Welcome to chapter 19!

First, an acknowledgement: while the general idea and some details about the Jedi AgriCorps come from the Star Wars Legends, I also borrowed from and built on the details in An AgriCorps Mystery by dave . davies . 5851 (remove the spaces if you look him up). Many thanks for permission to use ideas from that work! Some of this borrowing is evident in Eo's objections to the AgriCorps mentioned in this chapter.

Second, about chronology: as we follow the still-separate threads of Eo, Devin and Ry, I've sometimes made time jumps both backwards and forwards as we switch chapters from one character to another. This was largely due to my organizing the story thematically and not only chronologically. With this chapter, we jump forward again to 14 BBY. I expect this to be the last big time jump. At some point, I'll try to go back and clean up time indicators on the earlier chapters. In the meantime, sorry for any confusion, and please do message me if some point needs clarification!

The Way of a Siluan

Chapter 19: The Return of a Jedi

14 BBY, year 5 of Imperial rule

Eo lifted her arms to the sky and closed her eyes and turned her face to the warmth of the morning sun. She took a deep breath. The air on her cheeks was still cool and moist but the sky promised a hot day. The sun had come up only just high enough over the tops of the trees to touch Eo's face, but the garden at her feet was still in shadow. She waited, eyes closed, feeling the expectant hum of everything around her.

Now! The sun rose higher above the tree line and touched the garden, and Eo felt the air around her surge with joy and power as the plants burst into song. Or so she felt it to be. No one had told her that this sort of Force-hearing was not uncommon for those Jedi of the AgriCorps who were trained to connect with plants, and so she didn't think of this in terms of the Force, only the plants are singing.

Eo opened her eyes and let her arms fall to her sides. The force of the sun-power on the leaves of the plants was lifting the morning dew off in a cloud of gold vapour. With a glow of pride Eo realized that the garden had changed for her, or that she had changed for the garden. It was almost five years and more than a full round of the planet's seasons since she arrived on Hokto. When she first came garden had seemed no more than a big green tangle, but now – after thousands of hours of planting and weeding and watering, and day after day of harvesting and eating – she knew these plants. The colourful brakka and chadriswhose leaves she'd harvested all winter sported tall flower stalks now, gone to seed with the warm summer days. The frilly pink-flowered plant she'd seen on her first day in the garden bore five-sided seed pods; those were starpeas (which weren't really peas at all), and yima, the tubers she and Varda had planted back in that first spring, were popping up here and there with feathery purple leaves. And among them all rambled a fuzzy vine with big flat leaves; that wasmaramelo.

Maramelowas her favourite. The little yellow gourds it produced were full of dark green hull-less seeds, one of the few truly high-protein and high-energy foods to be had on Hokto. At nearly seventeen, Eo was still skinny and small for her age, and badly needed every calorie and every amino acid she could get. The thought of maramelomade her mouth water. She watched the broad-leafed vines twining around themselves, trying to climb higher to get more light but falling back down under their own weight. They'd grow better, and produce more, she thought, if they didn't ramble all over the ground like that.

She knew what she would do: she would go and cut down some of the tall straight branches from the shrubs that grew near the lakeside, and make a trellis so that she could train the plants upright. She could see it: the fuzzy green vines climbing up the trellis with big gold flowers and yellow fruits hanging down. They would be beautiful, just like a flowering vine she's seem growing on a trellis in a container garden on a portico of the Jedi Temple, overlooking the Coruscant cityscape. She turned to toward the hut to go get her knife.

"Eo!" Varda called, appearing from another corner of the garden.

Eo's heart sank. She had a feeling she knew what was coming. "Yes?"

"I checked the debris field with the telescope last night. I think the gap will be open again in three lunar cycles. You need to bring Ava Yen's navigational droid to finish the starship."

Eo stared at Varda blankly for moment. Varda reminding her that the gap in the debris field was going to open and that she'd have to leave was nothing new, but it was a while since Varda had said anything about the droid. "I'm not sure about that droid," Eo said. "It's kind of batty."

"Can you fly the ship?" Varda asked pointedly.

"No, I can't."

"And I am staying here, so I suggest you get that droid."

"Now?" Eo's voice sounded more like fourteen than seventeen.

"If it isn't working I'll need time to fix it."

Eo sighed and looked at Varda standing there in her green sari with a firm look on her face. The image of the trellis Eo wanted to make stood vividly in her mind, and she was very much inclined to think that the droid could wait. But she saw a change in Varda now. It had come gradually, and Eo was only just now realizing it: Varda's face was wrinkled more than it ever had been, and her hair was grey streaked with black instead of black streaked with grey. She looked tired. For all Varda's sternness and sarcasm, Eo suddenly felt a pit of sadness in her stomach at the thought that in a little while, she would have to leave Varda behind.

Eo sometimes wondered why the Jedi speak so little about love. The Sayings of Ava Shiowere full of things like: In this you will find Light, to love all as being your very self. But in the Jedi Order, what stuck out to her was the obedience of padawan to master, and the deep bonds that often formed between them. Eo would never be a padawan, but Varda was, in some sense, her Jedi master. Perhaps to obey was one way to love.

Eo was very much inclined to think the droid could wait another day, but to be fair, so could her trellis. She stamped the image of the trellis into her mind so that she could come back to it later.

"Alright, I'll be back later," Eo said to Varda, and turned to go get the boat.

Varda watched Eo trot off into the forest in the direction of the lake. This one is special, she thought. But why did she come to me?

# # #

On the far side of the lake, Eo pushed through the forest underbrush that had grown up over the path she'd worn to the shipwreck. She hadn't actually been to the wreck since early spring, when she'd finally finished making Varda's starship ready to fly. When she arrived with scratched-up arms and a twig in her hair at the clearing where the wreck stood, she found that it, too, was more overgrown than ever. Over the coat of moss and lichen that it had worn all winter, orange-flowered vines rambled and criss-crossed so thickly that she could barely see the hull. The nav-droid, however, sat on top of the ship, defiantly poking up from under the vines.

Eo had come for that droid, and wanted to get it to Varda's starship quickly enough to still have time before dinner for what she wanted to do in the garden, but there was one thing she needed to do first. It was her ritual every time she had to go to the wreck, but it was doubly important now that she would be leaving soon. Eo waded through the ferns that had grown up around the ship and found her way to the mound of stones on Ava Yen's grave.

The stones too were covered in shaggy mosses and frilly lichens now, dappled by the sun-patches where light reached down through the thick forest canopy. Eo stood quietly to feel the life-hum of the forest around her, and to remember.

It wasn't just that Ava Yen had brought dignity to the shame of her being assigned to the AgriCorps. At first I was scared to touch a dead body, but I now feel peace, I feel alive!she had told Varda as they laid those flat grey stones on his grave. That feeling was part of something she wasn't sure how to name, much less explain why she wanted it, but that something was wrapped up in the life-song of the forest and the garden, in the way she felt when she read The Sayings of Ava Shioand in the sense of Light she'd experienced as a child in the Jedi Temple. It was something she wanted the way she wanted to warm herself over the fire when she was cold or to dip into the lake when she was too hot.

That something – it must, she thought, be the Light of the Force, though it went beyond what she'd learned in the Temple – Ava Yen had showed her that she didn't need to be a Jedi Knight in order to find it. It is often that way with the death of a Siluan, Varda had told her. They believe that when a person dies, the energy they cultivated within them is released. If a person has cultivated Light within them, their energy can bring life and peace. Eo bowed with one hand over her heart, reaching down with the other to touch the cool mossy stones on his grave.

As she stood up again, Eo noticed that the sun-patches had moved nearly a handbreadth since she'd been there. She looked over at the droid on top of the starship. She didn't like CX24, but it was, after all, Ava Yen's droid. If he had left her with that sense of aliveness that she carried with her now, and if the cloth bag and the digital file reader he'd left behind had given her The Sayings of Ava Shio– perhaps the droid had something to teach her too. With one last bow toward the grave, Eo turned to the shipwreck.

The near side of the shipwreck offered a series of foot- and hand-holds for climbing up to the top, but little black-and-yellow wasps were flying in and out of a huge papery nest they'd built there, so Eo went around to the far side. The vines, she was glad to find, were old and thick and tough enough for her to scramble up through their scratchy leaves. On top of the ship, she pulled the younger, more tender vines away from the nav-droid and undid the heavy clips that held it in place.

As Eo pressed the lichen-covered power buttom on top of the droid's head to turn it on, it occurred to her to wonder whether the long winter out in the rain might have rendered the droid non-functional, but CX24 lit up, beeped and whirred to life.

"Communication," Eo said firmly, remembering the last time.

"To lock in voice response, say 'voice.' For analog mode, say 'analog,'" the droid said in a slow and scratchy mechanical voice.

"VOICE."

"I am CX24, advanced navigational assistant. How can I help you?"

"Please come with me," Eo said. "We're going to the other starship."

CX24 made a mechanical tsk tsk tsk, then said, "Request requires mobility options. Mobility options are currently unavailable."

"Please," Eo said gently, "we need you to fly the starship."

"That does not compute," the droid said. "For navigational assistance, say 'navigation.' For data access, say 'data.' For communication options, say 'communication.' For advanced options, say 'advanced options.'"

"Advanced options," Eo said quickly, hoping to find she knew not what to help her.

"For manual override, say 'manual override.' To select alternative algorithms for hyperspace jump calculation, say 'alternate algorithms.' To recalibrate galactic positioning system, say 'recalibrate GPS.'"

The first sounded hopeful. "Manual override," Eo said.

"You are not authorized to make that selection. For navigational assistance, say..."

Through a hole the droid was wearing in her patience, Eo glimpsed an idea. Without waiting to hear any more, she pressed the power button on top of CX24's head, and after a final sputtering the droid went silent. Then she steadied herself on top of the ship, carefully bent her knees to spare her back, and with her arms around the droid, lifted it out of its socket.

With the weight of the droid bearing down on her arms and shoulders, Eo realized that her plan was only half-baked at best: she hadn't counted on not being able to see her feet. With her first step, her foot caught a vine and she tripped.

Nine years of childhood Jedi training were not wholly lost on Eo. Without quite knowing how she did it, Eo managed to turn the three-metre fall into a roll and found herself lying on the damp forest floor, staring at ground level into the cool forest of ferns that grew beneath the tree canopy, surprised at the stillness after the first shock of relocation had passed. Slowly she rotated her ankles, then her wrists, and then satisfied that nothing was injured, she got up, dusted herself off, and looked around for the nav-droid.

There was mechanical squawk a few metres away. Eo pulled aside a clump of ferns to find CX24 upside down, flailing obviously functional ambulatory struts and firing a posterior jet pack in a fruitless attempt to right itself.

Eo's resolve to be open to learning something from Ava Yen's droid sufficed to keep her from getting angry that mobility options evidently were, in fact, available, but the sight of the cranky little droid bottoms up, helplessly trying to right itself was quite unexpected. Without thinking, Eo clapped a hand over her mouth and giggled.

The droid let loose a string of angry, unintelligible droidal jibberish.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" Eo said quickly, doing her best to sound contrite. She helped the droid to its feet, but for CX24 she had already gone too far. Nothing Eo tried thereafter would induce the droid to either shut down or shut up.

For a moment, Eo thought of just leaving CX24 there in the forest to natter away until it ran out of power, but she didn't want to find out what Varda would say if she came back without it. So after hoisting the droid up on one shoulder, she staggered with it back to the lake.

The boat rode dangerously low in the water under the weight of the nav-droid, and as Eo struggled to paddle her unwilling passenger across the lake progress was slow at best. The boat jerked and tipped and lurched because despite the droid's square, stocky and unbendable frame, CX24 insisted on leaning back and forth to try to look down into the water. They nearly capsized several times before Eo lost her temper and swatted the droid upside the head with her paddle, after which CX24 flopped down in the bottom of the boat and made a whimpering meep meep meep for the rest of the trip.

By the time Eo had wrestled CX24 into Varda's ship, her head ached from the noonday sun beating down on her black hair out on the shadeless lake. She felt wretched for having hit the droid and angry with herself for not having found a better way, yet also angry that CX24 hadn't given her much in the way of options. Any thought of learning something from Ava Yen's nav-droid was long gone.

When Eo connected the droid to the starship's computer, CX24 refused, of course, to run the programming required to connect to the ship's navigation system. But CX24 did allow her access, via the computer, to a seemingly random list of files carried in its memory bank, and when Eo saw what files were in the list, she went running back to the house.

"Varda! Varda! Varda!" she shrieked as she ran into the hut, where Varda was stirring a pot of soup for dinner.

"Eo, what in the galaxy are you shouting about?"

"The nav-droid, CX24, it has the complete text of The Way of a Siluan! The whole thing, it's on there."

Varda looked impressed, but her voice was stern. "It's a pity you didn't find that earlier. Copy it to your file reader and bring it back."

"Yes, yes, that's what I came for," Eo said, and grabbing the bag with the file reader, ran back out.

# # #

After dinner, when the dishes were cleared away, Varda and Eo sat on the big reed mat on the dirt floor of the hut with a basket of starpeas to shell for tomorrow's breakfast. Varda lit the lamp and Eo brought out the digital file reader. She had left it out in the sun all afternoon, solar panel side up, to charge the failing battery, and it still felt warm in her hands as she read aloud from the text she'd found in CX24's memory bank.

Though I may die, yet shall the Light be unbroken.

Though malice and malady wither all green, yet shall the Light be unbroken.

Though night of a thousand millenia swallow all into darkness, yet shall the Light be unbroken.

For the Light is before all, the Light creates all, and when all has been, yet shall the Light be.

You seek the Light? Why do you fear? What you seek no one can take from you, what you desire no one can drive from you.

Seek the Light, but know that we do not yet know the true Light. A day will come when the Light shall dawn for us. Until that day, let us walk in peace.

This concludes the first discourse of Ava Yelena.

Eo voice quavered a bit as she read. When she finished, she sat silent for a moment as the sound of Varda shelling starpeas into a metal bowl marked the time.

Eo's thoughts moved in wordless paths. Reading the sacred Siluan text felt like eating when she was hungry and drinking when she was thirsty, but it wasn't a feeling she could put into words. She reached out and grabbed a handful of starpea pods and a metal bowl, and sat quietly for a long time, feeling the rough five-sided pods crack under her fingers and watching the round white seeds drop into the bowl.

Varda, for whom reading the text was an exercise in Eo's education and not her own, was not specially moved by the words Eo had read aloud, but considered whether she might have any commentary to offer for Eo's benefit. After cracking open a few pods and letting the starpeas fall with a plink into the metal bowl, she decided to wait to see what Eo might say first, if anything.

"Who was Ava Yelena?" Eo asked at length.

"She was one of the Twi'lek Siluans who left Ryloth to settle on the planet Yalith, here in the Hokto system three millenia ago. The Siluans revere her teachings on non-violence and love even for one's enemies, but I question whether many of them have any real concept of what that means. It's one thing to like those sorts of ideas from the quiet of your garden, and quite another to practice them when your enemy is staring you in the face."

Eo looked over at Varda, intrigued. "What happened to her?"

"Sith came to Yalith in those days. There were hundreds of them before they had their Rule of Two."

Eo looked somewhat alarmed. "Did they kill her?"

"Eventually," Varda said in a matter-of-fact tone, "but perhaps it was harder for her to first see the darkness of those days. Her planet was green once, but now Yalith is just another rock, Hokto System Planetary Object 743 is all the astro-geographers call it now."

"But then how did anyone find her writings?"

"Strictly speaking, Ava Yelena didn't write anything. She was a medic, and a herbalist. When the Sith had all but destroyed the planet they turned to civil war. When she found their wounded she would try to tend them, the crazy woman. Most of them died anyways, but one lived and became her disciple, Ava Mannath. He transcribed her teachings and brought them with him to Yemer when the Jedi finally arrived and helped him escape."

Eo tiled her head to one side the way she sometimes did when she was thinking. It was a strange story, she felt, sad and beautiful and harsh. It reminded her of a story she'd heard in the Jedi Temple, but she couldn't remember now who the story was about. "I remember you said there are a lot of Siluans in Yemer," she said, not sure how to put her other thoughts into words.

"Yes!" Varda said fondly. "That was where I got to know the Siluans. I was sent to Yemer to mediate a dispute, but I fell ill and stayed several days in the hospital at the Paloma monastery. You might consider joining the Paloma monastery, after you finish serving with the AgriCorps."

"Maybe I could just go straight to the monastery. I don't want to serve in the AgriCorps." What Eo had heard of the AgriCorps was drudgery and isolation: walking through row after row of the same crop for hours and hours, trying to use the Force to aid their growth, serving alone in some remote outpost. She'd heard more than one story of AgriCorps Jedi severely depressed after a few months of this.

Though Eo did not voice these objections, Varda knew them. They'd talked about this before. "You aren't going to just any AgriCorps station," Varda said firmly. "You're going to Deema. Things are different on Deema; my friend Lu Mang is there."

Eo scowled down at at the floor. She'd heard enough about Master Lu to trust that he might do things differently, but the AgriCorps still meant delaying what she'd rather do, and it meant the dishonour of being a Jedi without being a Jedi knight. "I'd rather just find a Siluan elder to train me right away," Eo said, and showed her feelings in the force with which she cracked open her last pod of starpeas.

Varda gave Eo a sharp look. "If you do, they will remind you that the Jedi raised you from your infancy and ask you to finish serving with the AgriCorps until you are old enough to take your monastic vows. To become a Siluan, you will need to find peace even in doing what you dislike. So please be careful: if you go to Deema but resent it, it could twist you more than you expect. I don't want you to end up like me."

Eo looked over at Varda in utter surprise, but Varda shook her head at this. "You are old enough now to face reality for what it is. I've wrecked my whole life with resentment. But that is what it is. From the beginning, I didn't really want to be a Jedi Knight."

"But Varda! You're a wonderful Jedi!" Eo protested quickly.

"You say that because you are young and inexperienced. The truth is that when I was growing up in the Temple I longed to go into the AgriCorps, to serve alongside the Jedi who brought me to the Temple when I was a child. But when the time came the Council said I was too strong in the Force to be wasted on the AgriCorps, and assigned me to be a padawan with a Jedi master.

"I obeyed, but for a long time a shadow lay on me, and I became angry, not for myself only, but for my peers, and later for the younglings I taught in the Temple. Too many of them who were assigned to the AgriCorps lost their way as Jedi because they grew up thinking that being a Jedi only means being a Jedi knight.So I fought the Council to elevate the role of agriculture in Jedi education, but they wouldn't listen. 'We are raising guardians of peace and justice, not farmers,' they told me, and when I persisted they threatened to revoke my seat on the Council. So I went silent, but perhaps now you can see why I came to resent the Jedi Order altogether.

"Perhaps I should have been like my friend Lu Mang. He wanted to see the same changes as I did but he had the patience to seem as if he wasn't getting what he wanted, and yet in his own quiet way he accomplished more for the benefit of the AgriCorps than I ever did. But what's past is past, and here I am now."

Eo sat transfixed. In all the time she'd spent on Hokto, Varda had never told Eo even half this much about her past. "So...that's why you came here?" Eo asked cautiously, hoping almost against hope that Varda would be willing to say more, but for awhile Varda didn't answer, and there was only the sound of shells cracking and peas dropping into two metal bowls.

When Eo had almost given up on getting an answer, Varda sighed, not at Eo but to herself. "It is and it isn't," she said. "Some of the ancient Jedi masters taught that to resort to violence at all is at best to walk the line between Light and Dark. So the Jedi must have the wisdom to take up the sword only when all else fails and the strength not to be given over to the Dark Side of the Force when they do. But sometimes we fail. I only served a year in the Clone Wars but it was very hard for me. The more I fought the more I felt the Dark Side of the Force grow stronger in me. I suppose I was weak already with my resentment – and I certainly did not go to the war without grumbling – but one day I lost my composure and killed two of the clones who served under me when they made a mistake. Then I knew I had to leave. So I told no one, and came here."

Eo's face, always an open book, showed a mix of shock and sadness.

Varda saw this, but her expression didn't soften, and the unsteady lamplight sent shadows flickering across her face. "So perhaps it is just as well for you to have been assigned to the AgriCorps," she said. "It's hard to be the Knight of an Order that has lost its way."

Eo nodded slowly, trying to get her mind around this new idea.

"You have chosen a hard path too," Varda said. "The Siluans aren't tasked with being guardians of so-called peace and justice, rather simply to 'acquire Light within' as they say. But that is no small thing. They must find the strength to face evil, when it finds them, without any recourse to either hate or violence. That is why they say though I may die, yet shall the Light be unbroken, so that they can face loss and even death with peace."

"That is very difficult," said Eo.

"I told you it was hard," Varda said flatly. "Do you still want to be a Siluan?"

Eo's skinny shoulders slumped as she felt the weight of the question settle over her. She tried to imagine what she would do if some monster, Sith or otherwise, came to destroy Hokto, as the Sith had destroyed Ava Yelena's planet. Eo knew she was no good with a light-sabre, but the image of the beautiful forest and garden on Hokto being slashed and burned while she hid for dear life made her think with relish of shooting blasters and throwing bombs and commandeering proton torpedos – and then she felt sad. Perhaps Varda was right: it was one thing to like teachings about nonviolence and compassion and unconquerable Light, but quite another to actually practice them.

"I want to try," Eo said, looking troubled. But then, buoyed by another thought, she shook herself. "Anyways, the challenge of being a Jedi is not so different, I think. They can't just lash out and give themselves up to anger and hatred when they're fighting some kind of evil. They still need to face their enemies with compassion, and act without vengeance."

Varda shook her head and sighed, sounding somewhat exasperated. "Eo, one day you will have to face the fact that the way of a Siluan and the way of a Jedi are very different paths. You won't always be able to hold the two together." As Varda spoke, she got up and poured the two bowls of shelled starpeas into a pot for tomorrow's breakfast, then scraped together the few brown pods that had scattered from the main pile. Time to go to bed, she thought.

A cloud passed over Eo's face as she sat thinking. "I think they aren't so different," she said, more confidently than she normally sounded when she dared to contradict Varda. "They both ask you to love something more than you love yourself." She looked up at Varda as if to ask her thoughts on this, but Varda turned her face away and didn't answer.

When Eo woke the next morning, she didn't see Varda at her usual place by the stove. Stepping out into the cool before dawn, Eo followed the voice of the tree-frogs through the garden and down to the shores of the lake. Varda was there, and in her hand a blade of brilliant light wheeled and flashed as her body flowed through a series of motions, first quick and beautiful, then slow and fearsome, like a dance and unlike dance. Eo barely breathed as she stood stone-still, watching wide-eyed.

But then Varda caught Eo's eye, and extinguished the light-sabre. Shrinking back into her usual self, she came and stood in front of Eo, who at seventeen was now a head taller than Varda. They stood for a moment facing each other, in awe of the moment that had been, and awkward at its discovery. Varda was the first to speak.

"How can I teach you if I'm not willing to learn? Long ago I turned from the way of the Jedi, but from today I will walk again in it."

"I'm happy for you, Varda" Eo said, her eyes shining.

"Happy? We shall see. But I'm very glad that you are here with me," Varda said, and bowed to her apprentice.