No amount of sailing could find them, it seemed. It was difficult to be precise on the sea, especially in the middle of a storm, but by Vader's estimate, they sailed right over that bloodspot several times, yet saw not so much as a schooner break the waves.

Perhaps it was the mapmaker's incompetency. Perhaps it was poor luck. Perhaps they were already drowned, and the Codex was on the bottom of the sea. That would be inconvenient.

But no. He noticed just as the storm was beginning to abate, sunlight piercing the clouds. The dot was moving. The dot was on Greater Corel.

And by the time they had landed on Greater Corel, the dot was on the way to Naboo.

Vader saw an opportunity.

Neither she nor her handmaidens were allowed to send him away anymore, so he strode right in. But they had warned her of his presence in advance, so she was fully dressed despite the early hour, the sun just creeping over the eastern hills, seated on her throne, looking as radiant as she always did in a high-necked midnight dress. She always wore dark colours, mourning colours, around him.

He took off his helmet before she could greet him and didn't bother to hide his expression as he looked at her.

"Lord Vader," she said, looking down on him—the only time she was ever able to look down on him was when she was on the throne atop the dais, and he was staring up at her in awe. The twist of tone on his title told him that she was not a fan of it.

He was not a fan of it himself, in truth. It was an empty gesture a few years ago, Palpatine rewarding his most loyal enforcer after years of work on his behalf. But… "If you take issue with my title, Padmé, you have the power to change it."

She stood, the yellow sunlight catching her hairpiece. It was a six-pointed star of crystal, and sent rainbows dancing along the walls. "Our marriage was annulled when I was put back on the throne of Naboo. No monarch is allowed to be married to a foreign politician or important figure while they are in power. You know that."

Yes. That stupid constitutional law, one of the ones Padmé had dedicated her life to. The constitution that the Empire had crushed when it invaded, and she had fought to restore.

"I need not be a foreign general. I was a citizen of Naboo—"

"Before you were banished." She stepped down the dais, shoes clacking on the mosaic floor, and stopped in front of him, glaring. "No armour or weapons will change that."

"—and I can be again. And I am an important figure in the Empire." He stressed the word. "I can go wherever in the Empire I please."

"That does not mean you belong here."

He took a step forward, took her hand, and kissed the back of it. "Where else do I belong?"

She waited a polite amount of time before taking her hand back. That, more than anything, was insulting—to treat him as just another Imperial diplomat to tolerate, not her husband and the love of her life.

"In a place you respect, presumably," she told him. "Which you will not betray to foreign powers. Where you will not turn people into birds—"

"They were interfering—"

"They were carrying out my orders, and they have not yet been changed back! And that is only your crimes against individuals, without mentioning political meddling."

"You should always have been queen again."

"That is not how our system works. I stepped down permanently."

"It was what was necessary, for our child—"

"Do not talk to me about our child."

Padmé never snapped. Never shouted. But sometimes he wished she did, because that tone of hers was worse.

He was left reeling and silent, in shock. "Padmé, they…"

She forcefully composed herself. "Nor did you accomplish what you were aiming for. The Empire forcefully putting me back on the throne stained my reputation. Having to deal with Imperial rules worsens it. With every new importation of Imperial goods forcing my own people into poverty, I am seen more as a traitor."

"Any Naboo citizen ungrateful for what you do for them—"

"Would see me as a puppet and rightly so. We are occupied. Occupied, and oppressed." She added acerbically, in the flowering vowels of Nab, the Naboo tongue, "We are not even permitted to speak our own language in official circumstances. The Empire will not stand for it."

Those words cut him to the core—and not for their meaning. He barely understood the language he'd once dreamt in.

"Yes. Though I understand some of your previous handmaidens have taken to treasonous poetry—"

"Is it treasonous to speak the truth and celebrate Naboo? Retellings of immortal folktales are hardly dangerous."

"It incites rebellion."

"Your own actions incite rebellion."

"We have offered you what you wish for. Naboo can regain its independence, a sense of individuality, and still feel the benefits of what the Empire brings, retain its security and stand protected—"

"You offer me a dual monarchy in your Empire," she interrupted, still in Nab. She used the singular form of you—not him and the Emperor, but him. Just him.

He replied in Coruscanti, to her disdain. "It would end the occupation, restore your precious constitution and way of life—"

"And we would be cooperating with the Empire far more than my conscience can allow. I have no intention of combining our armies—and nor do my ministers of war. I would face a furious agricultural lobby if I endorsed the Empire's internal trade laws and threatened Nab farmers' interests. I have no intention of proclaiming Palpatine the Emperor of Naboo as well as of Coruscant."

"He is already Emperor." He tried saying it in Nab and got just as harsh a look as before. His memory of it was appalling.

"Thanks to traitors who no longer remember our language, he is," she said softly. "That does not mean I should endorse it."

They had this argument every time. She never budged. Perhaps she never would, but he had to try—he had to try to make his love see sense. "You would sacrifice the freedom of your people for your morals?"

"You presume there is no way for us to have both. The Naboo have a great many ways." And he really should mention these words to Palpatine when he reported back, he really should flag them as admittance of treasonous activity, but he wouldn't. Even if Padmé was funding an entire rebellion against the Empire he'd bled for, he wouldn't.

This was Padmé.

Even as he sought to control the world, make it into what he wanted it to be, he had always known that. No one could control her.

"This way is quicker and easier," he tried one last time. But he knew he had lost. He even switched back to Coruscanti, to cease embarrassing himself further.

"That does not make it right."

As he'd known she would say.

She stepped away, back up to the dais. "Is that all you came for—a rehash of the same inane argument? Do not waste my time."

"I had actual business." He sounded more defensive than he intended and hated himself for it—he felt like he was twenty years old again and had just watched her nail an invading Imperial soldier through the eye with a crossbow bolt. The stained-glass windows, carved with suns and moons and flowering trees, glowed over their heads. He kept his eyes fixed on them, and tried to remember which tale they represented. "We require a map through the hills."

Her expression went stony. "The foothills that border Alderaan? You are launching an invasion?" She glanced out of the arched window that consumed the wall to he right; through the curling river of blue glass in the centre, they could see the men milling about in the courtyard, bored. "You will not take Alderaan with such a pathetic force."

"No. The valley hills."

Her face relaxed minutely. "The ones rife with smugglers," she concluded. "You're still trying to stamp them out?" She sounded disdainful. He wondered what purpose smugglers might serve Naboo, nowadays.

"I am searching for a Jedi."

There—she stiffened again, almost unnoticeable. "Oh? I thought you had already killed them all."

"They required killing. They were hoarding what they found—"

"They saved Naboo."

"I saved Naboo."

"And then you doomed it."

She was so frustrating.

"Yes," he said, just to avoid the argument. "And now I am searching for a Jedi. A boy, specifically." She was getting tenser and tenser, like a bowstring being slowly drawn back. He let the arrow fly. "He is moving for the valley hills—and he has the last codex."

"Then I hope that you do not find him. May the Jedi keep at least some of the knowledge they earned."

"I earned much of the knowledge in that codex," he snapped before he could think about it, and he knew he'd fallen for her bait. He tried to pull himself together. "He is Obi-Wan's apprentice, a new young pretender."

"He does not seem to be much of a pretence, if he has evaded capture for so long."

"Sheer luck and tomfoolery. Luck that will soon run out. I have a map that tracks him unerringly, and I know he is in those hills." He pointed in their direction, to his right.

"Those hills are that way." She jabbed her thumb over her shoulder and raised an eyebrow.

Right. There was even a mural depicting them on the northern wall, behind the throne.

He lowered his arm. "I require information to forge through the hills. As an Imperial vassal, you are obliged to give it to me."

She sucked in a breath. "That," she gritted out, "I am."

He inclined his head towards her study. Its door hung in the shadow of that great mural. "Will you show me, then?"

"But why are you after him so fiercely?" she pressed. She moved towards the study, Vader close on her heels, but she didn't let up her interrogation. "Is Obi-Wan with him?"

There was a faint, mocking tone to it—in the wake of the tragedy, he had blamed Obi-Wan for turning her against him, and she knew it. Knew it and ridiculed it.

"Obi-Wan seems to have disappeared. Perhaps he is dead."

She seemed unsurprised by that; that was expected. "Perhaps he too was turned into a bird."

"You are being watched, Padmé."

If she was taken aback by the information, she didn't show it. She turned away to unlock her study door and wave him in. "You made me a queen. Of course I am being watched. A queen always is." She sat down behind her desk, hands settling in front of her. Many rings adorned her fingers, he noticed—diamond, sapphire, pearl, favours and gifts from dozens of nobles paying their respects—but none were his.

"You write to that boy regularly."

She did blanch, then. Her elbow knocked an inkwell, which slopped crimson onto the corner of one of her dusty theory books but remained otherwise intact. "I may write to whomever I please."

"You may." He tried not to let his bitterness show. She never wrote to him. He would reshape the globe into a gift-bouquet for her if only she would write to him, but she wrote to this random boy. "But your writings were useful for tracking his location. I might have delegated the hunt for the Codex, otherwise, but this demanded my full attention."

He didn't think she had ever looked at him with such fire. A part of him revelled in getting something from her at all, even if it was the fire of hate.

"I don't know where he is," she said, and it was the truth. "The last letter I received from him informed me he was going to Little Corel, then into the Sunless Sea, and that I likely wouldn't hear from him again." Her voice, for all her diplomatic genius, broke. He wanted to comfort her and was repelled by the thought of comforting her over sympathy for a Jedi.

"You do not need to. I already used your letters to find him in Tatooine," here his voice turned almost boastful, "and from there I gained the tool that means the Codex will never be far from my reach again."

"A tool?"

It was for her own gain that she asked, he knew. She might even warn the brat she was so foolishly attached to, he knew. She was only interested in the knowledge because she could use it. He knew all of that.

But he liked having the upper hand in their conversations for once. And he had always liked showing off.

He reached into his bag and pulled out the boy's map, laying it out on the table so it was the right way up for Padmé to view.

"Here," he said. "The map leads the possessor to what they desire. And I desire what is mine to be restored." He put his finger on the bloodspot, halted in its pilgrimage through the valley hills.

Padmé was running her gaze over the map, taking in the illustrations—there were dozens of intricacies spelled out in immaculate ink; the boy had clearly put effort in—and the handwriting and the details. "Who made this?" she asked quietly. "You?"

"No. I am not yet capable." He didn't know why he was admitting that to her, but he never could keep a secret. It was the ultimate weakness, wanting to be known by someone you loved.

It wasn't a lie, what he had said to the boy on Little Corel—he did know the magic of the map, now—but it wasn't the full truth either. He had tried to replicate it and failed; he could sense the deep longing in the boy's work but couldn't transfer his own longing into his own. He was still reliant on this child's unfinished handiwork, and it rankled.

"Then who?"

This was harder to admit, and he did not want to. But Padmé seemed to have gleaned it herself—whether from his silence, or from the handwriting she was studying ever so intently.

"Luke made it," she surmised.

"Luke?"

"The boy." She glared at him.

"I never bothered learning his name."

She withdrew from him, further into her chair, and didn't comment on that. "His depiction of Naboo is strange," she said mournfully. "This resembles something from a hundred years ago, and a lot of these roads have been closed since for rockfalls and dangerous terrain…"

He leaned over to study where she was looking. "Which ones?"

She said nothing.

"If you do not tell me," he teased, "I risk being caught in one."

"I do not see the negative side of that, Lord Vader."

He couldn't help but bark a laugh. If she flashed some teeth in a smile, he probably imagined it. She was more likely to flash a dagger at him.

"But no. It is not a good depiction of Naboo. He has clearly never spent much time in the jewel of the world. Or the Empire at all." Many of his depictions of longstanding Imperial territories were likewise skewed. "Nor will he have time to, when I catch up with him."

Padmé still looked horribly sad. He itched to wipe the expression off her face—to kiss her, make her laugh, shock her, anything—but did not know how.

"I need your maps and expertise, Your Majesty," he finished. "Or a guide you can provide."

She kept staring at the map. Her eyes were shining.

"Padmé."

She stood abruptly.

"I will assign Sabé to show you the safest paths through the hills," she snapped. "We have several maps you Imperials have produced since you first occupied us, trying to purge our smugglers. Though she will not be accompanying you. You will move through my kingdom as quickly and painlessly as possible, do you understand?"

"Padmé—"

"I want you out of here, Anakin." The words were a snarl. He had never heard Nab sound so horribly aggressive. "You are nothing but a gravestone to me. Do you understand?"

He stood up, until she had to crane her neck to glare at him. He replaced his helmet on his head.

These meetings always went the same way. Torture—if torture was needed to survive.

"I understand," he said, and she turned away at the rumble of his voice through the helmet.

"You're getting better," Ahsoka hummed, leaning over to adjust Luke's fingers before he dropped all of Leia's hair and had to start again. "It does take practice."

"And muscles," he complained. "My arms still ache from doing it on myself."

"No wonder you were losing that fight when we got there."

He swatted Leia's shoulder. "I'd like to see you take on all of Vader's soldiers at once."

"I did. Did you not see me?"

"And did you manage to beat them all?"

"Shut up and finish my plait."

He huffed a laugh and did, the rhythmic motion soothing. He twisted it around and pinned it up like she'd shown him. "Is that good?"

Leia frowned and tilted her head. "It feels a bit wonky—"

"It's good," Ahsoka assured him. Leia didn't argue; she was smiling a little. "Now, try it on yourself?"

He took the hairbrush and ran it through his hair, grimacing at the greasy feel. It had been at least a week since his bath in Little Corel, and the ferry to Naboo followed by the trek up into the hills hadn't been a short or sanitary trip. They'd swum in one of the brooks just off the side of the path to clean much of the grime off of themselves, but he needed to wash his hair properly.

It took several tries to get his newly-brushed, neatly-cut hair into the same braided bun Leia had taught him to do, but that didn't matter; they had plenty of time, it seemed. They had wound their way into the gorse on the hillside that overlooked the main road from Theed; keeping watch while hidden in the bushes was starting to cramp his neck, and the thorns had nearly taken out his eyes a few times. Artoo had instead taken up the job—he was small enough he could be unnoticed, congruous enough to Naboo's climate that there were plenty of blue tits about other than him, and he could trill to his heart's content for Threepio to translate.

But time passed, and Vader never came.

Artoo flew back to them after the sun set on the second day they were lying in wait and took Threepio to fly with him in a larger perimeter, until they found where Vader's force actually was. That seemed like a solid idea, and also seemed like an excuse to get each other alone, and the three of them agreed to it wholeheartedly.

Luke, bored, had already used up all his remaining papyrus doodling and annotating the flowers he spotted, checking them against the guides found next to the botanical maps in the Codex. Some were newer than his records, and he had to dig deeper to find their name—they were a Rodian flower, or a Corellian flower, blown across on winds or brought by travellers, taking root in the new land fairly happily.

Most of such non-native species were Coruscanti flowers. When he noticed that, he crushed his drawings in a fist and let them fall to the ground, snapping the Codex shut.

Leia entertained herself in more useful ways. She'd practised her sharpshooting at first, but the shots echoed loudly through the valleys and after they heard the sounds of distant screaming about the end of days, Ahsoka had convinced her to stop. Then she was practising magic on unfamiliar things—always a useful skill to hone. She was eyeing the flowers they didn't get up in Alderaan and teaching herself how they worked, how to make them bloom and wither, how to bleed colour from the red petal to the blue petal, until she held a flower that faded from pink to red to purple to blue. She plucked it from its stem and tucked it into Luke's braided hair.

"Those were good drawings. Not particularly graphical, but they were pretty. Why did you…" She gestured to the crumpled piece of paper.

He picked it off the ground and stuffed it into the pocket of the coat he'd bought on Little Corel. Naboo was warmer than those windswept islands, but that was in the humid valleys; the exposed tops of her hills were chillier than expected.

"These flowers are from Coruscant," he said. "They're non-native and weren't here about forty years ago when the Codex's botanical record was last updated. I imagine they were introduced by the governors or soldiers who came to live over here and had to bring their whole families, their lifestyles, their gardens. Must've been a lot of people who did that, to make them so common. Or maybe they're just a prolific flower."

"They're not parasitic, are they?" She was eyeing the flowers he gestured to—pretty yellow ones, paler than the gorse flowers, about the height of his thumb—with suspicion.

"No. They just attract less wildlife than native ones."

She left it at that.

He joined her practising little magics, and for a day and a half more they exchanged tricks they each learnt from their respective experiences, Leia's much more technical, Luke's much more varied. She taught him how the pistols worked. They hit every time, so long as she understood how the bullet moved through the world and the world moved through the bullet. He taught her to listen to birdsong and string threads together to fix clothes ruined by a chase through the undergrowth. And since they were in Naboo, they spoke Nab to each other in reverent tones—Leia in the ivory vowels of rigorous education, Luke in the hodgepodge accent he'd developed from Ben and their travels. But it felt precious, speaking the language of the mother they'd never met less than fifty miles from her doorstep, while her land and valley unfolded beneath them like an envelope full of green and blue.

Ahsoka watched them quietly, smiling, and joined in as they practised—especially when they meditated. It felt like having Ben back, almost.

Luke found the time to wonder about him, now that he had time to think past the horror of his father stalking him wherever he went. Had he reached Ahch-To after all? Did Ahch-To still exist? It must, he theorised; it was the land of the gods, and their imprint could still be read upon the land, in the magic they had taught their Jedi worshippers. If that imprint remained, why not Ahch-To?

He must have been murmuring to himself as he stared up at the stars, on the second night they were waiting there, because Leia was lying next to him and asked softly, "Do you think Ben is coming back?"

Luke didn't know how to respond. He stole some of the diplomacy Leia wielded when her pistols failed, that had permeated the reports he'd heard of his mother over the years, and said, "He'll come back once he's found what he's looking for."

"Which is?"

"Ahch-To."

"And why is he looking for Ahch-To?"

"He's looking for knowledge. He's looking for a way to end the war, or beat Coruscant, or help the people who suffer from it. And knowledge of the future—to make sure he knows we can win."

Leia made a noise that was half-huff, half-snort. "So he left you behind?"

Artoo was on watch again, but Threepio was taking the chance to sleep, and was curled up next to Luke under his coat. His head burrowed into the palm of his hand out of sympathy as Luke tensed up. "Yes."

"Why? Did he—"

"He didn't abandon me," he snapped. "He wouldn't let me come because he said it was too dangerous. That was why we were left behind. He trusted that I knew enough to protect the Codex on my own."

Leia hesitated. "And… you couldn't?"

"Obviously I couldn't."

"So you wanted to sail into the too dangerous situation he'd banned you from before to solve it?" Her voice was angry still—he understood why, but it stung. He appreciated that she'd buried the anger until now to give him space in his messy emotional state. Her voice was angry, but it was deeply sad as well. "That was how you decided to keep the Codex safe—take it away from the rest of the world anyway?"

He let out a shuddering breath. "I didn't have anyone else to turn to, Leia. We've been struggling for so long. I didn't know what to do."

"You could have come to us! You could have—"

"Ben always knew what to do," he said. "That's why I need him. I don't know what to do, I don't understand Vader, or how to beat him, or how to do anything to help. I need Ben back, but he's gone."

Leia shook her head. "I don't think Ben always knew what to do."

"What?"

She leaned over and plucked the flower from his hair. It had crumpled in death since she put it there. "If he left, looking for Ahch-To," she said, "then clearly he didn't always know everything. Why would he need Ahch-To if he did?"

Luke thought about that. He had to concede the point.

"Even if searching for or even waiting for Ben is a non-starter, Leia, that doesn't change the situation. I can't do anything against Vader. He's older than me, stronger than me, knows more than me, wiser than me—"

"I don't think he's wise." She turned over to look at him. The stars above and the embers of the dying fire glittered in her eyes. "Don't get me wrong, he might be wiser than you, because you're an idiot"—she said it lightly, teasingly, so he knew it wasn't true—"but from what I've heard, he's incredibly thick."

"From what you've heard?"

"I heard Ahsoka talking to Bail and some of the others at the library, once," she said. "Talking about how Vader keeps bothering our mother, trying to convince her of something she's long rejected. He keeps trying to hold onto what he loves without seeing how he's hurt it. He's a smart tactician, but terribly unwise."

"His relationship with our mother doesn't exactly help me either," Luke said drily.

"It could. Don't rule out the possibility. He doesn't know we exist at all."

That… struck Luke, more than he wanted it to. He'd always felt the gaping hole in his life that was his father, poisoned like an empty well by the truth. He'd always wished that things could have been different.

Never had he considered how his father might react to knowing his children had lived at all.

He dismissed the thought. It felt too much like hope, and that hurt. Hope was what had lost him the heart-map. Hope would lose him the Codex, too.

He couldn't trust himself to hope.

"I'll keep it in mind," he said, "for when he finally gets here. Maybe."

"If he finally gets here." Leia rolled her eyes. "What's taking him so long, anyway? The path is straight. Moving lots of troops takes a while, but not that long."

What was taking him so long? Luke had been wondering. But something she said—the path is straight—rang a bell in his mind.

"The path isn't straight," he said. "We took a narrow road, that we could easily fit down, but he's transporting a few dozen troops and needs the wider road. And the wider road isn't consistent throughout the whole hill. There are cliff passes, valleys, ravines…"

"It's easy to get lost," Leia surmised. "You're telling me he got lost."

"I'm saying that Vader likely hasn't had cause to use these hills for twenty years. They're not on the path to Coruscant, after all, his force wasn't the one that drove my smuggler friend out, and he was banished from Naboo. So he would have to get his information from a local."

"There are locals who are friendly to the Empire. Naboo has an entire movement jostling for a union of two crowns."

"But if he didn't… If he tortured it out of someone, it would be patchy, incomplete, and unreliable anyway. If someone was giving it freely, but knowingly giving false directions"—he thought of his mother, and the passive resistance she'd described in her letters, and smiled—"then yeah. I think he got lost."

Leia huffed. "So we have to wait even longer for him?"

"Yes."

"Gods' sake." She cursed in Alderaanian, and he smiled. It had always been the language of her heart. "It's cold."

"Aren't you from the mountains?" he teased.

"Yeah! With well-built buildings and blazing fires! None of which we have here!"

He had to admit that he was cold too. His time in Tatooine and Ryloth had left him accustomed to temperatures much higher than this, and while it wasn't distracting, nor was it pleasant.

He lifted his coat. "Come on. There's room in here for everyone." Threepio, who'd managed to fall asleep, cheeped indignantly but scooched over to give Leia space.

She rolled over to him and put her arms around his waist as he put his arm around hers. They lay there embracing each other like that all night. And despite everything, Luke found it oddly comforting to realise that there were still some things that even Vader did not—could not—know.