The Children of the Stars

Return of the Jedi

Allana knew she would be able to breathe properly again once the day was over and they could all return to the Chume'da's suite. She had noticed how Brakiss had locked eyes with her during the negotiations, how he tried to probe at her mind and that of her sister's.

Luckily, they were able to keep their shields up, but that wasn't enough to make Allana feel calm. Rather, she was even more alert, because that meant that Brakiss suspected something was off.

How he could have known to detect such a thing, Allana had no idea. Yes, decoys had been used by once of their ancestors, Padme Amidala, but Hapes had never employed such tactics.

It was considered unthinkable, once, to attack She Who Comes After. While she wasn't the living goddess that She Who Has No Equal was, she would ascend someday and usurp that role.

But when the Djos had come from the jungles of Dathomir, everything had changed. One might even suspect that Ta'a Chume herself had a hand in changing the relationship between the nobles of Hapes and their goddesses.

It was only the nobles, Allana knew that much. Inanna came from a lower house than the rest of the handmaidens and had once come from common folk. Thus, she knew better the hearts of the Hapan people than the nobles truly did.

A part of that was because Inanna's own mother had benefitted from the Djos' rise to power. Back on Madrassa, with no one really to talk to besides each other and Lady Serra, the girls would talk about their own histories. Allana usually managed to coax more out of them than they were able to for her.

At the time, Allana thought they knew all that they had to.

But Inanna's mother had gained her opportunity through protecting Queen Teneniel from the original Ducha of her estate.

"Her Majesty the Queen Mother and her mother before her have made the lives of the Hapan people much better," Inanna had told Allana once. "Better schools for the people, more equality for the men— and the nobles can't get away with nearly as much."

As Allana sipped her glass goblet of Hapan gold, she couldn't help but cynically note that that last achievement was the real reason that the Djos had been so unliked by the nobles.

When she was a little girl, Ben and Rey had spoken of Tenel Ka as having the noblest heart, the most courageous spirit and an incorruptible sense for justice.

Allana had doubted that in her mentor choosing to bargain with the Imperial Remnant. But Tenel Ka had dissolved her gilded mask with her outburst earlier. It impressed her.

But Allana still held her doubts.

The banquet was running as smoothly as it possibly could. Taking place in a ballroom with less access to the outside, it was dimmer than the rainbow-lit conference room they had been in all day.

This was less formal than usual, with plenty of food and drinks scattered about in little tables, and plenty of people were standing around and conversing.

Tenel Ka and Nellith were sitting up on two thrones at the back of the room, confined to observing and not partaking.

That was the job of other, more trusted nobles. In fact, the other handmaidens were doing that on Allana's behalf right now.

She knew she should probably be trying to make a feel for the room and see what was going on, but she felt fatigued. Despite living in Hapan space for the past three years, it was still a foreign world to her. One where she had to keep her guard up.

Which, granted, was no different from the rest of the galaxy. Tatooine and Ahch-To used to not be that way. But Tatooine now carried its ghosts that Allana couldn't bear to see.