apart from their surroundings, by something in their bearing: one human male and one... creature.

The human, who was nursing a glass of Corellian brandy (or, rather, Tatooine’s cheap equivalent, a regrettable choice), was fairly tall, well-proportioned though somewhat wiry in his build, and wore a hooded robe. The cut of that piece of clothing, in combination with the barely visible metallic cylinder at his belt also marked him out as someone not quite one with the seedy environment.

His companion, pointy-snouted and covered in velvety black fur, was so small they had to sit on the table. They had a glass of non-alcoholic jawa juice in front of them, and were contentedly munching on the contents of a large bowl of fried and spiced local bugs and worms. The human occasionally snuck his hand in and crunched on a snack of the odd selection himself.

“He’s taking his time,” the furry being remarked, sounding a little worried. “At least I can’t sense him anywhere near.”

“He’ll be here on time,” the knight replied. “He has a reputation to uphold. He’d have already let us know if he wasn’t going to make it.”

It was another ten or fifteen minutes until the front door opened and in walked a figure that had them both straightening their backs in anticipation. They were not the only people in the establishment with that reaction. Theirs, however, came before the man entered.

“Oooh, here we go,” the furry creature said softly.

The newcomer, clad in a gray flightsuit and Mandalorian armour with chipped paint done mostly in shades of green, was probably well-known throughout the galaxy, certainly well-known in all of its seedier corners. He had taken one look around the cantina and immediately spotted the duo in the booth. He bought a drink at the bar and walked with his glass towards them.

He sat down in the corner of their seat so that he could face them but still keep command of the whole room. He acknowledged them with a nod. The knight returned it. The furry being waved at him in greeting.

“Up front,” the bounty hunter said, “your order can’t afford me.”

The knight flipped a piece of flimsi in his fingers and laid it down on the table between them.

“This change your mind?”

The bounty hunter looked at the flimsi and then up from it to the knight’s face.

“When do we start?”

Chapter Text

Chapter 1

Sleeping Akin to Beasts

(Narnia, 6 years after the Battle of Anvard)

It started as a loud screeching sound of uncertain origins, quickly followed by the crash of broken branches and a powerful thud into the ground, the soil around them reverberating under the painful impact.

The children shrieked.

“Lion gracious, what was that?!” Lindendell cried out and hugged the smallest to herself protectively. Myrtledove, of course, protested that treatment, because she resented always being the smallest, and not even such strange happenings could quench her spirit for long.

At first, though, only Thistledown dared emerge aboveground, and so it was him who first caught a glimpse of the large, metallic, bird-like structure crushed and half-buried into the soil, and the Son of Adam who had fallen to the ground about ten feet from it.

Thistledown ran to him, and noticed the man was bleeding from his right arm. He seemed to have instinctually protected his head with that arm, even though he was also wearing a helmet. He was now yanking the helmet off, struggling to rise and looking around himself in confusion.

“Come help!” Thistledown shouted for the rest of his family, because he would certainly need help with tending the poor soul. Sons of Adam were always on the larger side and this one was definitely a grown adult. “Do not trouble yourself, sir, we will see to that arm of yours at once.”

“Arm---?” the man said, and only then seemed to notice his own injury. “Oh.”

As Lindendell emerged and gasped, Thistledown told her:

“Dearest, your eyes are better than mine, you can treat him better.”

And to one of his older sons, now that the children had ventured out behind their mother:

“Clovedeep, bring some water and bandages!”

The man who had found himself so unceremoniously thrown into their lives was, though he did not know it, perhaps lucky to have crash-landed where he had: that is, in a clearing littered with Mole-hills. He was certainly lucky not to have crashed into a tree. And had he landed elsewhere, his hard-edged face bisected by a nasty scar might have made a very different first impression on some other peaceful woodland creatures that could see it more clearly.

As it were, though, this family’s first impression, after the first glimpse of him as someone injured, was that of a man running back to the metallic structure which was now starting to spout fire, shouting for (as they eventually realised) his friend, and at them to try and douse the flames, not with water, before any of the Trees catch fire.

They were Moles. Soil was always at hand.

He managed to extricate his friend out of the crumpled metal just in time. As the man backed away, dragging the friend with him, and collapsed on the ground again, his sleeves and the edges of his cloak were already smouldering from the flames he had had to push through. His friend suddenly sprouted... something... and shot a misty substance at the man that both doused the smouldering cloth, and forced the man to cough. The friend looked very strange indeed; but Moles rarely bother themselves too much with appearances and there were more pressing things to worry about.

The friend warbled at the man.

“It would not help if you burnt yourself,” he replied to them, wearily.

“Don’t you worry none,” Myrtledove told him in a hopefully cheerful voice, trying valiantly to sound as reassuring as she knew her father to be. It took some effort; it was the largest fire she’d ever seen and she could feel the heat even here where her mother had commanded her to stay away from the fire.

“Mum and Dad will have it done in no time, and then we can take care of you. Do you like worm pie? We’re having worm pie for supper.”

“I’ll take whatever you’re willing to offer,” he said, in a rather shaky voice.

“We have lots,” she assured him, even though she secretly regretted the loss of seconds.

He smiled, she was sure. She could already tell that expression on humans: Lord Peridan smiled often, when he came to visit. This man’s smile did not look quite as nice as Lord Peridan’s; she could not put her paw on why. But she did not let it bother her too much, because the smile was definitely in his voice when he said:

“I hope I won’t be intruding on your hospitality too much, and that it is all right for humans to eat.”

“Well,” she considered, “most humans don’t seem to like it. But Lord Peridan always has some and says it’s very nice and very…” she pondered the big word she never could say properly and settled on a different one, “- filling.”

He gave a short bark of laughter, and she was certain there was another of those grown-up jokes she did not understand behind it. That was not fair, but it probably wasn’t his fault. She was resolved to like him because someone who had run into a fire to save a friend could not be a bad person and probably did deserve her worm pie seconds.

Moles are efficient with soil. The fire was, indeed, soon put out, and the parents could now also turn their attention fully to their unexpected guests. The man explained to them that Deefore – that was his friend’s name – was an astromech droid (whatever that was) and would not have any worm pie. Myrtledove had already figured out as much, really; Deefore felt different.

The man’s own name was Kenix Kil. It did not sound anything like any other human names they knew, but then who knew how they named people where he was from – wherever that was. There was little consistency in human names, except perhaps for the way Archenlanders sometimes named their sons.

Lindendell sent Myrtledove for a plate of food for Kil and then proceeded to bandage his wounded arm. He insisted it was not serious. She pointed out to him that mere scratches did not bleed quite so much and that he should not underestimate any wounds, and he seemed so genuinely confused that she climbed up his good arm and checked his head.

It seemed it was alright, but just in case, she ordered him to sit up next to one of the Trees, Cersis, a gentle Redbud friend of theirs who could keep an eye on him while Lindendell saw to it that none of her family had suffered from the fire and checked with Thistledown which of their burrows had suffered from the crash.

* * *

Truth be told, the worm pie, while dubious in appearance, was positively delicious. Kir Kanos had already eaten many a worse thing in his life – ration bars swallowed in haste, raw meat forced down in hiding from pursuit, bugs on their own... This had not just the worm meat but also flaky pastry, what was probably cream and eggs, some sort of vegetable, and salt and spices, and after a year of eking out a living in the far reaches of the Outer Rim and Unknown Regions, it felt like the height of luxury, reminiscent of his time with the D’Astas – not even Imperial Guardsmen ate so well on a regular basis. That impression of a fancy meal was only heightened by the fact that what for the Moles had to be a large plate, for him was just a small dessert plate, which he could easily balance in the air in one hand.

And whoever the Lord Peridan the little Mole had mentioned was (presumably a local nobleman) he actually may have been telling the literal truth when he’d said the pie was filling.

Whoever these Moles were, they were living the good life, a charmed life.

It was dawning on him that it was also a very low-tech life, and that he was stranded. He had wished to stay away from galactic events. He was clearly getting his wish in a most spectacular fashion.

The world he found himself on, it turned out quite soon, was not only low-tech, but also populated by some creatures even stranger than the Moles, a fact Kanos was alerted to when the tree above him suddenly spoke.

“Thank you for taking us Trees into consideration.”

Kanos jumped in surprise and dropped the plate. Fortunately he’d already finished the pie and the plate was wooden and did not break.

“My apologies,” the tree said – it really was the tree speaking. It had a female-sounding voice, though deep like a large wooden wind instrument, and when Kanos looked up at it, he realised it also had a rather feminine humanoid face, though surrounded by branches full of heart-shaped leaves. He had heard stories of sentient beings that resembled trees. He had always thought them to be just tall tales.

“I should have realised there would be no Talking Trees where you come from,” she said. “My name is Cersis.”

For several moment Kanos only gaped at her.

“Kil. Kenix Kil,” he finally managed.

He’d given them that name, the name he’d been introducing himself with for years. The name he intended to keep – Kir Kanos was dead.

Even though it was not quite as easy to forget that was who he was, in his own mind.

“So I have heard. What brings you to our neck of the woods, Kil?”

“I’d like to hear that myself,” the first of the Moles – the pale-coloured adult he thought was named Thistledown – said.

Slowly, with many side explanations, he related to them his story – or at least the relevant parts: delving into his whole history would do him no favours. No, just the relevant parts: The experimental hyperspace lane through the Unknown Regions, the singularity that had pulled him from hyperspace and above this world, so devoid of any technology his snubfighter could pick up on, the collision with – he was still not sure what.

The fact that he firmly intended to live and let live (with reservations for particularly abominable wrong-doers like child-killers, he had to admit when they asked what he meant by that), and stay out of trouble. That part was important.

When he was finally finished, night was closing in. The adults in the group started wondering what should be done with him and Deefore.

“We should send for Lord Peridan. Sons of Adam should be with Sons of Adam,” Cersis said sagely. “You cannot feed him on Mole diet all the time. And those wounds of his should be looked at by someone with the eye for it.”

Kanos had originally dismissed his wound, but he had to concede that in the absence of bacta – his own medpack, he realised, had been in the section of his X-Wing that had suffered the greatest fire damage – or even any of its inferior substitutes, he would much prefer to have it treated by more expert hands.

“But it’s so far away!” Thistledown said.

“Not for Trees,” Cersis replied. “We can pass on the message. The Beeches stretch far.”

“Do, please,” Lindendell begged.

The leaves and branches of the trees around them began whispering, as if a breeze had picked up, though Kil could not feel the air moving. This, he realised in wonder, must be the private language of Trees, or at least some part of it.

“Consider it done,” Cersis said. “You can rest easy now. I will watch over Kil.”

“Will you be alright at night? Should we bring you some blankets maybe?” Lindendell asked him.

“Do you have any big enough for me?” he wondered.

“Well, no.”

“Don’t worry about me, then; my cloak will suffice.”

It certainly would not be the first time it had to.

They wished him good night in their pleasant high yet earthy voices and disappeared into their underground burrow.

He settled down between Cersis’ roots – she assured him she was used to it from various travelling beasts – taking care to lie on his left side and keep his injured arm safe. She moved her roots slightly – and a very odd sight it was – to accommodate him better, since, as she said, he was “a bit larger than usual.”

“Do you want me to tell you a story?”

“Story?” he asked, confused, and then laughed and added: “It’s been a long time since I was the age for bedtime stories.”

“How old are you, then?” she asked.

“Thirty-six... Thirty-seven... thereabouts.”

“Not a sapling anymore,” she chuckled.

“No. Not for a long time.”

“Then perhaps I can tell you a story for fully-growns,” she said, and after a couple moments she asked: “Do you know the history of the Stone Table?”

“I know none of the stories of your world.”

“Of course,” she said, slightly embarrassed. “Well, then, let me instead tell you how Aslan created Narnia...”

Her voice lulled him to sleep. He was vaguely aware of her protective and gentle yet solid presence even with his eyes closed and while the words blurred. He was not sure if what he saw playing out in his mind was mental images subconsciously induced by her story, a fully-fledged dream, or some sort of vision.

A vision of a great golden feline, shining with Light, and pulling many beings to their feet.

* * *

He woke up early, cold and cramped, and thus not quite rested. He was now feeling the lack of bacta keenly; his arm was aching and throbbing, although, when he took a careful peek under the bandage, it seemed, thankfully, clean of infection. The bandage would need changing anyway, though.

“Good morning,” he said to Cersis, suddenly self-consciously aware of how odd and unfamiliar it was to wake up curled up next to a living being like that. Last time he had slept close to someone had been a couple hours of snatched sleep next to Mirith Sinn, almost three years ago; before that... before that on Yinchorr, next to Lemet Tauk.

After Tauk’s death, he had been a Royal Guard, and had always had a right to a bunk of his own. That whole memory hurt.

Neither of those experiences had prepared him for waking up next to a Tree, anyway.

Cersis only hummed in response, but Deefore tweeted at him, and Kanos rubbed his face and said:

“Good morning to you, too.”

He was not really in the habit of treating his droid like a person as some other people did, though in his solitary existence he had certainly led conversations with him before. He was beginning to suspect that, stranded as he was now, that would change. It already was changing. That familiar trill of binary and that silver dome of the droid’s shell already seemed like a welcome touch of home in a foreign land, despite the fact that home had long been elusive.

Or maybe not. Maybe in the past couple of years, home had been the X-Wing, and R2-D4 therefore certainly had been part of it. Maybe that was the reason Kanos had asked the D’Astas to get him his X-Wing and Deefore back, after Boba Fett’s “invitation” to Devian’s stronghold and all the subsequent mad-dash events had forced him to leave them behind. It had certainly felt right to have them back, the X-Wing now no longer a means of studying an enemy but a part of him, and if still anything to do with Luke Skywalker, then a relieved admission that their differences did not matter to him anymore.

He turned his attention to the ruins of that tentative home. The starfighter itself was unfortunately a definite write-off. In other circumstances, it may have still been salvageable, with lots of work and spare parts, but on this world, spare parts were clearly unavailable and any work therefore just a waste of time.

Many other individual objects, however, seemed to have survived both the crash and the fire. To his immense relief, one of them was the mobile solar charger: that took care of Deefore’s needs. In addition to the unexpected sentimental connection, the astromech and his databanks were now his only link to civilisation, his only proof in this forested, pre-industrial land that his life experiences were valid and true.

The charger would also take care of his blaster energy packs. That was no less a relief: he hated being vulnerable; it was bad enough that his small hosts certainly were. It would be a poor repayment of their hospitality if he proved nothing but a liability in danger.

Next order of business: food and drink. His water bottle had cracked in the crash. He did find three ration bars that were only lightly scorched. Still, if he could find anything else to eat around here, and the pie last night had been more than promising, he’d much prefer to save those for emergencies.

His catalogising of the damage and salvage was interrupted by the sound of – was it hooves? It proved to be so. Into the clearing rode a human man on a brown-coloured equine, leading another, grey one, by the reins.

“Good morning,” the man said, dismounted, and led both the horses towards Kanos.

He was of a height with Kanos, a pleasant fact after the small Moles and the tall Tree, and similarly leanly muscled, though much of his figure was obscured by the loose belted tunic he was wearing. He had a sheathed sword at his left side – an honest-to-goodness long, straight blade, with a rather ornate yet well-worn hilt and crossguard that suggested perhaps an heirloom – and a similarly sheathed dagger or knife at his right side. Kanos saw no particular danger in his approach; those weapons were simply the man’s low-tech versions of the ordinary carry blaster you could see on many beings in the Outer Rim.

He had short dark hair and brown eyes, aquiline nose, and a tan shade to his skin that may have been an inborn trait and may have been simply the result of spending time in the sun – it was hard to say with his features. He was, Kanos guessed, about as old as him or a little younger, although that, too, was rather hard to tell with his features, at once young and very mature. His face was open and friendly, but his eyes were shrewd, despite the obvious differences in appearance somehow reminiscent of Leia Organa-Solo, and Kanos concluded that the man was almost certainly no fool.

“My name is Peridan. I am here to take a look at your arm. And to see what we can do about you,” the man said as he bound his horses to a bush and turned to Kanos.

“Kenix Kil,” Kanos said, and then belatedly recognised the man’s name from the conversations the day before. “Lord Peridan?”

“That would be me, yes,” the lord said. “I assume this is Deefore?”

Deefore replied with a trill.

“Ah. This will be somewhat more complicated, I’m afraid I cannot understand,” Lord Peridan observed.

“He simply said ‘Yes’. I think,” Kanos explained.

Lord Peridan nodded and reached into one saddlebag for a bottle and washed his hands with a clear liquid with the unmistakable scent of alcohol. From what he had seen so far, Kanos frankly would not have expected that degree of medical knowledge on such a wayward world. Nor would he have expected that degree of medical knowledge from someone who was not a medic.

“Do you not have medics for this?” he asked in surprise.

“Not as such, no,” Lord Peridan replied as he expertly removed the bandage and checked the wound. “At least not any who would be available right now and know enough about humans. I do know what I am doing.”

“I can see that, I was merely wondering...”

“About a lord who can do this?” the man shrugged. “I’d be a fool not to learn anything that can help my people, Mr Kil. And one does not always have the luxury of a medic.”

Kanos nodded numbly. That he did know all too well. But even on a backwater world, it still surprised him that a lord would have that experience as well and apply himself to rectifying the situation.

“It looks clean and safe. Lindendell knows what’s what, too. How does it feel?”

“I definitely feel it, but I’ll take that as a good sign.”

“Yes, I suppose at this point it is. Well, I’ll change the bandage. I would like you to go with me to my house so that I can keep an eye on it. You should definitely go easy on that arm for a while – stretch your muscles too much and it will pull on the wound and re-open it.”

“You do not mind putting me up?” Kanos asked while Peridan suited action to words and re-bound his arm with fresh bandages. “I’m afraid I cannot repay you; I do not know what currency this world uses but it’s bound to be different from what I have, and – and most of my things perished in the fire.”

“Will you mind me putting you to work in exchange?” Lord Peridan shrugged. “Obviously nothing strenuous, so maybe some help in the kitchen for now. If you want to stay beyond that, we can discuss further options when it comes to it. Did you say this world? You come from a different one, then. I thought so.”

“And you would trust a complete stranger like me?”

Peridan’s keen dark eyes were focused on his face now. Kanos could almost taste the lord’s consideration.

Nothing to see here, he thought. Just a stranded traveller. It’s not even a lie.

The man’s mouth quirked, as if he could hear his thoughts.

“I was a complete stranger once. Welcome to Narnia, Kenix Kil,” he said and offered him his hand.

Kanos took it, wondering what the kriff he was getting himself into.

Chapter Text

Chapter 2

Time Is Rolling Lazily and the Dam Is Giving Way

(Narnia, 6-7 years after the Battle of Anvard)

Kil swiped droplets of sweat from his forehead. The year resided firmly in its autumn part, but the sun was still powerful in the hours around noon. And even though Lord Peridan was keeping Kil on strictly easy duty in deference to his injured arm, “easy duty” during the hurried pre-winter preparations in Stormness Vast fields did not mean he did not do his share of physical work - it simply meant he did more walking and carrying of lighter loads, like bringing the workers’ lunches from the house in a large basket fitted up as a backpack, rather than digging the tubers (they called them potatoes here) and hefting up the full sacks like the other workers. The region was all hills and mountains, and in the low-tech world that the country of Narnia lay on, that meant both that basically everything in the fields had to be done by hand, and that the most sophisticated means of transport was riding a horse or a horse-drawn cart. When the work took place in one of the fields closer to the house, like right now, Kil was relegated to his own two legs.

Kil had, at first, felt it a bit of an insult to his qualifications to be sent as a helping hand into the fields. He had grown up on a farm, and had left that life behind long ago. On the other hand, though, he understood that in his current state of injury he could not be fully relied on as a man at arms, and he owed pretty much everything he currently had to Lord Peridan. So he did not feel it was his place to raise any objections. And then he found out that Lord Peridan himself was toiling away in the fields like any other worker, working possibly even harder than any other worker, and after that realisation Kil was absolutely sure it was not his place to raise any objections.

One of the things he quickly realised in his first weeks there was that Narnia was a very diverse country, possibly more so than any other place Kil had ever been in, which was saying a lot in comparison to both Coruscant and the Outer Rim. Narnia had a seemingly never-ending range of sentient species of all sizes (with a lot of them actually smaller than humans), shapes and colours. It also meant that the variety of lunches Kil was entrusted with was wide - and it took him quite some time to learn to understand which of the workers preferred which foods. The fact he was not familiar with some of the foodstuffs certainly did not help. The only beings he was fairly sure about were the dwarfs - small-statured, wiry, sturdy humanoids - who ate much the same things as humans, although they all seemed to be particularly fond of eggs and mushrooms. But some of the avians preferred solely grain-based diets while others were into insectoid meals similar to what the Moles ate; and the other mammalians were equally varied in their tastes. Some of them could get quite forceful in their complaints if he got it wrong. Centaurs in particular quickly became a terror of his supply runs just because they ate so much - and while they were not so loud in their complaints, they were capable of making extremely pointed comments.

Lord Peridan himself was, in comparison, a great relief to cater to because he would eat just about anything and did not seem to mind one bit when Kil accidentally gave him something the housekeeper had not meant for him.

As he bent down again to sort through the remaining packets in the basket, Kil heard the chattering of a group of some of the smaller people behind himself, and caught his name. He turned around, fearing he’d got it wrong yet again; but this time, their chatter and their gazes seemed in fact quite friendly, if still rather intense.

“You’re the right kind of human,” one of them piped up excitedly.

“What?” he asked, completely flabbergasted by such a proclamation - whatever were they getting at?

“You’re like Lord Peridan, you turn brown, not red,” another informed him cheerfully.

His Lordship burst out laughing and Kil flinched involuntarily.

“They’re referring to a predecessor of yours,” Peridan said. “The sun did not agree with him. He did not agree with the sun. He complained that he had not signed up for this. He burned and peeled and after one season he slunk off to shadier prospects at Cair Paravel. I understand he makes a mediocre royal clerk, which is still an improvement, so hooray: all’s well that ends well.”

Kil had begun to understand that most humans here in the north of this world were fair-skinned and fair-haired (although dwarfs, in contrast, tended to have browner skin and black or bright red hair), so one such human suffering such fate when working outdoors was not too surprising. Lord Peridan with his dark hair and eyes and easily tanned skin was something of an outlier and even Kil's (in his own estimation perfectly average and boring) brown eyes had been something of a sensation among the more excitable small non-humans.

Cair Paravel, Kil already knew, was the capital, where the four kings and queens of Narnia resided.

He was rather taken aback at the open sarcasm in Lord Peridan’s recounting of events, but as it turned out...

“Good riddance, I’d say, though I certainly don’t envy Their Majesties having to deal with him,” one of the dwarfs, Rogin, said ruthlessly, and the rest of the workers nodded and bobbed their heads in agreement.

… perhaps said sarcasm was in fact still a much lighter recounting than the events warranted. Kil was very glad for his habit of keeping his thoughts to himself right now - he could have so easily started off on the wrong foot here. And then he offered: “I grew up on a farm.”

“I knew it,” Rogin said smugly. “Unlike that mealworm, you have the air of a fellow who knows the right end of a hoe from the wrong one.”

“I would not be so sure about that,” Kil said cautiously.

His Lordship grinned at him.

“You did not start your first day in the fields by complaining that the soil is dirty, so you’re definitely an improvement,” he said.

“... where did he grow up?” Kil ventured to ask, his courage bolstered by the air of easy teasing Lord Peridan was exuding. He still mentally crossed all his fingers that he was not crossing a line; but he did not seem to have done so.

“Archenland,” His Lordship said. “He was the grandson of old friends of Lorna’s; but by the end, even Lorna was fed up with him.”

Lorna was the housekeeper and main cook; she often went off on a tirade but Kil had to admit that if she could put up with all the dietary requirements in this group of sentients, she had to in fact have extraordinary forbearance.

* * *

“Kil, would you mind terribly sleeping in the Hall for the time being? I think we should save the firewood as much as possible.”

It would be a mind-boggling request in any other country as heavily forested as the mountains on the southern border of Narnia. But one of Kil’s first acquaintances in Narnia was a Tree. He had learned very quickly that there was a bit more than met the eye to the forests in Narnia.

And so he only nodded and said “not at all” when Lord Peridan made that request of him a week into full-blown, snowy winter.

The Hall was the largest room in the house where theoretically banquets and balls could be held and the Lord might eat with his guests. In practice it served all kinds of purposes, including everyday meals with all the servants, because Lord Peridan was a very pragmatic individual who seemed to think that setting a room aside for special occasions was a bad use of space. Stormness Fast, his house (even though it was fortified, castle somehow seemed too generous a word, and indeed no one really used it), perched as it was between hills and mountains, did not exactly abound with spacious rooms. The Hall was by far the largest, most practical indoors space available for many activities – ranging from putting together the layers of Lorna’s patchwork quilts to weapons practice .

Moving Kil’s whole bed into the Hall would therefore not have been practical at all; it would be a bedroll for him now. Kil did not particularly  mind. It was true that he had personally served the Emperor, with all the prestige that had come with it; but it had also come with a high degree of self-sacrifice. And he had since then, by necessity, learned to make do with very little. Combining the two habits was not a particularly difficult leap to make for him by now; and in his short time in Narnia, he had quickly learned that Lord Peridan never asked for anything without good reason.

He did not mind it if it did indeed mean the household could save on firewood. The Hall, heated by a large fireplace in the middle of each of the lengthwise walls, was being kept warm in either case; the fireplace in Kil and Deefore’s small room was actually probably too large for it and keeping the fire going there was indeed comparatively more wasteful. Kil was one of only four humans in the house, next to Lorna, the elderly cook and housekeeper, and her husband Mertel, the – well, it was hard to say what exactly Mertel’s position was called, since he did so many things, but he was definitely the head servant who made sure things around the manor got done and got done well. And Lord Peridan himself, of course. The rest of Lord Peridan’s servants all had furry and feathered coats of their own, being members of various other mammalian and avian species, so the winter cold bothered them less than the humans; besides, the majority of them lived somewhere nearby rather than in the house itself.

And then there was Deefore.

When Kil had promised his service to Lord Peridan, the man had turned to Deefore, and had asked him what he wanted to do. And Kil had felt ashamed because he had not given any thought to where did Deefore fall in all of this. Deefore was his droid, he would follow where Kil went, end of question.

But Lord Peridan had asked, and Deefore had trilled an answer, and even though the end result was the same – Deefore had followed – there was a world of difference. And it had become even more pronounced over the number of weeks they had spent in Narnia so far. Deefore was no longer relegated to regular astromech tasks, Kil did not wipe his memory because of course he wanted to retain access to every scrap of info possible, and Deefore had quickly developed a personality .

Kil suspected it was one the droid never would have developed had he had Kil himself for his sole companion. It was far too friendly and eager a personality for that.

“I’ll be sleeping in the Hall now,” he told the droid. “This room will get cold. I’m not sure what your ideal operational temperatures are; it probably won’t get cold enough to bother you so you could keep this room for yourself.”

Deefore responded with emphatic whistling and whirling of his dome, and demonstratively grabbed Kil’s pillow and made to follow.

“Or that. Thanks, pal,” Kil smiled at him, and Deefore warbled contentedly.

They walked through the house together, and met Lord Peridan with his arms full of blankets at the doors to the Hall.

“I’ll join you if you don’t mind,” the lord said.

Kil blinked at him.

“Not at all,” he said.

It was a surprise but – he did not mind. Sleeping in a large room together with other people was something he had not done in some time, but it was familiar and comforting, in ways he had forgotten, forgotten to allow himself to think about. That first night in the Hall, talking into the darkness, with Lord Peridan’s funny, snarky observations about some of the people who had feasted in that same room, and with Deefore’s warbles of laughter (laughter from a droid! - but there was no mistaking it for anything else), Kil fell into the soundest sleep he had experienced in years.

* * *

Thus Kil quickly found out that communal sleeping in the Hall, with its night-time conversations and the reassuring sound of another person’s breath always present, was something to like about winter in Narnia.

But he was also quickly finding out, to his growing displeasure, that one of the things to dislike about winter in Narnia was that there was a limited number of things a trained guardsman could do day by day in a snow-covered fortress at a decidedly friendly border. Because Narnia’s border with Archenland to the south really was decidedly friendly and governed largely by the two coutries’ unusually open relations. And thus there was very little for a man at arms to do.

Not that Lord Peridan was not willing to train with swords every day now that Kil was determined to get his arm back up to scratch and to prove useful in his new avocation as one of the retainers at Stormness Fast. Kil was, in his turn, teaching the lord all the unarmed combat techniques the Royal Guardsmen had been expected to learn. Peridan was a quick study, although he scoffed at all the more performative aspects of many of the martial arts like Echani – something Kil was rather in agreement with. Peridan was a pragmatic individual; he understood very well that when it came to a fight outside the confines of a training salle, your opponents did not bother with the niceties. His own sword-fighting lessons reflected that mindset, too: he would teach Kil the proper forms, and then mercilessly upend his expectations in the ensuing bouts. Kil did not mind; he was used to that sort of teaching.

And yet the lessons Peridan drilled into him were very different from the lessons Kil had learned in the Squall or in the wilds of Outer Rim. In one sense, they were considerably more selfish – the main objective seemed to be to come out alive and clear of wounds, whereas the Academy at Yinchorr had always taught him that his life and health were of less import than the safety of the Emperor or the success of the mission – but simultaneously they were far more selfless: the focus was not on utterly crushing the opponent but simply on rendering them ineffective. Sometimes that would still mean delivering a killing blow. Sometimes it would not. In the context of defending Narnia and its inhabitants, sometimes convincing the opponents that they were better off as allies was the best, most desirable outcome.

But those lessons still accounted only for a fraction of the day. The necessary day-to-day business of watching out for potential trouble in the region was sufficiently covered by beings far better suited to the wintry conditions who also happened to have better hearing and sense of smell than humans. And Kil was quickly finding out that when all was said and done, the lord of the manor did not actually need him for much right now. Peridan was far less inclined than Palpatine to bring a bodyguard with him everywhere. (And yet this mere human with low-tech weaponry dealt on a daily basis with Beings he would stand no chance against – Bears for one might give even Wookies a challenge; and Kil was very grateful that Flo, the Lynx who was one of his fellow guards-persons, was a softie at heart, since a single swipe of her claw was not something to be treated lightly. Whereas Palpatine as a Sith Master could have defended himself easily even barehanded...) So for the most part Peridan went about his daily tasks unaccompanied just like the day they’d first met, and Kil’s duties continued to be quite different from what he’d once trained for. He was now mostly helping out with keeping the Hall warm and with carrying heavy loads for the kitchen and stables. But for a good number of hours in the day he was still left hanging because the household at Stormnes Fast had done just fine for many years before his arrival.

Lord Peridan had at first decided that Kil should learn to read and write in the manner of this world. But that was something Kil soon got the basics of under his belt – it turned out to be a variant of High Galactic, not so surprising in retrospect considering everyone spoke a dialect of Basic, and he was used to the necessity of absorbing new info and skills quickly. Besides, Lord Peridan was far more of a bookworm than Kil was to begin with. So the lord not only could, and did, do perfectly fine for himself whenever he needed to deal with some reading and writing; he in fact learned Aurebesh (and with it also communication with Deefore by help of Deefore’s little display screen) just as fast as Kil learned Narnia’s writing system. (Peridan still frowned at the messiness of Kil’s handwriting, though, and insisted that he write a little each day to improve on that. Kil usually did so by writing down his tasks for the day or week, even though they had a tendency to change on him unexpectedly.)

Then Kil discovered Stormness Fast’s stash of bows and crossbows and got out into the snow to train with those; but that, too, proved far too simple to occupy his undivided attention for long. Peridan, it turned out, was quite hopeless with a bow, but a more than decent shot with a crossbow. Although Kil was determined to improve his range with the former - if only to balance out his lord's shortcoming - Peridan insisted he take it easy and slow because it could still put too much strain on his arm right now.

It was the early dark and the encroaching inevitability of being stuck in one place with this unaccustomed boredom for at least three months that led to Kil sitting in the Hall in the evenings and doing nothing else but closely watching Lorna at her sewing, absorbing her techniques.

It was an illuminative, contemplative thing to do for him. Lorna preferred to do her patchwork by hand, even though she did have a sewing machine – which was, just like about any other piece of fine metalwork in Narnia, of dwarf make. Even Kil’s new sword and dagger had been made by dwarfs (and both blades were by far the best he had ever had a chance to handle). Peridan’s own sword was not – Kil had learned that Peridan did not originally come from Narnia and the sword had come with him; that solidified Kil’s conclusion that the sword was an heirloom, because otherwise the pragmatic lord would have no doubt opted for the incomparable dwarf craftsmanship.

Kil had another, more personal reason to be grateful for the dwarfs’ affinity to all kinds of skilled crafts including the few examples of Narnian machinery: if Deefore happened to get damaged, Kil hoped a dwarf would be able to help repair him. Right now, though, Deefore was quite happy to trundle around the ground floor levels of the house doing simple tasks like handing Lorna her sewing shears; so the danger of damage to him was thankfully low.

It took Lorna all of two such quiet evenings to shove a needle, a spool of thread, and a stack of paper pieces and colourful fabric patches at Kil, and say:

“Give it a try.”

“I’ve never sewn anything,” Kil protested.

“That’s an oversight,” Lord Peridan remarked matter-of-factly from the other side of the table where he was doing his bookkeeping.

Knowing Lord Peridan at least as much as he did by now, Kil was not altogether surprised by that comment. Peridan definitely believed in having a well-rounded skill set. Kil also realised that his lord fully expected him to rise to the challenge, not because it was a challenge but simply because it was the prudent thing to do.

So he did give it a try.

It proved far harder than it looked to thread the needle, to catch the thread in the fabric and do so neatly, to get the needle to push through fabric exactly where you wanted, to keep your stitches and thread tension even.

He got absorbed in it, and before he knew it, Lorna was pressing him to stop for the day because it was getting late. She looked on at his startled surprise with a knowing smile.

He was, simply put, hooked.

There was the technical aspect to it, the familiar drive to get it right and master the technique, in this case to match the pieces perfectly with neat tiny stitches as quickly and smoothly as possible. But there was also the unaccustomed creativity of putting the pieces together to create a new whole, the fascinating world of possibilities that opened up before him when he looked at Lorna’s previous creations and saw how you could use endless configurations of simple shapes and colours to create patterns and pictures, to create order out of chaos, richness out of scraps, and personality out of a default template. It pleased something deep in him: the part of him that had so far rejoiced in perfectly executed plans was suddenly thriving on this boundless creativity, and could not be deterred by the fact it took time. In fact, he relished the time spent; in his situation it was just what he needed. It was strangely meditative, something he had never had the patience for before. He found meditation in itself disturbing. Instead of clearing his mind it often took him into places he preferred avoiding, completely defeating the purpose in his estimation; but when he lost himself in patchwork, it soothed his mind and yet it also had a practical, tangible result. And there was even more to it, which he was seeing all around himself: it could bring brightness, warmth and cosiness to stark stone and wood chambers and create a home .

Because Stormness Fast definitely was a home to these people he now lived with, and now that he was creating something more lasting that just a day’s firewood stack, he was beginning to see it that way, too.

* * *

“And you could use it for Christmas gifts,” Lorna told him one day when he was sewing and she was instead knitting, something in blue and gold wools she had promised him would be a new winter hat for him. (A month ago he would have protested the lack of tactical foresight in a colourful hat in a snowy landscape; now he was rather enjoying that splash of colour in the monotony of white and dark.)

“Christmas... gifts? What---?”

“Oh my goodness,” Lorna looked at him in shock that seemed disproportionate to a mere cultural difference. “You do not have Christmas where you come from, do you? You poor dear.”

He had observed that Lorna had strong mothering instincts. She was constantly warring between treating Lord Peridan with more deference than he ever demanded himself, and an urge to treat him like a son – which ultimately often culminated in the urge to berate him when he was doing something she perceived he should not be doing as the Lord of Stormness Vast. With Kil, she must have found it far simpler: she had almost immediately settled on treating him as a mother (or grandmother?) would. As disorienting as it often was to him to suddenly find himself fussed over as if he were twenty years younger than he really was, it also meant that he was well taken care of, which was frankly a huge comfort after he had shed and lost almost everything he had ever had to his name. At the time he’d arrived at Stormness Fast, the sum total of his material belongings had fit into one of the two saddlebags of his borrowed horse. It was still more than he had had immediately after the massacre of...

... well. That way lay most of the reasons he still sometimes woke up in cold sweat and occasionally lost track of time. But no one batted an eye at it here. Kil suspected that Peridan, being a member of a class expected to defend the land and its people in this world, almost certainly had a couple of painful memories of his own tucked away.

But Lorna’s mothering tendencies also meant she was quite happy to explain things to Kil whenever she found out he was lost. That, too, was a relief, even though Lorna’s explanations could get quite convoluted because she often had trouble understanding just how much of a cultural divide lay between them. (He usually got much more concise and to-the-point explanations from His Lordship, but it did not sit well with Kil to be asking him about everything .)

And so they passed that particular evening with her telling him about decorated trees, about gifts, and all kinds of festive food, and spending time with your family, and Father Christmas. (He really did not understand the part about Father Christmas but kept mum about it, concluding it could wait for another time.)

The whole thing seemed a world removed from his own experiences. And, in truth, of course it was. When had he last had anyone to celebrate with? When had the Empire ever let anyone just spend time with family and friends, with no strings attached? Nearly all holidays had been public, nearly all time he had ever had had been permeated by the Empire’s presence. He had lost touch with his parents after shipping off to Yinchorr. Even before then, they had already drifted far apart, differing as they had in their views on the government. Hoping to avoid Imperial indoctrination had been the whole reason his family had moved from Coruscant to the farm on Chandrilla when he had still been little. The attempt had been in vain: the Empire had done its best to maintain its presence in all schools, and in the process of his teenage rebellion, Kir Kanos had succumbed to the Empire hook, line and sinker. Uncle Sam, now just a very vague memory of a protective presence from his childhood, had left the Core entirely first. His parents themselves had followed and vacated their Chandrilla home when Kir had been selected for the Royal Guard training. He had never heard from them again; and being what he had been then, he had not even regretted it.

He did regret it now.

Lorna could not know why he grew so sombre, but given his current situation she seemed to understand all the same, laying her hand on his in a gesture of motherly comfort.

In that moment, he determined to give her and Mertel all the respect he had failed to give his own parents.

He forced himself to smile at her, knowing full well that the mark Darth Vader had left on his face meant he could never again smile as he used to as a child.

He was suddenly realising that the Empire had done far more harm to him than he had ever given it credit for.

That evening, as they laid down on their bedrolls, Lord Peridan seemed to sense his distress, and instead of his usual amusing anecdotes launched into a hopeful story about Aslan, the Lion god who had created Narnia, and the hundred years of winter he had broken in joyous spring.

Kil did not share Peridan's beliefs, but he was grateful for the change in tone.

Chapter Text

Chapter 3

I’ve Been Waiting Since Time Immemorial

(Narnia, 6-7 years after the Battle of Anvard)

Christmas had been a long time coming, the household all aflutter with preparations for weeks, even before Kil had learned of the full reason for the activity. And yet at the same time it came almost too soon. He had eventually been employed in the cutting and arrangement of evergreen branches for decorations all over the house, and with helping Lorna in the kitchens, and with helping prepare trestle tables for the expected guests - the wooden parts were years old and needed checking and some repairs; and that on top of carrying the bales of hay to feed the horses and bringing the wood and water in, as he had been doing before. He had in the end been suddenly so busy he had barely had enough time to finish the gifts he wanted to give his new friends.

(The thought of friends was strange now, and rather terrifying, and yet he could not think of any other word to describe the group of amicable acquaintances he had acquired over this couple of months in Narnia.)

And then the morning of the day before Christmas arrived, when most things were ready and Lorna had shooed Kil out of the kitchen immediately after he had entered “because now it was time for finer cooking he had no skills for” in her estimate; and Lord Peridan told Kil:

“Dress up for snow, we’re going to visit some people. Please ask Mertel to prepare the sleigh and I’ll pick the baskets from the kitchen. I think it’s safer if you don’t get under Lorna’s feet now.”

That last he said with a grin.

Kil was surprised by this development, but his had never been to ask why.

The sleigh was a rather rudimentary wooden affair pulled by a draft horse. It was better suited to carrying cargo than people (they had used it to bring in all those evergreens), and Lord Peridan had mentioned baskets from the kitchen, so Kil began to suspect there would be gifts of food involved.

There were. But it was not the only thing the sleigh was to be used for.

“Wood first, baskets last?” Lord Peridan asked, pondering, of no one in particular.

“Baskets first if you want to crush what’s inside,” Mertel said, and Peridan laughed.

“Good point,” he said.

And so they piled the sleigh high with a good chunk of the firewood they had been so carefully saving in the past weeks, and tied a tarp over it to secure it, and then added the baskets of food on top, with Mertel throwing in the lanterns with glass in all four of their sides and candles inside (an addition welcomed with an appreciative nod by Lord Peridan), and with another securing and protective layer of tarp on top of the baskets. And then, finally, Peridan and Kil set off into the snow.

It lay on high, and while the main road from the fortress was being maintained, as clear and smooth as possible, they soon branched off onto a narrower path. That was more difficult to navigate, winding, sometimes rather dangerously, between trees, rocks, and steep snowy slopes, and in places with the snow tamped down to a layer of slippery ice. It made it abundantly clear why the lord had elected not to ride on horses and instead to walk beside their draft animal, or one before and one behind the sleigh in the more dangerous places, although it took them longer to reach their destination – or, as it turned out, destinations.

They visited a number of dwellings of various kinds - most fairly rudimentary - and were welcomed with warm surprise, as they distributed the food and the firewood to people who had fallen sick, or had lost a bread-winning family member in the past year, and did not quite have enough food or firewood of their own.

Peridan checked on each and every bedridden patient's health, and made sure their baskets included food that would help them regain their strength.

Each person tried to invite them in for tea, and each was gently rebuffed by Peridan with a merry "We have more visits to make today! But you're welcome to come visit tomorrow!" (The latter in those cases when their hosts were not ill.) Several times, they were at least gifted some biscuits, or other snacks of preference (not all of which were entirely suitable for humans, but these proofs of hospitality were harder to decline).

It was like nothing Kil had ever done before, and he felt quite awkward at first; although soon the simple duty of carrying the loads, and the simple joy of the people they presented them to, overcame his embarrassment.

His and Lord Peridan's at first mostly silent walks between the dwellings slowly but surely drifted into conversation. At first, they were just discussing the people they met, with Peridan explaining their circumstances; but as the day drew on, the sky darkened and stars started blinking into their nightly presence above their heads, the topics became more personal.

“Is it really bad if you don’t have a Christmas gift for someone?” Kil asked ponderingly.

“It probably depends on the someone,” Lord Peridan shrugged, “and how close you are. But I’m sure people will understand in your case.”

“I actually do have something for almost everyone; but I still haven’t figured out what one can give to a Tree ,” Kil admitted. “I could not think of anything I could make for Cersis.”

Peridan laughed.

“And here I thought I had it hard, coming up with gifts for kings and queens every year,” he said. “Living in Narnia is never boring; there’s something new every day.”

Only a couple of weeks before, facing the prospect of months in a remote, snow-covered fortress, Kil had thought the exact opposite. But he could see Lord Peridan’s point of view now; and the fact that Narnia was ruled by four siblings was just one of the many ways in which it kept surprising him.

“Perhaps you could tell her a story,” Peridan suggested.

“I’m nowhere near as good a storyteller as she is,” Kil protested.

“But she’s not just a storyteller, she’s a story collector ,” Peridan pointed out. “She’ll enjoy it, no matter how it is told.”

Suddenly he stopped and raised his eyes to the starry sky.

“Speaking of stories...” he said.

“My lord?” Kil turned back to him; he had gained a couple of steps before he realised Peridan was standing still.

“There is an old story from another world being told around this time of year,” Peridan said, and then he slipped into a slightly different tone of voice as he recounted the story. “A rightful king was born in a barn and laid in a manger because his parents were travelling and there was no room for them anywhere else. When he was born, a star emerged in the sky; and in a faraway land, wise men – some accounts say there were three of them, but then three is a neat storytelling number – saw the star and realised what it meant and set out on a journey to pay their respects to the new king. After a long journey, they came to the capital city, where there was a different king in his palace. But no one in the city had heard of a newborn king. So they went on to a small town, and found the child in the manger, and gave him their precious gifts worthy of a king.”

He spoke with a degree of reverence Kil was still not quite used to from the shrewd lord with his rather snarky sense of humour. And somehow the very brief story left Kil wanting for more. But Peridan kept looking up at the sky, and stopped there.

“So that's the end of the story?” Kil asked, carefully.

“Not really, but that’s the gist of what is being told this time of year,” Peridan shrugged.

“But it does not make sense. That’s not how stars work. And why would the baby still be in the manger after the journey – why, for that matter, would the baby be king...”

Peridan turned back to him with a boyish grin that somehow made him look about half his age and was strangely at odds with the solemnity of his speech.

“Old stories passed down through generations don’t always make perfect sense, Kil,” he said. “The point is, I think, that the wise men followed the right star, and found the king, and saw beyond the seeming. And maybe also the fact that it’s not palaces and all that nonsense that make a rightful king. The king in the palace, you see, went on to kill innocents; but the king in the manger went on to feed the hungry and heal the sick, and he spoke with those no one else wanted to have anything to do with, and ceaselessly worked to help everyone.”

“Oh.”

And suddenly the story did make perfect sense. Not in the details, but here, now, being told by Lord Peridan, in this moment under the stars, with everything they had done that day.

“So it is about seeing beyond the seeming,” Kil ventured.

The follow-up to the story nagged at him. Went on to kill innocents. Worked ceaselessly to help everyone. It was as simple as that, wasn’t it? The perfect way to describe the differences between the two shadows looming over his past actions, Palpatine and Luke Skywalker. If only one were a wise man who could see as much right from the start, instead of well past the end.

“When I first came to Narnia years ago, King Edmund saw something in me even I did not. Narnia opened my eyes to many things – including that story,” Peridan replied.

I see myself in you was left unsaid; but Kil felt it, and his conscience both protested against and desperately clung to the notion.

If only because there was something utterly fascinating and deeply alluring in the way Peridan’s whole countenance seemed to be enveloped with brightness and joy as he went on trudging through the snow. Even half an hour later, when not that far from their final destination he tumbled down a slope, fell into a snowdrift and managed to let out a truly impressive string of curses, surely badly suited to a nobleman of his standing, in the moments before Kil reached him and tugged him out again.

The curses were directed at the treachery of the terrain and Peridan’s own clumsiness rather than at Kil, and the lord laughed again when, back on his feet, he fished in the snow for his green woollen hat. He seemed no worse for wear and in the end more amused than irritated by the episode, and not the least bit concerned by what Kil might think of him.

Kil, for his own part, felt far more like having been hit by a stack of duracrete bricks than the man who had fallen several meters downhill seemed to. He could not remember the last time he had been able to laugh at his own clumsiness. He had for so long striven to be as good as possible at everything he did, to be better than others in everything he did, with the idea that anything but excellence would have dire consequences always hanging over him… that he had entirely lost sight of that aspect of sentience.

Laughter. Unconcerned, joyous laughter without any bite in it.

And only now, seeing the utter lack of concern in the man at his side – the man who, nonetheless, had the presence of mind to have realised weeks ago that the firewood would be needed elsewhere, who had the presence of mind to learn medicine because it might come in handy... Kil suddenly saw with perfect clarity that the way he had lived his life for so long had been deeply skewed in far too many ways.

* * *

Just two weeks earlier, Kil might have brooded, regretted, wished things had been different, any number of self-flagellating habits he was closely familiar with. ("Why did you fail to protect your Emperor?" habit said, even though by now Kil no longer really regretted the direction events had taken in that particular regard.) But the new experience of Christmas somehow did not let him brood.

It wasn't even that he would not have the time for it. With most of the work now finished, or out of his hands, he woke up early the next morning and did have, in fact, the time to go out and look at the snowy landscape, and reflect.

But there was so much giddy anticipation in the air all around him, and that was not an atmosphere conductive to pondering the past. Standing on the battlements, armed with a mug of hot tea sweetened with honey, he instead wondered whether his gifts would be well-received.

Then the sight of Lord Peridan sweeping the fresh cover of snow off the road reminded him that he still had some finishing touches to do on his gift for his benefactor, and he rushed inside to correct that glaring oversight.

Visitors started trickling in in time for lunch. Lunch was a very simple affair - Lorna had made two huge pots of soup, one a meat broth thick with potatoes, root vegetables and mushrooms, the other a creamy green pea soup, and everyone got a bowlful of their preference and a slice of bread to go with it. The main event would come in the evening. But these were the shortest days of the year and evening would come soon.

In the meanwhile, they put the final touches to the decorations. Lord Peridan and Mertel emerged from somewhere in the attic with boxes of silvery tinsel, heavier than Kil remembered being used in the wider galaxy since this was truly made of metal. They all helped drape the sparkly garlands over the evergreen ornaments they had put up earlier, and the end result was, even in its relative simplicity and in the sub-par Narnian lighting, easily the most strikingly festive thing Kil had ever seen.

* * *

Kil could be many things as needed; but "life of the party" was not one of them.

He was no stranger to big social gatherings - he had worked in the Imperial Palace, after all - but… well, he had never been a part of them. Never a guest, never partaking of the food and drink offered. Always on alert, standing guard and often also listening in on other people's conversations, since the combination of drink and the faceless anonymity of his armour sometimes made people forget there was a person present, and loosened their tongues more than they'd otherwise allow in the very heart of the Empire.

In retrospect, Kil reflected, sipping on a drink of his own now, that level of official paranoia had never amounted to much. The real Rebels in the high echelons of Coruscant society who truly did wish harm on the Emperor - the two Organa senators, the young Tarkin who in reality had very little in common with her more (in)famous uncle - were never so stupid as to let their guard slip up like that.

Still, old habits died hard, and Kil had always found it easier to listen than to talk.

This was a whole different sort of party. Far more informal, with far less conspicuous display of wealth, what with most of the food coming from the near vicinity, most of the decorations being made of things found in the forest and fields (There was even a whole evergreen tree! Decorated with ornaments made of straw. ), and most of the guests being quite content to wear nothing but their own fur or feathers. And the conversations were very different, too - the inquiries after other people's health and recent experiences were quite genuine, and there was none of the politicking and underhanded posturing Kil was familiar with from his old life. There were still awkward moments, but people were far more inclined to laugh over their faux pas and forget about it in favour of the more pleasant things on offer.

And it all started with the lord of the house, of course. Kil had been aware that everyone respected Lord Peridan; but now that he could observe the reactions to him from many people at once, he realised there was more to it than that. Peridan's people loved him. He put them at ease. They trusted him, trusted that he would keep them safe and take care of them, a trust now clearly honoured and affirmed every time Peridan conversed with his guests.

Basically all the things that Palpatine's propaganda had often proclaimed but the reality of life in the Empire had never lived up to.

The realisation was no longer surprising, the observations he made just fleshing out an existing image. Still, the contrast was striking, even more obvious than the contrast between Palpatine's Empire or the old Imperial Ruling Council, and the New Republic or the current Imperial Remnant. The heritage states that had sprung up after Palpatine's death still had their faults, but this small sector of the universe was free of that which plagued galactic governments.

Even then, Kil could not help but think Lord Peridan would probably do better by the galaxy than most people, if given the chance. The man displayed the unique ability to combine cynical, wary experience with hope, values and honour. That personality cocktail also included - or perhaps even resulted in - a healthy dose of humility concerning Peridan's own abilities. Kil could not really remember having encountered someone like that before; even Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa, for whom he'd developed quite a degree of respect more recently, seemed more… self-posessed? Probably not quite the right word, though, because he would not be able to claim Lord Peridan wasn't. The only person he could think of maybe coming close was Feena D'Asta the second, who had seemed to keep tempering her admittedly forceful personality with the knowledge she was a clone. But Peridan's self-doubts, from what Kil could see, seemed somehow… healthier.

"More eggnog?" Lorna broke into his thoughts, waving the laddle somewhat exaggeratedly; she may have herself had a bit more than she was used to.

Kil considered the offer. The sweet, frothy, creamy concoction was not something he would have opted for if left to his own devices. Lorna's rather tipsy state made him wary; the sweetness and the consistency of the drink probably masked something fairly potent.

"I think I'll pass, thank you," he said.

Lorna shrugged in a "suit yourself" manner, and shoved a tray of roasted poultry meat under his nose instead.

Come to think of it, if he did not want to lose his wits, putting something substantial in his stomach probably wasn't a bad idea right about now.

* * *

He really needn't have worried how his gifts would be received.

All the recipients seemed delighted, their joy and pleasant surprise nearly palpable.

He'd managed to make quilts for all the Moles - that was a reasonably small project, even though he had to stick to a very simple pattern of squares - and they were welcomed with abundant exclamations of admiration that made him blush (a very novel but not unpleasant experience). For the others, he had made various other small patchwork gifts: a bookmark for Flo (with a flower pattern to echo her name) because she loved reading, a bag that Lorna could store her sewing supplies in because her own bag of patchwork pieces was becoming threadbare, another bag for Mertel… for whatever he might choose to store in it…

The book cover for Lord Peridan had seemed the least adequate, and turned out to be perhaps the best received. The man said very little when he unpacked it, but Kil could swear he was on the verge of tears when he saw the images Kil had, inexpertly, worked into the design: a rather simplified version of the coat of arms on the lord's sword (embroidery would probably never be his strength but there was no better way to work in the intricacies of the figures), with the two lions flanking the device reworked into a single one on the back because of the format of the thing and the limitations of Kil's skill. Kil felt a great boulder of worry fall from his heart at Peridan's reaction: clearly, his guess that there was sentimental value attached to the heirloom was a correct one.

Somehow, in the rush to finish all his gifts in time, Kil had never considered the possibility that he might receive gifts himself.

But that was exactly what happened.

Lorna's was not a surprise - it was the blue and gold wool knitted hat. Even then, though, when she handed it to him, wrapped in a cut of printed red cloth that was obviously another part of the gift, he felt a lump in his throat and…

"Come here," she said, and hugged him.

It was exactly what he had needed and something he never would have thought to initiate himself.

Mertel gave him a carved wooden box, very similar to one Lorna had. For his sewing supplies.

Peridan gave him a book. A book of Narnian stories, beautifully illustrated - it cannot have been cheap, and he was left gaping for a couple moments.

"Books really helped me when I came to Narnia," Peridan said. "I hope you'll enjoy this one - and learn from it."

But the biggest surprise was that he got a gift from Deefore .

It was… thoroughly unexpected. Deefore had apparently, with help from someone, retrieved a datapad from the wrecks of the X-Wing, and repaired it . At least as much as possible. It was something he must have done months ago, because by now the ruins of the fighter were long gone, scavenged for materials by the dwarfs.

And now Kil was looking at the couple of holo images that had survived the crash - some even then not quite without damage, grainy and incomplete, but they were still there. Feena and her father at dinner, an image Tav had snapped on the sly. Tav and Kil together in the gardens of the D'Asta's palace, taken with a timer at Tav's insistence. Tav himself, grinning into the camera next to Kil's retrieved X-Wing, this image one Kil had taken himself, overwhelmed with gratitude when Tav had brought the fighter in and Kil had truly realised he was about to leave and might never see Tav again.

It was just the last couple of months before Kil had disappeared into the wilds of the Outer Rim again, just a smattering of memories - but if he could only have a few, these were certainly among those he would have chosen.

People crowded around him, and admired the images, and he found himself telling them, in a rather shaky voice, who Baron and Baroness D'Asta and Tav Kennede were to him. Friends. They were friends.

He got more hugs, and hugged Deefore and promised him a very thorough cleaning in return, which seemed to be just the reaction the droid had been hoping for so it was all good.

And then Kil got more gifts - all of the Moles had a gift for him, small or practical things: a whole pie from Lindendell, a bag of nuts from Thistledown, a box of shortbread biscuits from the older children, smaller, singular things from the smaller children - trinkets they liked themselves and were convinced he would enjoy.

He did, even if mostly because it was the thought that counted.

Myrtle was the last to give him her gift, all excited but giving way to her older siblings - he was not sure whether it was truly out of respect, or because she wanted to be the last one to give him her gift so that no other gift could surpass it.

It was a translucent yellow crystal. It was not a perfect cut and polished gemstone, it was rough and threaded with some impurities; but that only gave it personality. It felt warm in his hand, and even though he had no idea what he should do with it, he also felt that he would definitely treasure it. It was a child’s gift, a Mole’s gift, and it was a gift from a friend, and all those things put together made it special.

“I found it,” Myrtle said. "It was just there, and it wanted to go to you. So I’m giving it to you.”

“It’s beautiful,” Kil said. “Thank you.”

* * *

Myrtle found herself spending quite a lot of time with Kil that Christmas. Later that evening, they stood on the stairs outside the Great Hall to get a bit of fresh air and more quiet away from the crowd inside. There was now a lot of singing, and as much as she enjoyed Christmas songs, and Kil seemed intrigued by them, it was becoming a bit too much for him. It was cold outside, but they each had a cup of mulled apple juice in their preferred size - well, hers was juice, Kil had the cider. 

“If this is Christmas...” Kil said, thoughtfully.

“Of course it is,” Myrtle said. “What else would it be?”

He laughed.

“If this is Christmas, I want more of it,” he said.

“Everyone does!” Myrtle giggled. “But mum says very good things have to be sprinkled carefully in small amounts, like salt, and that’s why Christmas is only once a year.”

“Your mum is no doubt a very wise woman,” Kil said. “Even if, right now, I’m inclined to disagree.”

“Oh, let’s go get more biscuits!” Myrtle begged excitedly.

“Myrtle, you’re going to be sick. You should listen to your mother.”

She frowned at him.

“Now you’re being grown-up,” she complained.

“I am grown-up.”

“Being grown-up does not seem like much fun.”

“Most of the time it isn’t,” he admitted.

“Why do people have to grow up, then?”

Something about him shifted; there was a lot of fondness in the way he was looking at her now, and it warmed her from the inside all the way to the tips of her paws, her ears and her nose, even more than the hot drink.

“Maybe so that they can look out for the next generation of children having fun,” he said. Then he looked up at the starry sky. “Or maybe because the universe is huge and complicated and there is always more to it than you think, and you have to grow up to be able to take it in. I’ve always liked shortbread biscuits, ever since I was a child. I never knew I liked worm pie because I had never had it; but I do like it now. And if it’s like that, I think you are never fully grown-up; you keep growing and growing, just like a Tree, only it’s invisible. Unless you stop yourself, and if you do, that’s not a good thing. I think I’m starting to grow again.”

“ That actually sounds like fun,” she conceded, and huddled closer to him.

He wrapped his warm hand around her, petting her head gently with his thumb, and smiled, the now familiar smile crooked by an old scar. He was still looking up at the stars, and seemed far more at peace than he had before.

“As long as you follow the right star, I’m sure it is,” he said.

* * *

Kil accompanied the Moles on their way home the next day, in order to deliver his gift to Cersis: his favourite childhood story of Uncle Sam's. His own gift from Myrtle had brought the tale to the foreground of his mind: it was a story about a man searching for a magical stone. It had always been their private story, him and Uncle; but if anyone deserved to hear it, surely it was a lady who had protected him and told him meaningful stories just as Uncle had.

He'd demanded it from Uncle so many times as a child, always insisting on the exact same wording, as children are wont to do, that he now found that even after all these years it was still burned into his memory and the words flowed with no great difficulty once he started, though his telling was a bit halting.

Lord Peridan had been right: Cersis was delighted with this gift and did not mind the shortcomings of Kil's delivery.

The main one of those occurred about halfway through the story. For a couple of moments, he completely froze upon the sudden realisation, in another unexpected and unasked for moment of clarity, of what the story was actually about, and what exactly it said about both his childhood and his adulthood:

The protagonist of the story was a Jedi.

And Kil suddenly remembered things he had forgotten, things he had never paid that much heed to because children often just take things as they come.

It all crashed down on him on his way home.

Uncle Sam had come to live with them, injured , when Kil had been two years old, on the very day when the Empire had been proclaimed. He had been so badly injured that he'd always born the marks of it afterwards. Uncle Sam had told him stories that were to remain secret. Uncle Sam had disliked the Empire, and had avoided its notice as much as possible; until it was no longer possible and he had left them for the lesser scrutiny of somewhere in the Outer Rim.

His Uncle was a fugitive from the Empire who had told him stories about a Jedi that the Empire had not wanted told.

His Uncle was a Jedi.

Chapter Text

Chapter Four

Looking for a Brighter Season

The house was almost uncomfortably quiet after the celebration had ended, all the guests had gone home and the majority of the detritus of the day had been cleared away.

The decorations were staying up till the next month, apparently, but without the crowd filling the space, and without all the extra lights, the house suddenly felt large and empty and the winter cold and darkness more present and pressing.

Kil wasn’t one for crowds, exactly, and everyone else seemed to need some degree of decompressing after the excitement as well; but right now he would have still preferred more of it. He would have preferred the hectic activity of the weeks before Christmas or the hubbub of Christmas Day over the sudden quiet that was pressing down on him and bringing the upsetting revelation from Boxing Day into sharp focus.

The realisation of just how much his life had been a lie. The realisation of just how much the Empire he had served had taken from his own family.

Uncle Sam's world had been turned upside down, he had lost everything he had ever known, had been constantly under threat, and with him, his whole family. He had left them to keep them safe more than to keep himself safe, Kil was certain. And Kil had – Kil had thrown that care to the wind, when he had started to serve the Empire.

His complete breach of opinion and contact with his parents suddenly made a lot, lot more sense. He had forced them to choose between him and Sam; he had chosen the very people who had nearly killed his mother's brother. What else could he have expected?!

Palpatine had never found out about Kir Kanos’s uncle; but had he had? The Emperor would have relished the thought that the nephew of a Jedi was now his, mind, body and soul. He still had relished the fact that Kir Kanos was unquestioningly loyal to him, even without the known Jedi connection. Nothing less would have ever done for him.

Nothing less would have ever done for Palpatine. Either you were completely his, or you were dead. Lemet had suffered for his friendship with Kir Kanos, and Kil could not help but think, now, that Lemet’s death was by far his greatest sin. But Palpatine had twisted former Jedi to his purposes, too. Had he actually captured Uncle Sam, the result might not have been death – it might have been worse.

Kil had not thought himself beholden to Palpatine anymore, and yet he had found another thing that severed some last remaining invisible threads of loyalty he had been unaware of.

The Jedi were not what Imperial propaganda had claimed; Kil had personal proof from his childhood of how caring and principled they were. Just how many of his childhood lessons had in fact been Jedi lessons? Just how much of his behaviour had in fact been instilled in him as a legacy of a persecuted culture? He had no idea now, he had no one to ask now, and Uncle Sam still remained for the most part a distant, vague memory. He knew nothing of the man beyond what a child had seen and been privy to – which, in the grand scheme of things, had not been that much. Still, he was now certain some of his recently rediscovered convictions – such as that lives should not be spent carelessly – in fact originated with his uncle’s lessons and stories. That one was, after all, one of the main lessons of his favourite childhood story.

His loyalties had all been based on a lie. The lie that everything that had died with the Old Republic had deserved its fate. Kil had never really known the galaxy before the Empire, the way Baron D’Asta had. He had no grievances with the Old Republic, he had no memories of the Clone Wars, though technically he had lived through them. And his grievances with the New Republic had all been based on lies.

In contrast to that stood the jarring realisation that some of the people who had transferred their allegiance from the Republic to the Empire had genuinely been doing so in good faith and had been equally deceived or equally wilfully blind. A lot of his lessons from Ved Kennede had not been completely bad ones. Tav was still following in his father’s footsteps; he was simply doing so in a changed political landscape. It complicated matters: discarding everything he had learned might be pouring the baby out with the bathwater, as Narnians said.

It probably did not matter directly anymore in his current situation, galactic politics did not matter in Narnia, but…

But it was his whole life. It was everything he had been basing his decisions on up till now. And that was a lot to try and make sense of, to filter out the lies and the truths in all of his experience.

Kil was glad that a couple days later they eventually returned to the routine of companionable evenings in the Hall, and the soothing meditativeness of sewing. He did not feel up to working on his own sewing right now, with ideas thin on the ground; but somehow, helping Lorna with hers did not have the same sour taste to it. The idle chat the others were exchanging was in many ways unnerving, now that he was experiencing a minor existential crisis; but at the same time, it was a relief to see life go on as usual.

The thoughts rattling around in his head were all a bit contradictory, and that really wasn’t helping with the aforementioned existential crisis.

Startlingly, his companions turned out to see right through him, even if they could not begin to guess at the reasons for his mood. Mertel came and sat down at the table with them, which he did not always do. Lorna made Kil a cup of soothing herbal tea. And Lord Peridan…

Lord Peridan did not beat around the bush, and after Kil had just silently sat nursing his cup of tea for a while, forgetting to drink it, Peridan straight up asked:

“What’s wrong?”

“I think my uncle was a Jedi,” Kil blurted out.

Peridan frowned, but it was more an expression of intense focus than one of dismay.

“Knight of the order that the Emperor hunted down?” he asked, obviously making sure he remembered correctly from the snatches of information Kil had shared over the past months.

“Yes,” Kil said quietly.

“Oh my,” Lorna said. “Why…?”

Peridan gave her a raised-eyebrows look suggesting he did have an idea why.

Kil laughed mirthlessly.

“Because the Emperor was a Sith; they are the antithesis of what the Jedi are, what the Jedi stand for. Jedi are peacekeepers, Jedi help people; the Sith only seek power, and they gain power through other people’s suffering. The Jedi would have opposed his ascent to power… And because he could.”

He ran his hand down his face.

“My uncle was a Jedi and I served the Emperor,” he said, tears gathering in his eyes and his throat growing tight. Admitting as much in front of these three was mortifying, but – he could not hold it in. He’d tried for just a couple of days and it was already eating at his sanity. Saying it out loud was a strange relief. It was a relief to put it into words, but the words lent it a terrible substantiality. He had already regretted serving the Empire; this really made it infinitely worse.

“I did not realise he was a Sith. I don’t know why no one realised. His right-hand man was a Sith, quite openly.”

He ran a finger down his face where he knew, and could feel, his scar was.

“This was courtesy of Darth Vader. On the Emperor’s orders. That should tell you how – how brainwashed we were.”

Lorna and Mertel winced. Peridan faced him head on.

“Those who are enslaved are dependent on their slave-masters,” he said seriously. “And if it is all they have ever known, the path of freedom is often not apparent.”

Kil blinked at him.

It wasn’t judgement. It was just an observation that cut straight to the heart of the matter.

“I – yes,” he gulped. “Lion gracious, yes, that is precisely it.”

“You think your uncle was a knight of the Jedi Order,” Peridan said thoughtfully. “I assume it was never spoken of?”

“How could it have been?” Kil shrugged. “He was hiding from the Empire, I’m sure of it now. He came to live with us just as the Empire was proclaimed. I was just old enough to remember that much… or my parents told me as much later, I’m not sure. He was grievously injured; I think they took him for dead, that’s why he survived and escaped pursuit…”

“That must have been dangerous for your family all the same,” Mertel observed; and then before Kil could say anything, he raised his hands, placating. “Don’t get me wrong. Family is family; it was the right thing to do.”

“It was the right thing to do even if he had not been family,” Peridan observed mildly, proving once again that he was a much better man than Kil.

Well, Kil thought rather hysterically, at least my master is a much better man now.

Starting with the fact that Lord Peridan had not demanded a full oath of allegiance from him. Right from the beginning, Kil had thought it a rather foolhardy degree of trust; but he saw the long-term wisdom in it now. A trust enforced was not worth as much as trust earned and nurtured. Lord Peridan was not someone who relished force and power, and he was also someone who valued honesty over appearances. Kil could see the truth of that all around him right now, in this room intended for appearances and used for practical reasons.

Had Peridan asked for an oath at the beginning, Kil might have given it out of pure sense of self-preservation, but he was not sure he would have really meant it. Now? Now he would give it gladly. Even if he was not sure he had anything left to swear on.

And that, he realised, was also why he was sharing all this with Peridan now. He had no idea how to begin facing his memories and epiphanies; but Peridan kept a clear head, saw beyond seeming, could see the whole picture, and knew exactly what to say.

“I remember my mother saying, once, that Uncle Sam was her half-brother,” Kil reminisced. “They did not grow up together, they did not look that much alike, and Uncle was considerably older than her. I guess – I guess that’s why no one actually made the connection between a Jedi and my family.”

His audience nodded thoughtfully.

“He told me stories,” Kil added. “That’s how I’ve realised… The story I told Cersis. As I was telling her, I realised it was a Jedi story, just with the serial numbers filed off.”

“The… what?” Lorna asked, confused, and Kil remembered that serial numbers were not a thing in Narnia.

“He changed out the specifics that would have made clear the hero of the story was a Jedi,” he explained. “Turned it into just a fairy tale for a small boy. But I know more about the Jedi now; I could see it now in the shape of the story alone.”

And that, too, had been a horrible realisation – he knew more about the Jedi now only because he had learned all he could in his attempts to track down Luke Skywalker for his revenge. Although… that had been where he had started to change his mind. Where he had started to realise the Jedi were not what the Empire had said they were, and that maybe, just maybe, he could actually see where Skywalker was coming from.

He was certain, now, that that was because it was where he was coming from.

It was a strange irony. The Jedi would probably say it was the will of the Force. It was still a ridiculous irony that he had come to this realisation now, here, where there were no Jedi.

Lorna was clearly ruminating on things. What eventually came out of her mouth wasn’t at all what Kil had expected, though; she had not focused on the heaviness of his confession at all.

“You say there wasn’t much family resemblance. I’m thinking there must have been some, though. Do you have anything of your uncle in you, do you think?”

Kil shrugged.

“The brown eyes,” he conceded, “and the way I turn brown and not red in the sun, I guess that comes from that side of the family.”

“Just that?” she asked. “That isn’t much, dear – I’m sure there must be more. You don’t look in the mirror much, do you?”

“What? No – why would I…?”

“Men,” Lorna rolled her eyes. “You have no sense for such things. Wait here!”

She rose and hurried out of the room.

Kil exchanged confused looks with the other two men. Well, confused on his part. Peridan was biting his lower lip, almost certainly trying not to laugh. Mertel looked probably more resigned than anything else.

“She’s got a bee in her cap and won’t stop till she gets you exactly where she wants you,” he said, sounding rather amused as well.

“What?!”

Narnian slang was often exactly as opaque to him as his own turns of phrase had to be to them.

Mertel shrugged, now also amused.

“You have no family to speak of, and it’s been bothering her,” he said. “Especially because His Lordship is in a similar predicament, and there aren’t that many other humans here. So of course she’s very curious now that you’ve given her more on that account. She’s a bit of a gossip, you know – not in a bad way, but always curious about other people’s families and suchlike. I think it comes from ourselves living away from our own family.”

“Oh,” Kil said, understanding dawning; although… “Your children are in Archenland, right?”

“Already had their own families and their own lives there, and our job took us here,” Mertel nodded, catching onto why Kil was asking. “It’s not too bad, we could have ended up in some other part of Narnia even further away, but – well, let’s just say she likes having you around.”

Kil suddenly realised that speaking of something like that so openly with their lord sitting right next to Mertel was surreal. It said a lot about Peridan, and it said a lot about Mertel, and above all else it said a lot about the sort of relationship they had, where Peridan being the lord of the manor was somehow less a question of power and more a question of division of labour. Kil had noticed that before; it was not quite the same even with Lorna. Kil supposed that closeness and near equality between the two men had something to do with Mertel being an older, more experienced man with a cool head on his shoulders whose every word carried weight and who knew the workings of the house and land in and out – Kil himself certainly admired him for it.

“I am glad you took me under your wings,” Kil assured Mertel. “Thank you.”

Mertel scoffed dismissively.

“Lord Peridan is right, you know,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Kil wasn’t sure what to say to that. He was especially not sure what to make of being likened to his uncle like that when their situations were so different. He was saved from having to solve that conundrum by Lorna’s arrival.

She was carrying a mirror. Kil could not recall having seen it anywhere in the house, so he had to conclude it was her own, from her and Mertel’s own rooms. She had clearly hurried there and back; she was a bit short of breath. She sat back down at the table across from Kil and placed the mirror in front of him, holding it up before his face.

“Take a good look,” she said, rather imperiously, “and tell me if you see any resemblance.”

Kil’s instant impulse was to dismiss the possibility – surely he would have already known – but then he caught sight of his own face in the mirror and suddenly his thoughts in that direction sputtered and stopped short.

“Ah,” Lorna said, satisfied. “I knew there had to be more.”

Kil blinked back a new unexpected onslaught of tears. He remembered. He remembered what Uncle Sam had looked like.

“I have his eyebrows,” he said, shocked, barely above a whisper. “And cheekbones. And… whatever this is,” he laughed a bit incredulously as he ran a finger along the deep wrinkle of skin and muscle stretching from his nose around the corner of his mouth down to his chin. The chin itself wasn’t his uncle’s chin, the cleft in it the most obvious visual inheritance from his mother instead. The colouring was his father’s. But the overall shape of his face when viewed face-on like this, especially in the dimmer light of Narnia’s low-tech lighting solutions… He really did have the same low eyebrows like his uncle, the same prominent high cheekbones with the sunken cheeks below them, the same lines curving around his mouth. He looked, in fact, far more similar to Uncle Sam than he had expected, considering the relation was only partial.

How have I never noticed? he wondered. On the surface, there was the fact that he had inherited his father’s light skin, brown hair and the shape of the nose and mouth, which made for a considerably different first impression. That side of him was quite apparent in holos, and that was perhaps why it had not jumped out at him as he had viewed the holos Tav had taken, either. But Uncle Sam had been a fixture of his childhood just as much as his parents had been – he should have noticed a long time ago.

And then he realised that a lot of what he was seeing in the mirror now had not been there twenty-five years ago when he last could have easily made the comparison – certainly not so clear to see. He’d always had his mother’s high cheekbones and his father’s longer face; it had not been such a startlingly specific combination. With age, though, and with the hardships he had gone through, his face had been carved down to the angles and lines of his uncle’s face. He’d been first too embroiled with the Empire, then too focused on his revenge, and in the end just too busy simply staying alive both to pay attention and to think about his uncle at all.

Once again, he wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this new revelation. But Lorna – Lorna was clearly delighted by it, and both her husband and Lord Peridan were smiling like it was a good thing.

It had to be a good thing.

Still… it was startling to have visual proof that he, too, was in fact in some sense part of the legacy Luke Skywalker was trying to revive.

Not that he actually was, especially not here and now, but…

But he was, wasn’t he? And it did not matter where he was – Coruscant, Chandrilla, Narnia; he was his uncle’s nephew, and he owed it to the man who had helped raise him to…

To do what, exactly? To be what, exactly?

He needed to figure that out.

* * *

Winter dragged on, a cycle of snow and occasional thaws and snow again. Slowly, barely perceptively, the days grew longer; the sun making its presence known did little for the temperatures, though.

It did make for breathtaking sights every now and then. Kil was stopped short one day when he stepped outdoors and found all the roofs and edges of the buildings around the courtyard lined with big sparkling icicles, bright against the dark wood and an impossibly blue sky. It reminded him, for a moment, of uncle’s stories; something otherworldly, something out of the ordinary, something to be treasured.

It was really quite mundane, just a natural phenomenon, but…

It still was something to be treasured: a bright, sunny sky did not happen every day, and it somehow made everything easier that day.

Funnily enough, even in winter Kil’s tendency to go brown in the sun served him well, because the low sun reflecting off snow had a power all of its own; Mertel only needed two such sunny thaw days to get sunburned.

Mertel grumbled about it good-naturedly as he rubbed some sort of animal fat into his skin, and Kil once again regretted his lack of bacta.

His arm had only just been finally cleared for all hard work. (Though there wasn’t much difference anymore between what he was “allowed” to do now and what he had done at some points during the pre-Christmas rush.) He took up archery again. It was one of the things brightening the monotony. Their stores of food were getting more and more boring and one-sided. The cows’ milk was thin, the eggs few and the egg yolks pale, vegetables and fruits more wrinkly and dry, and becoming a scarcer sight at the table.

It was a novel experience, actually. Kil had had his share of boring, barely scraped together food, of course, and he’d experienced seasons before, of course. But out there in the wider galaxy, in most places, even backwater ones, planetary and interplanetary trade was a matter of course, and no one of such high standing as a lord would have been reduced to relying on stores the way Lord Peridan and his household with him were, in this world without fast transport. Out there, if you were eating poorly, it was because you were poor.

Kil had never appreciated the practice of eating sprouted legumes the way he did now.

“I’m craving oranges,” Peridan remarked once as they were walking along the battlements, reviewing how well the structure was holding up in the wintry conditions. “That is quite unfortunate.”

Then he had to explain to Kil what oranges were – apparently a juicy, tart fruit that grew much further to the south in the country of Calormen where they did not get winters like this, just a rainy season and a dry season.

“It’s an odd country,” Flo said, ears and whiskers twitching. “No Talking Beasts, no other people, just the dumb ones and humans. Can you imagine?”

Bricklethumb, Rogin’s older brother and their main expert in matters of structural integrity of buildings, just grunted in agreement. He was inadvertently demonstrating that dwarfs were a hardier species than humans: where Kil and Peridan had taken care to wear their woollen hats and gloves, Bricklethumb had not bothered, and was just now tapping the wall with his bare fingers, feeling for faults.

“Dumb ones” was Narnia-speak for “non-sentient”; Narnians had latched onto speech as the mark of sentience, which probably said something about all the sentient species in their world. Kil could in fact imagine a country like Calormen, he had known places like that, but – he could also relate to Flo’s judgment of it as being odd. The Empire had not been kind to its non-human inhabitants, but even the Imperial Remnant was easing up on that policy. It was simply not sustainable – and it had been a huge contributing factor in the rise of the Rebellion, when entire races like the Mon Calamari or Bothans gave their allegiance to it. On Chandrilla, in the closed society of the Imperial Army and the Royal Academy on Yichorr, and on the high levels of Coruscant, Kir Kanos had not questioned it; but in the Outer Rim, Kenix Kil had seen clearly just how high a percentage of the Galaxy’s population the policy had actually affected. Now that a good number of people Kil might call friends were non-human, he could not help but wonder how he could have ever thought the Empire’s High Human Culture normal.

“They don’t know Aslan down there, poor things,” Lorna offered her five credits as she climbed up the stairs towards them, with a previously promised warming bottle of hot tea wrapped in rags to preserve its heat.

“And they have slaves,” Flo added, sounding both disgusted and like the very concept was so foreign to her she could barely make sense of it.

Kil nodded in understanding, and gratefully received the bottle of hot tea and took a large gulp, then passed it on to Peridan.

He could not say he knew Aslan; what he could now say with certainty was that if the people around him had met Aslan, and trusted Aslan, he was certainly willing to follow their example.

Bricklethumb kept tapping in a specific area of the battlement and grumbling to himself, sounding dissatisfied. Kil focused on the wall and…

“Try about five inches higher,” he offered. “I think that’s where the crack started.”

Bricklethumb shot him a confused look.

“You think?” he asked. But he did move his fingers as indicated, and then said: “Well I’ll be! You’re right.”

After a moment, he added:

“It will hold for now, but if we get more of the thaws followed by icy days, I’d definitely keep an eye on it. How did you know?"

Kil shrugged, uncertain.

Bricklethumb made a mark of the place and moved on.

* * *

Another thing brightening the monotony was letters.

Actual handwritten letters on paper and parchment.

Lord Peridan was a prolific correspondent. He exchanged letters quite often with the Kings and Queens, acting as their advisor even when he was not present at the court at Cair Paravel. But he clearly also had a number of friends he kept in touch with. Most often, the letters were carried by Birds.

On one memorable occasion, a letter came, instead, with a messenger from down south. Unlike the birds, they did not stay to rest for a while; they had more letters they were taking elsewhere in Narnia.

“Who’s writing this time?” Lorna asked, after Peridan had torn the letter open quite impatiently, standing right in the middle of the hall, and become increasingly engrossed in its contents.

“Lasaraleen Tarkheena,” Peridan replied.

“That woman is trouble,” Lorna said, sounding mildly disapproving and more than a little worried.

“Yes,” Peridan agreed easily. “But not for us, I don’t think. Her latest idea spells trouble for Calormenes, not us. I would be grateful if you would help.”

“So what is it?” Mertel asked.

“A daring idea, but… I cannot in good conscience reject it, even if you do not agree to it. I will have to check with others – Kameen Akrima is also in on the plan, which should help mitigate Lasaraleen’s… everything. And we will need help from the Amateq who I’m sure will help gladly, and I think I’d like Kiolani and Arlimas in on it since spreading the efforts over different countries should make it less politically explosive and less of a danger to Narnia herself… Sorry, I didn’t answer your question, did I?”

“No,” Mertel replied, smiling.

“If you remember my last journey south and the unexpected travelling companions… Lasaraleen wants to make a habit of it.”

“I see,” Mertel said. “Yes, I can see that’s something you can’t very well say no to.”

“What is it?” Kil asked, still none the wiser.

“Oh, right, you were not here yet,” Peridan said. “Slaves, Kil. Escaped slaves. Lasaraleen wants to set up a network they could rely on to take them to freedom. I’m not sure how active she intends to be in the escaping itself on her end but – whichever way they do escape, they need someplace to go where Calormene authorities cannot reach them.”

And that, Kil realised, was indeed exactly the sort of thing Peridan could not say no to. It was exactly the sort of thing Uncle Sam would not have said no to.

“I’m in,” he said decisively. “I don’t know this world well enough to be much help but – I’m in. Tell me what to do.”

Peridan didn’t; he just grasped his hand, gratefully, man to man.

“Thank you, Kil,” he said. “Thank you.”

* * *

For the rest of winter, it remained mostly a matter of anticipation and planning. Lorna and Mertel had also joined the efforts without hesitation; so did Deefore, and once Flo heard about it, even though she had no idea what exactly to do, they could not have dissuaded her if they’d tried. (They did not, of course.)

Meanwhile, Peridan was whittling out details with his friends abroad. The Amateq, Kil found out, were nomadic tribes who lived in the desert south of Archenland, a sort of no-man’s land between that country and Calormen. The Amateq loved their freedom, and disliked the power-hungry and far more regimented Calormenes; it sounded rather like the Outer Rim settlers with their dislike of any kind of state power. And they currently had a particular beef with the Calormenes over an attempted invasion some ten or so years ago. It had been a Calormene attempt to conquer both the Amateq with their hidden oases in the hills in the west of the desert and the two northern countries, in one fell swoop of cloak and dagger shenanigans; and it had fallen through spectacularly because the Amateq, Archenland and Narnia had instead formed a permanent alliance. And personal friendships had formed, ones Peridan was now calling on.

That was something of a running theme, and Peridan’s lessons about gaining allies instead of enemies were beginning to fall into place. Kiolani and Arlimas had come to Narnia, many years ago, with an invasion force from Telmar, a war-like country west of Narnia; being honourable men from the more independently-minded Western Telmar (that, too, seemed to be a running theme), they had made a separate ceasefire and peace treaty with Queen Lucy. And then, ostensibly under its terms, they had brought some stolen goods back to Narnia. From there, alliance had easily transformed into friendship, and friendship was now strengthened by a common goal and mission.

Kil realised he was familiar with the tactic. He’d seen it employed before: it was what the Rebels used to do. It was what Luke Skywalker did, what Leia Organa did, it was essentially why Kil was still alive. It was how the Empire had lost despite the odds. The Empire, and especially the Tarkin Doctrine, had turned allies and subjects into enemies, and the Rebels had successfully chosen to do the exact opposite, to gamble everything on being the better people and help even when they could barely afford to do so.

It was a Jedi tactic, Kil thought, and a Jedi sort of undertaking; after so many years, that thought was no longer hateful or bitter but instead… exciting. He was no Jedi, he was just a man at arms, and things were too serious, with lives at stake, for this to be anything like the sort of glorious fairy-tale of heroism little boys tended to dream of. This was not about him, anyway; he was still just a tool to a bigger purpose. But the excitement was there all the same. As evenings turned into mission planning, into discussions of routes and codes and tactics, of protection details and slipping under people’s guard, Kil could not help but think he had ended up exactly where he had needed to. Someone had to do this, and he could. Everything he had ever been had led him here; the experiences he had regretted now meant he had experience he could use to help others.

For Uncle. For others serving those who would exploit them; for Lemet, to whom his debt was of cosmic proportions.

Outdoors, the world was finally waking up and gradually turning to colour. Days grew longer, warmer, lighter; snow was melting, the first uncertain shots of green grass were showing, early flowers were poking out. Those who hibernated in winter were waking up.

Kil drew Cersis into their plans once she was fully conscious after her winter half-slumber, because her contacts among Trees and storytellers far and wide proved an invaluable network of potentially helpful individuals. The Moles volunteered themselves, too: much like Flo with no clear idea of what to do but with a deep conviction for doing the right thing. Even if all they could do was provide some food, they could do their part, and would.

It was good.

Then, one evening when the wind that blew over the mountains was no longer cold, two men on horses and with two more in tow came over the western passes: One tall, muscular, dark-haired with brown skin, darker even than Peridan, one slimmer, slighter of built, fair-haired, fair-skinned and blue-eyed like Mertel and Lorna. Peridan welcomed them boisterously, with hugs and laughter and teasing remarks, and then called Kil to meet them, too; and that was how Kil met Kiolani and Arlimas for the first time, and saw that the friendship Peridan had spoken of was very real.

They had come because some of the codes had to be discussed in person, to be safe, though the pretext was that they came for trade.

Kil and Deefore did a lot more talking and laying out of plans than they were used to, since it was them – mainly Deefore, really – who had come up with most of the codes. Deefore could come up with codes that would be hard to crack without a computer, if you did not have the formula to begin with. The two Telmarines took it all in stride, clearly used to action and mission-planning, and not once did they question why the retainers had done more of the talking than the Lord. It put Kil at ease. There was a certain degree of camaraderie he had missed, and while he was still aware these men were all technically his superiors, it did help settle something inside him a bit more once again.

He was not entirely sure whether it was more Mirith, Tav, or Lemet he missed so much; maybe all of them. It was all of them with whom he could have talked like this, seeing eye to eye even if they disagreed. But just as he realised the pain of their absence, it was also easing: he may never see them again – he would never see Lemet for sure; but he was, at least, becoming the sort of man who could declare his friendship with them without shame.

Kiolani and Arlimas stayed two more days; they left with packs of good quality Narnian wool, and with small devices of Deefore’s design and dwarfish make that held a promise of future endeavours.

“Well,” Peridan said. “I suppose that makes it all real, now. Last opportunity to back out.”

“Why would I?” Kil asked.

Peridan shrugged.

“It’s a dangerous enterprise.”

“Not my first, and certainly a better one than all my past ones,” Kil replied. “You still did not ask for an oath from me.”

Peridan shrugged again.

“I’m not sure why, but I have a feeling you should keep your options open.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 5

Cuy Adenn Sa Pitat

(Outer Rim, 15 years after the Battle of Yavin)

Boba Fett ran his last preliminary check of the holonet news from his destination, an unremarkable city on an unremarkable temperate planet in an unremarkable region of Mid Rim. The city had its own spaceport, and reasonable amounts of interplanetary traffic including some of the shadier elements, but nothing important seemed to ever happen there. It suited him just fine: enough of a transit area for him not to draw too much undue attention, and quiet enough for him not to draw too much undue attention - sometimes having a reputation was a drawback. The news still showed no sign of trouble, with traffic at normal levels; weather cloudy right now with incoming rainstorms the next day. His business there should be long finished by then. Rain used to be his constant companion in childhood; that did not mean he liked it.

Settling Slave I into the unremarkable spaceport, he noted with some dismay that one of the ships in the dock he had been assigned was not quite so unremarkable.

The port authorities here clearly had a policy of directing similar businesses to the same docks. That wasn’t always a good idea in his line of business.

The ship was definitely well-armed, a heavily modified, customised FX-77 star yacht; most of the modifications were done half-surreptitiously, but ship models had always been Boba’s special interest, and he usually could see at a glance where a specimen’s outline differed from the default and make some educated guesses as to why. However, it was the figure standing next to the ship that made Boba truly apprehensive: a tall human enhanced with cybernetics, with their mechanical components including their face on full display, looking in truth more droid than human. Coupled with the sort of clothes they were wearing, the weapons they were carrying openly, and the sort of ship they were clearly travelling in, well, it all boiled down to only one person that Boba knew of.

Beilert Valance’s apparent death, his survival and re-emergence as a cyborg had been a matter of some hot debate in bounty hunting circles. Boba had taken note of it, without participating in the gossip mill (as was his usual wont, a habit shared by most of the top-level hunters). What had captured his attention, and formed a crucial, though not the only, element of his current dismay, was the less widespread but far more concerning rumour that Valance had turned Rebel before his disappearance.

Boba’s own views of the Empire had undergone a change since those days; he still did not exactly approve of the Rebels, but it was hard to blame them after certain experiences. But as matters stood right now, Valance was something of an unknown, and that left room for possibilities like working for Republic Intelligence - possibilities Boba would still much rather avoid.

Backing away from the dock now would only make matters worse, though. Especially because he was here for a job that sounded lucrative, prestigious, and relatively safe, as private bounties went. If Valance was also chasing it, that was a problem to deal with as it arose. He finished his landing.

He disembarked from the ship, leaving the usual safety protocols in place, plus several additional ones in deference to Valance’s presence.

He met the man still standing next to his ship, but Valance was now accompanied by a droid of an unfamiliar make. And that alone was strange. Valance had not been known for a fondness of droids, quite the opposite.

“Valance. Still alive.”

“I could say the same for you, Fett. I guess sarlaccs do struggle with armour.”

You could not expect a non-Mandalorian to catch the nuance of meaning in the greeting[1], but Boba still felt vaguely annoyed that Valance had not. It was the sort of thing that underscored just how much Boba did not belong anywhere except his own ship.

“Droid? You?” he asked out loud.

“I changed my mind on some things. This may come as a surprise to you, but that's a thing that can happen.”

Considering his recent thoughts on the Empire, it did not come as a surprise to Boba, but - that was opinion. Valance’s resistance to droids had been more primal.

“At your age?” Boba scoffed.

“Age is irrelevant.”

“With your condition, it would be.”

In someone not in that condition, there probably would have been a visible reaction; but Valance just stared at Boba, his face as blank as a buy’ce[2].

“We’re not that different,” he said.

“You say?” Boba asked sarcastically.

Valance shrugged, an oddly human motion in someone so droid-like.

“Here for a job?” Boba asked.

“Just finished,” Valance said. Then he laughed, an equally oddly human sound, and said: “I can guess what job you are here for. You can rest easy; you can keep that galoomp chase to yourself.”

“Not interested?” Boba asked, surprised but trying not to show it. If Valance was still highly enough placed with the reorganised Guilds to know about this job, and had made it here to this planet of all places, it was rather strange that he did not want to maintain or improve his professional status by rising to the challenge when it was being offered. Boba certainly had.

Valance shrugged again.

“Close encounters with death can do different things to different people at different points in their lives, I guess,” he said. “They did for me. I cannot begin to guess what it did to you, if anything. Me, I figure life’s too short to spend it looking for a man who has very good reasons for wanting to stay dead. To those who are up for that sort of waste of time, good luck. Have a nice day.”

Valance executed a sardonic salute in Boba’s direction and walked up the ramp of his ship, apparently really on his way out.

It was a disconcerting encounter, but clearly more for personal than professional reasons. Boba had decades of practice in putting the professional before the personal; when he did not, things tended to go south. And the way Valance had spoken from a very personal standpoint, a fairly significant change from the man Boba had once known, was disturbing.

Still, a traitorous voice somewhere in the back of his head said Beilert seems much happier now.

* * *

Boba had his own speeder on the ship, but the planet was rather infamous for having such complicated legislation regarding off-world equipment that it was much easier to hire one locally. So Boba opted for that. He walked several blocks away from the spaceport before he picked a rental service; the ones closest to the port were, of course, always the most expensive. The speeder he ended up renting was lower quality, slower than his own; but he was not here to chase bounties, only to secure the contract, so he did not let it bother him.

The address he was headed to was on the other side of the city. He took the direct route through downtown. The old narrow streets of the city centre were harder to navigate, but he avoided the traffic he might have been stuck in at this hour if he had taken the bypass. It provided him with a good overview of the architecture: the centuries old houses downtown were standing side by side, facing directly onto the street, and mainly built from yellow stone; but once he entered the residential areas at the edge of the city, especially in the district he was headed into, that changed to bright white duracrete in extensive gardens. Both areas featured buildings exhibiting a certain level of affluence, separated only by age and changing tastes, and both stood in contrast to the spaceport and its surroundings. Interesting comparison mirrored in many other places throughout the galaxy: the spaceport district that usually brought in the credits was rarely the place where most of the credits ended up.

His directions took him to the very edge of the city, where the local elites resided in what could best be described as mansions. Each house seemed to be a self-contained world of its own, separated from its neighbours by high walls and sprawling gardens filled with strategically sightline-obscuring topiary and landscaping. On the other side, his map told him, these gardens were adjoined only by forest and fields.

The house he finally stopped in front of was no different. The ornamental yet closed-off and imposing gate was automated. He rang the bell, stated his business to a disembodied droid voice, was informed that he was expected, and let in through a smaller door, sectioned off inside the big one for foot traffic.

Boba clocked the features in the garden: definitely designed with both aesthetics and privacy in mind, but now rather overgrown. He spotted one or two gardener droids trying to keep up somewhere between the greenery. Had he been the owner, he would have invested in more at this point: as far as he was concerned, the garden had overgrown its original strategic purpose and had toppled over into a hard-to-control mess that, if the initial barrier of the wall was breached, offered just as many opportunities to attackers as it did to defence. The house, a tasteful villa-like building that had also seen better days, did not present a particularly intimidating front; whatever defences there were were likely mainly electronic.

Boba reflected, with wry amusement, that the owner of the house was obviously not the level of paranoid Boba was used to operating on.

As he walked up the three steps in front of the house between the columns of the frontage and the overgrown flower pots and vines on the ground, the door opened, revealing a silver protocol droid.

“Welcome, bounty hunter,” it said, in the sort of slightly neurotic-sounding Core-accented voice most protocol droids sported. “Please, follow me.”

The preference for the type was one of the quirks of high status living Boba had never understood, though he did have some intellectual understanding that some people liked servility. Personally, he preferred to exert his authority through actually coming up on top.

He followed.

The entry hall was fittingly impressive, with two curving staircases leading up to the upper floor taking centre stage. The droid took him up the right staircase, and then led him through a maze of corridors - everything was appropriately luxurious and tasteful, mainly in light tones in keeping with the house’s overall vibe; but everything was a bit oddly quiet, and Boba got the distinct impression that despite having walked up on the main staircase, he was now being led through the servant wing of the house. They met no servants. They passed a couple droids - a cleaner, another protocol droid, another cleaner.

Finally, they arrived at a larger door, in a larger corridor; his guide opened the door and announced:

“Boba Fett, my lady.”

“Enter,” a female voice replied.

Boba did.

The room was sunny, despite the trees surrounding it outside, and filled with hanging plants - some sort of solarium. A bit off-centre, there was a small round table set with a tea service and some dainty snacks, surrounded by three wicker chairs. In the chair facing the door sat a woman dressed all in black. Her attire - long robes, a stiff headdress, a thick veil obscuring her face - was at odds with the light-coloured surroundings, although it spoke of a similar level of affluence. Oddly enough, though, Boba almost immediately had the impression that the hanging veil and hanging plants stood in harmony, both an expression of… grief?

He knew next to nothing about this planet’s customs. It was something about the way the woman in front of him sat, almost holding herself back.

“Please, sit down,” she said, and her voice was an echo of the droid’s, another Core accent, though less neurotic and more… brittle.

Boba waited a beat, just to weigh the situation, and then did sit down. He appreciated the seating arrangement; she had command of the room and the door, but he, sitting not directly in front of her but somewhat sideways, was offered a similar advantage, with good sightlines for the garden to boot.

He had no idea if it had been deliberate on her side or not, but he appreciated it.

“Tea?” she asked.

He hesitated.

The journey here had been quite long, it had been hot, and despite the environmental controls in his armour, he was parched. She seemed like the sort of person who would appreciate some show of being civilised more than his usual brand of being to the point. One of the marks of a successful high-level bounty hunter was the ability to work with the expectations of one’s client, and where most of them expected exactly what he normally projected, this one was a bit out of the ordinary.

He removed his helmet.

“Yes, thank you,” he said.

She gasped, and quickly suppressed it. His face was not the prettiest of sights after the sarlacc. But she controlled herself quickly. She poured him a cup of tea with all the elevated restraint of movement the act probably involved in her circles. Her hands, pale against the black cloth of her robes, were the only skin she showed. Her nails, long and clicking softly against the blue porcelain, were painted black.

That blue colour rang a bell. It was Alderaani porcelain - a true rarity these days. On one occasion some years ago, Boba had been hired to recover a nobleman’s stolen items, including a very similar tea set.

“Sweetener?” she asked.

“One cube,” he replied.

Truth be told, his defaults were either none or two, depending on mood. Neither seemed right in this situation.

She put in one cube.

“Milk?”

“No, thank you.”

She handed him the cup, together with its matching saucer. He took a sip. He intended to set the cup down after the one sip, to get straight to business, but the tea was delicious and he could not help but take two sips more.

“Is it to your liking?” she asked.

“Yes, thank you,” he replied.

There was a barely perceptible soft sigh of relief.

She seemed nervous.

“I am guessing you are not in the habit of hiring bounty hunters,” Boba said.

“No,” she agreed. “But this is too important to me, and too difficult to solve any other way.”

“And ‘this’ being…?”

“You should know,” she replied. “The Guild assured me my offer would be shown only to the best in the business who could observe the proper discretion about his identity.”

Boba shrugged.

“As you know, I am looking for a man,” she said. “A man the galaxy believes to be dead but… I have some indications that he may still be alive. I want him found, alive.”

She paused.

“You could say this is for… closure,” she said, folding her hands delicately in a nervous gesture masking behind elegance. “Perhaps you will not be able to finish the search to my satisfaction. But I have reasons to believe you can. Either way, I need to know.”

“Kir Kanos,” Boba said. “And you want him alive. May I ask why?”

“You may,” she said. “We have a personal connection - familial, you could say. He is one of the few I have left. I could… use his help.”

She gestured rather vaguely around herself.

“Until you arrived, I was the only one alive in this house,” she said.

Boba nodded, and drank more of her excellent tea.

* * *

He was walked out by the droid again; he could have easily found his way back on his own with the help of his buy’ce, but he did not want to ruffle feathers that way. He breathed a sigh of relief as he stepped out of the gate, with the details of the job cleared up and agreed upon and the house that seemed rather adrift in time behind him. He could not exactly pinpoint anything objectively wrong about the meeting and the client, but the whole place was eerie somehow.

Maybe it was the necessity to follow such a different form of etiquette than he was used to; but that wasn’t all of it. Something nagged at him, and he could not figure out what. He had gotten all the details he had needed, the client had even given him proof her money was as good as her word, he had her initial info - observation from a friend in the D’Astan sector - to go on. She maý not have been in the habit of hiring bounty hunters, but behind the currently rattled appearance was a woman who knew business, in her own way.

He scoffed self-deprecatingly as it occurred to him that he had got the heebie-jeebies from droids, like Valance used to. It wasn’t unheard of for large houses to be served entirely by droids. Whole ranges of droid types had been developed exactly for that purpose. And he supposed some people at a certain level of affluence found being served by droids more reassuring than the presence of people who could gossip. But it did feel wrong somehow. The mansion with its many corridors had been built for the hustle and bustle of a large household of people.

On the other hand, in light of that it made sense that the client would go to such lengths to find someone she had a personal connection to…

He drove back to the rental service, doing his best not to think of his own, thin on the ground personal connections.

He walked back to the dock where Slave I was parked, intent on leaving as soon as possible. Then suddenly, for a moment, he froze.

In the middle of the now nearly empty dock stood a man who should not be there - dark skin, bald head, high cheekbones, hooded eyes: Boba would know that face anywhere but how… His hand strayed to his hip towards his blaster; before he could act, right before his eyes the face he saw transformed into a different one. Now it was even a shade darker, graced with a beard and topped with short tight curls of hair not too unlike Boba’s own, and with eyes also even darker yet somehow much brighter, sparkling with mirth and mischief. And his figure seemed considerably more spindly than the one Boba would expect with the original face.

“Not so fast, little brother,” the human-looking being said calmly, even merrily. “Not everything can be solved with a gun, and not everything needs that sort of solving.”

The figure was dressed in a dark suit; that, too, was not in keeping with the man from Boba’s past, but who knew after so many years? But Windu had been a human or near-human from Haruun Kal, and would now be quite old if still alive.

“Don’t mess with me, changeling,” Boba growled, extremely unsettled. Whoever still knew at this point in time that that face could get under his skin was definitely someone to be wary of.

The changeling just laughed.

“What do you want?” Boba asked.

“Oooh, a loaded question. But not the important one. What do you want, little brother? That is the question.”

“Stop playing with me. Why are you here?”

“Because someone asked nicely,” the being replied far more soberly.

“Who do you work for?”

“Ah. Anansi works for himself and his people. Have no fear, I am not in your line of work. But for that same reason, some people are far easier to give allegiance to than others. So, you see, as I said, Someone asked me nicely to keep an eye on you.”

The “Someone” had somehow sprouted a capital S. Boba could hear it.

“Why?”

It was all very cryptic, and all very odd; Boba could not figure out what the man’s - Anansi’s? - angle was.

“Because, little brother,” Anansi said, jerking his head in the direction of Boba’s ship significantly, “there are many ways to be a slave, and something tells me you inherited more from your father’s enslavement than either of you bargained for.”

“Who do you work for?!”

Anansi shook his head.

“That, little brother, is something you’ll have to find out for yourself on your own time. But here are some pieces of advice Anansi can give you for free: Don’t make your father’s mistakes. Watch out for webs. Think. Remember your education. Remember the people. Don’t pay back the same coin; it’s always a third party that gains the most.”

Boba still had no idea what that meant and what to make of it.

“If they only wanted you to keep an eye on me, why don’t you just stick to that?”

Anansi laughed.

“Where is the fun in that, little brother beroya?”

And with that, he walked away, with an ostentatiously insouciant sway to his hips, humming a song. He did not seem to care one bit that Boba could see him perfectly well and could shoot him in the back if he wanted to.

That alone told Boba the man definitely had more tricks up his sleeves and it would not be so easy to nail him.

Or he was bluffing, counting on exactly that.

It was extremely annoying, and extremely unsettling, and Boba was no wiser to the man’s motives than before.

A gust of wind blew towards Boba, and as if it was carried on it, the last thing for Boba to hear only calculated to rattle him more, a snatch of Anansi’s song suddenly reached his ears:

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break

And the water gonna come in and we’ll have no place to stay

Boba waited till Anansi disappeared from sight, and then turned back to walk to his ship, conducting a quick scan for trackers with his buy’ce as he did so. Before he reached the ramp, raindrops started landing on his armour, clinking dully on the metal alloy, reverberating through his sound systems. The weather forecast had got it wrong. He did not bother adjusting the sound levels in his buy’ce; several more steps, and he was inside the cargo hold.

He ran another check from the cockpit. His caution was not for naught: Slave I really was carrying an electronic stowaway on its hull. It was a rather sophisticated one, he would not have caught it with his buy’ce alone. Good thing the Slave I had truly the best scanners money could buy. Certain events had early on made him extremely wary of ever being tracked, and it was an investment he had yet to regret making periodically.

Still, it was something of a mystery how the ship had acquired this unwanted ballast, because he also had the best alarm systems his money could buy.

He could hear the rain drumming on the hull; it was a proper deluge by now. It stirred memories he preferred buried. It always rained on Kamino; buir had always left in the rain, and the sound, unbroken by conversation, used to make Boba feel particularly forlorn. His last, already solitary visit to Kamino had certainly not helped with that feeling.

He sighed, grabbed his toolkit and a raincoat, and headed outside again to deal with the electronic nuisance. It was definitely hi-tec: one of the autonomous Imperial models from only a couple years ago that could imitate the colour of the hull. He needed to check his alarm systems when there was time - clearly they were lagging behind on these particular bugs. He was left with something of a mystery as to where the thing had come from and why. Was Anansi working for the Imperial Remnant? It did not add up with his behaviour; there was a certain flavour to anything Imperial, and Anansi did not fit the profile: it was hard to believe even a spy would act so… erratically. With the rather haphazard way these trackers worked, though, it could be simply bad luck that it had latched itself onto Slave I: maybe the intended target had been Valance with his likely New Republic ties.

Just when the bug was dealt with, Boba was informed by port authorities that due to high levels of electrical interference, no ships were allowed in the air for the duration of the storm.

Interference from storms might affect cheap run-of-the-mill ships, but it had never been a problem for Slave I. The Fetts never could have lived on Kamino if it had been. But Boba was not in the mood to get into yet another fruitless conversation with a virtual stranger. The job was projected to be longer term, anyway. He could wait.

He checked his inbox for written messages, and found one.

Connor.

Connor was sending along a video message from kriffing Fenn Shysa. He accompanied it with the words He’s sitting in my tavern, eating Quinny’s sorry excuse for a tiingilar and being relentlessly polite. Can’t you bloody reply to THE MAND’ALOR for once??!!

No, Boba thought; but Connor was the closest thing to family he still had, so he did play the message.

Shysa spilled out of the holoprojector in all his unsophisticated yet undeniable glory, impossible to contain even in the washed-out bluish image of a low-def holo recording.

Still, if you did not know any better, you would probably not be able to tell that this person with floppy helmet hair who sent unsolicited personal messages through people’s family members was the closest thing Mandalore had to royalty, and the first ruler of truly unified Mandalorians in centuries. None of the pomp other nations’ heads of state displayed; he was not even wearing a cape.

Boba did know better. He had received messages from Shysa before. A long time ago now. He had ignored them. The appeal to his family heritage and Mandalorian tradition had been a burden Boba had wanted nothing to do with.

This time, though…

This time Shysa was not offering that. Just a place to belong. Just an open invitation to come to Keldabe and find a home and a purpose among the Mando’ade.

Once upon a time, there had been a note of begging, of desperation. Shysa had been fighting the Empire, and hoping Boba might help, might step up. Now the Mand’alor had won that fight on his own, and with it a degree of dignity and power no manner of outer fanfare could lend. More wrinkles, too; the hardships and length of the fight had chiselled him down, but that only added to his unassuming appeal. Even the more minimalist luxury of the less ostentatious and perhaps wiser rich and powerful of the galaxy, like that austerely elegant mansion in the city outside and its withdrawn dark lady, could not really hold a candle to Shysa’s easy warmth and charisma. Boba could not really put a finger on what it was about Shysa that provided him with that effect, but he did have some ideas.

The man had grown into his role, Boba thought. He had accepted it. Had moulded into it. Or maybe the role, for so long divisive and contested, had moulded onto him. Fenn Shysa no longer needed Boba Fett, the son of Jango Fett. He did not need anyone else’s legacy. He was not asking for it; he was simply asking for Boba Fett, one man on his own merits to another man on his own merits.

It was surprisingly tempting. There was a mixture of warmth and respect in Shysa’s demeanour that went a long way towards explaining why Connor had fallen for his spiel. It was, Boba was finding out right now, just the right level to feel sincere and, yes, tempting.

But not enough so for Boba to change his plans so drastically. He had a job to do. He closed the message.

He took out his blaster to clean it. He discovered, utterly perplexed and unsettled even further, that the barrel was filled with cobwebs.

What the kriff.

He was not one to be superstitious, but he was also not one to leave his blaster unattended and uncleaned, and so this had no better explanation than magic. And that was way above even Boba Fett’s paygrade.

But it also made him… intrigued. And angry. It had to be Anansi and his mysterious employer (employer?); and whoever they were, they knew far too much about him. And Boba was getting really tired of being a lackey in someone else’s plans. If you were talking about his father’s mistakes, that had definitely been one.

He considered again. Shysa seemed to have gotten over that particular compulsion.

Still… No, not now, he decided. Not yet, at least. He had a job to do. Family was important, after all, to more people than just Mandalorians; Shysa would have to keep dealing with that.

But Boba realised that it was for the first time in decades, possibly even the first time in his life, that he was giving serious consideration to Shysa’s requests. For the first time in nearly two decades, his immediate gut reaction wasn’t to turn his back on his father’s and grandfather’s more public legacy, but to consider that his Mandalorian legacy could still stretch to more than just the bounty hunting one.

He was not entirely sure what to make of that, either.

He was still chewing that over when he got the all clear from the port authorities. The storm had abated enough to allow lift off, they said. Boba would not have been able to tell from sound and sight alone. The locals were operating on their own parameters that had no relation to him or his ship’s capabilities.

As he took off, the rain still kept pouring, sheets of water washing all over the ship. He broke through the clouds and headed through momentary sunlight into the blackness of space.

[1] The Mandalorian greeting “Su cuy’gar” means “You’re still alive.”

[2] helmet