Embarrassed, Jacen slid his snake-covered hand behind his back. “No,” he said, “I can honestly say that all of my pets are completely accounted for.”
Jaina bent down to help the other Jedi boy to his feet. “You must have just fallen asleep, Raynar. You really should have gone to your sleeping pallet if you were so tired.” She brushed his clothes off. “Now look, you’ve got dust all over your pretty robes.”
Raynar looked in alarm at the smudges of dust and dirt on his gaudy garments. “Now I’ll have to put on a whole new outfit. I can’t be seen in public like this!” He brushed his fingers over the cloth in dismay.
“We’ll let you get changed then,” Jacen said, backing toward the door. “See you at the lecture.”
Jacen and Jaina ducked out of Raynar’s room. Feeling suddenly bold enough to joke, Jacen waved good-bye with the hand that still carried the invisible crystal snake.
Together, the twins raced back to their quarters so they could put on their own robes in time to hear Luke teach them how to become Jedi Knights.
2
Jaina ducked back into her quarters to change into fresh clothes as Jacen ran to stash the crystal snake in its cage. She splashed cold water on her face from the new cistern in her bedroom wall.
Her face still damp and tingling, she stepped out into the corridor. “Hurry, or we’ll be late,” she said as Jacen ran to join her.
Together, the twins dashed to the turbolift, which took them to the upper levels of the pyramid-shaped temple. They entered the echoing space of the grand audience chamber. The air was a bustling hum of other Jedi candidates assembling in the huge room where Luke Skywalker spoke every day.
Shafts of morning light glinted off the polished stone surfaces. The light carried an orange cast reflected from the orange gas giant hanging in the sky—the planet Yavin, around which the small jungle moon orbited.
Dozens of other Jedi trainees of varying ages and species found their places in the rows of stone seats spread out across the long, sloped floor. To Jaina, it looked as if someone had splashed a giant stone down on the stage, sending parallel waves of benches rippling toward the back of the chamber.
A mixture of languages and sounds came to Jaina’s ears, along with the rich open-air smell that came from the uncharted jungles outside. She sniffed, but could not identify the different perfumes from flowers in bloom—though Jacen probably knew them all by heart. Right now, she smelled the musty body odors of alien Jedi candidates—matted fur, sunbaked scales, sweet-sour pheromones.
Jacen followed her to a set of empty seats, past two stout, pink-furred beasts that spoke to each other in growls. As she sat on the slick, cool seat, Jaina looked up at the squared-off temple ceilings, at the many different shapes and colors mounted in mosaics of alien patterns.
“Every time we come in here,” she said, “I think of those old videoclips of the ceremony where Mother handed out medals to Uncle Luke and Dad. She looked so pretty.” She put a hand up to her straight, unstyled hair.
“Yeah, and Dad looked like such a … such a pirate,” Jacen said.
“Well, he was a smuggler in those days,” Jaina answered.
She thought of the Rebel soldiers who had survived the attack on the first Death Star, those who had fought against the Empire in the great space battle to destroy the terrible super-weapon. Now, more than twenty years later, Luke Skywalker had turned the abandoned base into a training center for Jedi hopefuls, rebuilding the Order of Jedi Knights.
Luke himself had begun training other Jedi back when the twins were barely two years old. Now he often left on his own missions and spent only part of his time at the academy, but it remained open under the direction of other Jedi Knights Luke had trained.
Some of the trainees had virtually no Force potential, content to be mere historians of Jedi lore. Others had great talent, but had not yet begun their full training. It was Luke’s philosophy, though, that all potential Jedi could learn from each other. The strong could learn from the weak, the old could learn from the young—and vice versa.
Jacen and Jaina had come to Yavin 4, sent by their mother Leia to be trained for part of the year. Their younger brother Anakin had remained at home back on the capital world of Coruscant, but he would be coming to join them soon.
Off and on during their childhood, Luke Skywalker had helped the children of Han Solo and Princess Leia to learn their powerful talent. Here on Yavin 4 they had nothing to do but study and practice and train and learn—and so far it had been much more interesting than the curriculum the stuffy educational droids had developed for them back on Coruscant.
“Where’s Tenel Ka?” Jaina scanned the crowd, but saw no sign of their friend from the planet Dathomir.
“She should be here,” Jacen said. “This morning I saw her go out to do her exercises in the jungle.”
Tenel Ka was a devoted Jedi who worked hard to attain her dreams. She had little interest in the bookish studies, the histories and the meditations; but she was an excellent athlete who preferred action to thinking. That was a valuable skill for a Jedi, Luke Skywalker had told her—provided Tenel Ka knew when it was appropriate.
Their friend was impatient, hard-driven, and practically humorless. The twins had taken it as a challenge to see if they could make her laugh.
“She’d better hurry,” Jacen said as the room began to quiet. “Uncle Luke is going to start soon.”
Catching a movement out of the corner of her eye, Jaina looked up at one of the skylights high on a wall of the tall chamber. The lean, supple silhouette of a young girl edged onto the narrow stone windowsill. “Ah, there she is!”
“She must have climbed the temple from the back,” Jacen said. “She was always talking about doing that, but I never thought she’d try.”
“Plenty of vines over there,” Jaina answered logically, as if scaling the enormous ancient monument was something Jedi students did every day.
As they watched, Tenel Ka used a thin leather thong to tie her long rusty-gold hair behind her shoulders to keep it out of her way. Then the muscular girl flexed her arms. She attached a silvery grappling hook to the edge of the stone sill and reeled out a thin fibercord from her utility belt.
Tenel Ka lowered herself like a spider on a web, walking precariously down the long smooth surface of the inner wall.
The other Jedi trainees watched her, some applauding, others just recognizing the girl’s skill. She could have used her Jedi powers to speed the descent, but Tenel Ka relied on her body whenever possible and used the Force only as a last resort. She thought it showed weakness to depend too heavily on her special powers.
Tenel Ka made an easy landing on the stone floor, her glistening, scaly boots clicking as she touched down. She flexed her arms again to loosen her muscles, then grasped the thin fibercord. With a snap from the Force she popped her grappling hook up and away from the stone above and neatly caught it in her hand as it fell.
She reeled the fibercord into her belt and turned around with a serious expression on her face, then snapped the thong free from her hair and shook her head to let the reddish tresses fall loose around her shoulders.
Tenel Ka dressed like other women from Dathomir, in a brief athletic outfit made from scarlet and emerald skins of native reptiles. The flexible, lightly armored tunic and shorts left her arms and legs bare. Despite her exposed skin, Tenel Ka never seemed bothered by scratches or insect bites, though she made numerous forays into the jungle.
Jacen waved at her, grinning. She acknowledged him with a nod, made her way over to where the twins were sitting, and slid onto the cool stone bench beside Jacen.
“Greetings,” Tenel Ka said gruffly.
“Good morning,” Jaina said. She smiled at the Amazonian young woman, who looked back at her with large, cool gray eyes, but did not return her smile—not out of rudeness, but because it wasn’t in her nature. Tenel Ka rarely smiled.