Prologue: The Jedi and the Handmaid
The day Padme Amidala told me of her pregnancy by the Jedi Lord Anakin Skywalker, I sat on the balcony of her private apartment overlooking the central plaza of Theed under a dusky-red sky. I watched from my quiet perch in the corner as the usually strong Senator painfully informed me of this news, of which she was absolutely certain in herself, although she had not been tested by a medi-droid.
"I'm telling you because I need your help," she said, shifting her gaze to me from the latticed screen above the railing and away from the view toward the Eastern water ledge. "Even now, it must be kept secret, for as long as possible. I want this child and I will keep it, but I tried hard to prevent this from happening. And with the war as it is…I'm afraid to tell him until I know what I should do."
She did not explain herself or why she might be afraid of the young knight whose child she now carried, but I sensed an unusual tremor in her voice. I stayed seated and silent, wondering about what lay behind the Senator's sudden disclosure to me just after he had gone. Although the substance of her announcement was known to me before her confession, her appeals for help nonetheless seemed to reveal things, the implications of which I had not foreseen. And the tone with which she expressed her sentiments gave me an unnerving glimpse behind the Senator's naïve and idealistic façade of faith in what was an ever-increasingly broken Republic.
She turned fully away from the railing to face me, looking in my direction as though I, and not she, was owed the respect of an entire system. "If the Council finds out, they'll surely expel him," she pleaded. "Even Master Kenobi cannot overlook this…"
That the Senator carried the Jedi's child had been suspected for some time among those of us that attended her. But even as I promised Padme in surest sincerity that I would provide what help I could, I was hit with portentous clarity about the extent to which my own situation differed from hers, particularly where the Order and the Council were concerned.
Certainly, it was not the first time she had mentioned Jedi Master Kenobi to me in all the years since I had been a young handmaiden beginning her first official assignment as part of the diplomatic mission of my people to the Naboo. And he was, at least to my recollection, the only other Jedi but Skywalker that she had mentioned to any of us since the now-dreamlike period before the fiercest fighting had begun.
She may have been right about the Jedi Master, and about how he might react, but I had reason to doubt that he would be cruel or cold no matter what action the Council itself might take.
She didn't know that by then, the Jedi warrior was already tied to me. It was a connection made in the terrific heat of what was not yet known as the beginning of a civil war, and under an impulse of feelings that, despite their emotive force, I could no more call purely emotional than I could call myself Nubian…