Chapter 30: Finding Varda
BBY 14 0 months 6 days
Garth and Devin dropped out of hyperspace with the Hokto system springing suddenly into view: one white star surrounded by a bright cloud of asteroids and planetoids, hundreds of them, speckled through a bright haze of smaller interplanetary debris.
"Wow, this is worse than I thought," Garth said, staring at the maze of orbiting rock that they were about to enter.
"What did you expect?" Devin asked.
"I just didn't think it would be this bad," Garth said as he called up the landing coordinates on the computer. The debris field that filled much of the Hokto Sytem was too complex for computer navigation, but he would still need the computer to make sure he was headed in the right direction while he manually picked a path through the maze of asteroids that lay before them.
"So here's what we'll do," Garth told Devin, who was sitting next to him in the cockpit of his little cargo freighter. "Master Lu and I used to do this thing where I fly and you use the Force feel out what's coming at us before I see it and then you to share what you're sensing with me."
Devin winced. It was certainly possible for a Force-user to share their heightened understanding with a non-Force-user via direct touch, but it required a great deal of concentration, and it tended to feel intimate in a way Devin didn't quite like.
"Well, you want to get the old lady or don't you?" Garth snapped when he saw the look on Devin's face.
Devin sighed. "K, let's give this a try," he said and put his hand on Garth's shoulder, pulling together the best of his Jedi dispassion to block that too-close feeling from the interaction. He soon felt more aware of his friend: his heart pounding a little harder than Devin expected from the tough look on his face, the way his fingers slightly clenched and unclenched the steering console, the way he shifted in the leather pilot's seat. Back in the day when he'd first gotten to know Garth, none of that would have bothered him but somehow now it did. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and forced himself to focus on the task at hand.
Garth looked at Devin and raised an eyebrow. "You don't have to be that uptight about it, do you?" he said sarcastically. Devin rolled his eyes but before he could answer, Garth's hand was on the motion control lever, pushing the starship forward.
Soon they were dipping, diving, swerving, curving, whirling around asteroids and there was nothing in either person's conscious awareness but that present moment: Devin's mind sensing each asteroid just before it came into view, Garth's hands quick and skillful on the steering console. When they finally reached the far side of the debris field and Devin took his hand off Garth's shoulder, it seemed as if hours had gone by but a glance at the chronometer told Devin only forty minutes had elapsed.
Garth ran both hands through his hair. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. "Man, I need a drink!" he said and got up from the pilot's seat. "Look, you know your stuff. The coordinates are in the computer already, so just do your thing."
While Garth cracked open a bottle of something dark, Devin slipped into the pilot's seat. There were no asteroids or interplanetary debris to dodge now. Looking down on the globe of the planet where Varda was, just a slim crescent of shining green-blue, Devin felt a sense of awe and of gratitude well up inside him. There on that little gem of a planet yet one Jedi Knight remained in the galaxy. Having braved the interplanetary debris field, Devin did not doubt that he would find her. For the first time since that darksider came to Nechako, he felt a true sense of hope.
As they sped towards the border of night and day along the curve of that blue-green crescent, on the day side Devin saw wide blue oceans and vast continents where verdant, untouched forests ran wild. All those green trees, all that shining water, all seemed so exotic to Devin after years in the prairies of Nechako.
As he followed the cues from the navi-computer, Devin found himself flying inland from one of those ocean shores at the very border of night and day. Under a sky pink with dawn, he came upon a shining lake surrounded by a forest of tall dark conifers mixed with broad leafy canopies of green-gold. It was so near to the landing coordinates that he knew this must be the lake Eo had talked so much about in her stories of Hokto.
Devin felt his stomach contract at the thought of her. So much of why Eo's death hit him so hard was that cruel reality of finding one rare person who knew what his past was like, only to lose her again right away. It was a lonely, lonely feeling that even Shie didn't quite get.
But he was filled too with a longing to see Varda again, and not only for the help she could give him against that darksider. Varda knew him from the days before he was Devin Baxter the farmer, back when he was Devin Strong, the Jedi. He knew her all the way back from growing up in the Jedi Temple, when she used to teach math and physics and botany to the Jedi younglings, being one of the more scholarly knights. But the word scholarly hardly seemed to fit her. She used to visit Deema when he and Master Lu were there, and when the two of them weren't deep in conversation, they used to practice duelling together. Devin would watch sometimes, standing breathless on the sidelines. Even now he could see it: the clash and flash and whirl of green and blue lightsabres, beautiful and terrifying.
The memory made something Devin didn't quite want to think of poke its way into his mind. He was coming to get her help, yes, but he was also coming with bad news: Master Lu, ever a close friend of hers, was now dead, as were all the other Jedi, as was Eo. It was not a comfortable feeling with which Devin realized that he had given almost no thought whatsoever to how he would break all this to Varda, but now was not the time to think. The navi-computer was beeping at him as he neared his target and he had to focus on making a landing.
With his hands clenched tight on the steering console, Devin swooped down to the landing coordinates on the far side of the lake only to find that there was no obvious opening in the trees to provide a spot to land. He had to shoot past the place and circle back again to find that there was indeed a small opening in the treetops and a clearing on the ground beneath. It was just barely big enough for the sleek little passenger starship that Eo had brought with her but not nearly big enough for Garth's cargo ship.
"Look, I'll handle it from here," Garth said, smelling of drink and leaning over Devin's shoulder to check the control panel.
Devin yielded the pilot's seat to Garth but gave his friend a good hard look. "Are you going to be able to fly out of here?" he asked.
"No problem," Garth said, "that stuff's not what you think. I'll just take a rest while you're getting that Jedi of yours and I'll be fine."
Garth deftly angled the cargo ship in between the trees as far as he could go, and then, to Devin's surprise, extended landing struts nearly three meters long. Instead of lowering the gangway, he showed Devin to a landing platform that he could lower to the surface. "My ship's better than you thought, eh?" he told Devin.
Devin smiled. "That it is," he said.
Garth grinned, then yawned. "Good luck," he said. "I'll be here when you come back with her."
Devin nodded, and with a press of a button, he was slowly lowered to the ground.
In the pale light that filtered through the trees, Devin stepped off the landing platform onto the springy forest floor and into a world unlike any he'd ever known. All around him tall straight evergreens reached up towards the pale dawn sky, reaching sweeping branches down into the dusk around them. In the distance, between the trees, he could see the shining surface of the lake. All around him rose a chorus of chirping voices, not the monotonous creek, creek, creek of the crickets on Nechako but a more fleshy and resonant sound of voices that rose and fell together, creating an ebb and flow to the energy of the music. It was that song and the voice of the trees that dominated the feel of the Force in this place.
Devin found a narrow little path beneath the trees and followed it, with the tall ferns on either side swishing against his pant-legs as he went. He began to feel like a character in an old story, the apprentice seeking a master in some pristine and secluded place where such masters dwell. With that thought, and with each cool breath of the pure forest air, Devin felt the stress and tension of the last few days melt away from him. He realized now just how much his muscles had hurt, from the strain of that flight, from the stress of dealing with Saw and the thing at the dam, from the terror of that darksider's visit and from the evil he had seen in his encounter nearly a week before with Ry Kyver.
The light that filtered through the trees was shifting from blue-grey to gold-rose as Devin came to a fork in the trail. Going left, he walked slightly uphill a short ways, under some broad-leafed tree that let more of the light through, and then out into a clearing. The sun was not yet fully up but the pale dawn-light was more than enough to see by. There was a rough hut made of bent branches, about six meters square, and beside it, a tangle of plants different from those in the forest. After a moment, Devin realized it must be a garden: amid the tangle of plants, there were rows of something with dark feathery leaves, and a plush jade-green vine that climbed up a handmade trellis. He stopped and touched the fuzzy leaves of that vine and noticed little gourd-shape fruits forming beneath them. There was something of Eo in this place, he realized, or rather, Eo had something of this place in her.
Devin felt sadness well up in him. Less than two weeks ago, Eo was here. The feeling quickly turned to anger at what Ry Kyver had done, but anger felt jarringly at odds with the quietness of the forest and the garden around him. It wasn't so much that this place was so strong in the Light side of the Force, as that it was unexpectedly neutral, a place where each being could become what at its heart it most wanted to be, and Devin knew in that moment that he didn't want to be the darkness that tried to rise up inside him. Pushing his thoughts of Ry Kyver away, he checked the hut.
"Varda?" Devin called softly as he knocked at the door. It was made of sticks woven together by some sort of reeds and didn't stand up to knocking very well. He opened it a crack. "Varda?" he called again but heard nothing. He opened the door all the way. Inside there were two empty beds on the ground along the wall at the far end of the hut, a reed mat, a little wood stove and various baskets full of tubers and dried seed stalks. Something that might have been garlic hung braided from the roof in one corner, but no one was there. He closed the door.
Devin circled around behind the hut and found an open space in the forest where some sort of round-leaved plant stood still and silent with its long stalks reaching up beneath the trees. But there was no Varda.
It began to occur to Devin that something was strange. He wasn't so perfectly skilled at such things, but he should have been able to feel Varda in the Force. She should have been there in the fabric of the energies interwoven around him. But all he could feel was the trees and the rise and fall of those chirping voices, which he began to suspect were some sort of tree-frog.
"Varda! Varda!" Devin yelled and then waited but there was no answer. He left the garden behind him and went back to that fork in the trail. "Varda!" he called, cupping his hands around his mouth like a megaphone.
Devin called out in every direction but heard nothing. He began to worry. If he and Garth could get through that debris field, couldn't that darksider do the same? Surely Varda would know how to handle that. But what if there was more than one of them? He thrust the thought aside and took the other fork in the trail, down and down towards the shining lake.
After a long descent of a narrow trail criss-crossed by tree roots, the ground abruptly flattened out and turned sandy. The trail dipped down into a final thicket of dense bushes, but Devin stuck to it, bending over to walk through the narrow tunnel worn between the bushes. On one twig, there was a long strand of grey hair, human apparently. He wasn't sure whether this was hopeful or not.
Then, bush and forest gave way and he was out in the open, with a rose-coloured dawn spread out in the lake and sky before him. "Varda!" he called out one last time. A niggling in his mind told him to look to his right.
Out a spot in the forest several metres away came a little old woman in a tired green sari and an old black shawl. She held herself upright as she walked in a way that seemed somehow brave and resolute to Devin, but he couldn't help but notice that she walked unevenly with a stump-step sort of gait. As she came closer he could see that there were dark circles around her eyes and she scraped wisps of grey hair back from her wrinkled brown face as she came. She seemed small and fragile somehow, not at all the Varda Devin remembered, yet Varda all the same. He felt a sudden ache in his chest as he wondered how she would handle everything he had to tell her.
"Devin, by the will of the Force we meet again," Varda called out as she came closer.
Devin stopped staring and remembered his formalities in time to make a slight bow. "By the will of the Force," he replied.
"How did you come here?" she asked. "I take it that Eo reached you safely."
It took Devin a few bewildered moments to realize that Varda must be thinking that he had come from the old AgriCorps station on Deema, where Eo had been headed when she found him at his current home on Nechako. He rubbed his forehead, wondering where to begin. "She did reach me safely," he said slowly, "that's how I found out you were here. But perhaps we should sit down. I have a lot to tell you, and it's mostly bad news."
Varda motioned to a log lying on the beach and they both sat down, Varda with considerably more effort than it took Devin.
"Did the Separatists win the war?" Varda asked and wrapped her black shawl tight around her. In the dawn light, the wind off the lake was chill.
Devin shook his head and made a face. He almost wished now that they had. "No one won the war," he said. "About five years ago, the Supreme Chancellor accused the Jedi Order of treason and had every last one of the Knights murdered by the Clone army. They say now that he was actually a Sith Lord all along. But he's in charge of the whole galaxy now, as Emperor. So there's no Republic, no Separatists, no Jedi Order. It's all gone."
Varda's face twitched. "And Lu Mang?"
Devin bit his lip. "He got shot down like the rest of them."
Looking down at the ground, Varda blinked back tears and nodded. She showed no other reaction, but in the fabric of the Force, which Devin could sense clearly now that she was right in front of him, he felt a massive shock-wave rocking through her. He felt a deep respect for her mastery of herself and did not comment on what he sensed. For a while, they both just sat in silence.
"Until I met Eo," Devin said at length, "I thought even you were dead. It made me so happy to hear that you're still alive. You might be the only one left now."
Varda scowled. "But what happened to the AgriCorps station on Deema? I thought you said Eo was safe," she said.
Devin got a sinking feeling in his stomach. A sudden and distinct memory of Eo came to mind, of how avidly, how affectionately she spoke of Varda and it dawned on him that maybe the news about Master Lu might not actually be the worst of what he had to tell Varda. He wished now that he didn't have to break any of this to her, but it was too late now to turn back from what he had to say. He sighed a big sigh and got started.
"She did reach me about two weeks ago, but not on Deema. She made an emergency landing on another planet called Nechako. That's where I live now. That's how I met her."
Varda seemed visibly relieved. "She is staying with you, then?"
Devin rubbed his forehead, wishing a thousand times over that he didn't have to do this. "She said she wanted to be a Siluan, and so I took her to a guy I know on Iwaki called Ava Kirrin, to train with him," he said and paused to gather together what he had to say next.
"I never met him, but Iwaki is a good place," Varda said. "But what is wrong? Has there been trouble?"
Devin took a deep breath. "Varda, forgive me, I didn't know until it had happened, but the first night we were there, a Dark Jedi came. She used to serve with the Agri-Corps, Ry Kyver, she somehow found Eo..."
Varda's face showed growing concern.
"The morning after we got there, Eo wasn't in the house when the rest of us got up. I found her lying in the forest, dead. There was nothing we could do."
For a moment Varda just looked stunned, her face completely blank. Then she blinked a few times and looked out across the shining lake that lay beside them. She closed her eyes and shook her head. An expression of deep pain crossed her face. "I knew I should have gone with her," Varda said and, to Devin's shock, beat her breast with her fist.
"No, Varda, you couldn't have known what would happen. It's not your fault," Devin said. He reached out a hand towards her but then stopped short; touch wasn't really the Jedi way. He groped for words to say and found none.
But Varda wasn't paying attention. She was taking the ends of her old black shawl in her hands and burying her face in them as she sat there on the log beside the lake, her thin shoulders hunched and shaking.
Seeing Varda cry soundlessly like this, Devin felt sick in the pit of his stomach. He looked out over the bright morning lake and realized all at once that he had been wrong, damn wrong. When he set out to find her, he'd only thought of getting what he needed: Varda the Jedi Knight, Varda the warrior who would draw her bright sword and chase away the dark things of the night that had come upon the galaxy, not Varda the woman who had shared so many years with Eo in this quiet place. He wished he could have thought at least a little more beforehand about what it was going to be like for her to hear all the bad news he'd brought with him. But with Varda sitting there shaking beside him, Devin knew this was no time to berate himself for that.
He closed his eyes, trying not to be overwhelmed by her pain yet not blocking it out either. If they weren't Jedi, he might have put his arm around her, but he knew that wouldn't mean to Varda what it would mean to a layperson. And so he sat, pulling together what was left of his own Jedi dispassion. He looked out across the shining expanse of the lake with its smooth reflections of the dark trees and the blue and pink morning sky and focused his intent on one thing: to become as still as that water, to empty himself of every thought and so create a space within himself to be present with Varda in her mourning. That, at least he could share with her through the Force. As Devin let go of his own thoughts, he could feel Varda feeling the weight of her loss close in on her.
The planet's sun rose up above the trees and with it came a wind that rippled the surface of the water and sighed as it moved through the forest and ruffled Devin's short hair. Even though Devin meant to hold that space within himself empty to just be with Varda, he found that it couldn't stay truly empty. As the sun rose higher and beat down on his forehead, Devin found his own scant memories of Eo coming back to him: the stories she had told him about Hokto and her life with Varda, her quiet excitement and nervousness on the way to Ava Kirrin's place, and that moment when she had first shown up as a little bush woman on his doorstep just two weeks ago. Varda's sadness certainly did not diminish when he shared any of this, but she seemed to breathe more deeply and gather herself together, and for that sake he let himself feel her pain as well. When he blinked, he felt a tear trickle down his cheek.
At first, Devin tried to block certain memories, the ones he didn't want her to see, but in the space they were sharing, the space Devin had opened up to share a quiet presence with Varda through the Force, he found it didn't feel entire right to hide certain things when the vibe he was getting was that Varda wanted to know. And so, even though part of him wasn't sure it was the best idea, he just let his memories keep flowing in all their vivid detail, even the parts he'd meant to hide at first: the conversation about Sith Lords and Dark Jedi they'd had around the table with Ava Kirrin and his family the night he and Eo were both there; the silence of the forest around them as he and Ava Kirrin's family sat beside the pile of stones they'd mounded on her young grave. He tried to hide but then found he couldn't rightly hide even that awful, awful moment when he first found Eo lying all crumpled there in the forest.
But as soon as the image crossed his mind, Devin wished he could take it back. He could only sense the broadest broad strokes of the grief Varda was feeling, but somehow in letting that image come into the space he was sharing with her, he felt something change. It was like she became very still, and it didn't feel like a good kind of stillness, more like something deadening in her than something becoming peaceful. It made Devin feel suddenly bewildered and very, very tired. He felt that shared space between them break, and found himself just sitting beside Varda there on the lakeside like an ordinary person, not knowing what to say. But he knew she needed whatever time she needed, and so he just sat.
The sun was near its zenith and Devin was just beginning to wonder if he should let Garth know where he was, when Varda gave a long, shuddering sigh and let her hands fall back into her lap. Her face was gaunt and her eyes red-rimmed.
"Now I reap what I sowed," she said bitterly. "In the end, sent Eo to her death."
"No, Varda, you didn't know..."
"I sent Eo to her death," Varda said, "and now I must go to mine."
Devin looked at her with alarm, unsure what to make of a comment like that. "Varda, no, that's not why I came here."
"I promised the cosmos that if I was given another chance to leave, I would take it. I've stayed here long enough." Varda's face was drawn but she spoke resolutely.
Devin nodded. "I would really appreciate you coming back with me. That's why I came, to ask for your help." But he decided that maybe the whole story about the darksider who visited his place should wait for later, and Varda didn't ask him to say anything more about what sort of help he had in mind.
Instead, with some difficulty, Varda got up and, to Devin's surprise, walked with her stump-step gait to the edge of the lake and three times made a sweeping bow, then dipped her hand in the water and touched it to her forehead.
"I do this for one buried there," she said, pointing the far side of the lake when she saw Devin's questioning look. "Ava Yen was a friend of Lu Mang." Varda sighed a deep sigh. "But Lu Mang is gone now too. I should have been out there like him, not hiding here when all of that happened."
"No, Varda," Devin said. "It's good that you were safe here."
Varda shrugged. "Anyways, let's go," she said.
The trees were tossing gently in the wind and the lake was all blue ripples under a clear blue sky when they turned back to the cool dark of the forest and walked up the little path together. Although Devin could walk quite a bit faster than Varda, he went behind her, and couldn't help but notice from the way she walked that she seemed to have trouble with one hip.
"Varda, do you want me to give you a hand?" he asked when they came to the steepest part of the trail.
"It's fine. It's been like this for a while now," Varda said.
Devin scowled. It didn't look fine to him. He could feel that she was in pain the way he could feel that a cow was in pain when something wasn't right, but Varda evidently didn't want to deal with it and so he just forced himself to walk slowly.
At last, they came to the place where the path branched under the big broad-leafed tree.
"The starship's this way," Devin said, pointing to the trail on the left. "But do you want to go back to your place first?"
Varda didn't answer, but turned to the path on the right and took the trail to the garden and the hut.
When they reached the end of the trail and the forest opened up to let the sun beat down on the tangled garden and the little hut made of bent branches, Varda stopped and looked around at everything and shook her head. "I stayed here too long," she said. Devin longed to ask her more about herself, what had happened to make her come here and why she hadn't left with Eo, but now was not the time. They brushed their way along the narrow path through the tangled garden and went to the door of the hut.
For a moment she just stood in the doorway with her hands hanging limp by her sides, looking around at everything: the two narrow beds, the reed mat on the floor between them, all the baskets of tubers and seedheads and things, and a sun-hat hanging on a peg by the door. Varda sighed. "She won't need it now," she said quietly and put the hat on her own head. She sounded a little hoarse when she said, "Let's go."
The sun was past its zenith when Varda and Devin walked back out through the afternoon warmth of the garden. It had been very still there when Devin first came early in the morning, but now the whole garden was buzzing with little insects and in the warmth of the sun a scent like mint and cumin wafted from some herbs as they brushed past them. Devin wished he could ask Varda more about all the things growing there, wished he could just stay here in this safe and quiet place, but Varda walked ahead of him without stopping until she came to the edge of the garden where there was the rough trellis made of branches and the fuzzy-leafed vine growing up it. Varda stood there for a long time. "I should have let her stay," she said.
"Varda, you didn't know," Devin said.
Out of the forest, Garth emerged, yawning and looking around as if in search of them, but before he could say anything Devin waved to him and motioned for him to wait back at the starship. Not long after Garth had left again, Varda sighed and turned back to the path.
Back at the starship, Devin found Garth rested and ready to go. The respect with which Garth treated Varda when Devin introduced them gave Devin a renewed respect for his friend; perhaps he hadn't wholly become the tough-and-gruff person Devin had seen him be recently.
"We're pointed almost right at the star now, and we've got to aim away from it for the shortest route out of that death-trap asteroid field," Garth said as the two of them settled into the cockpit. "I'll just get free of gravity and then we can turn around."
As the starship lifted off, Devin looked behind him. There in the hold, Varda was standing next to one of the tiny, grimy viewports and watching the forest and the lake recede behind them and then melt into the rest of the blue-and-green dot of the planet. When Garth re-oriented the ship and the planet was no longer in view, she sat down wearily on a bench nearby, not looking up.
Devin sighed and turned back to the forward viewport. Before them once again was the bright haze of the debris field, individual asteroids looming large as they sped towards it.
"You want to ask her help this time?" Garth said, motioning with his head towards Varda.
"No, it's OK, let's do this," Devin said and put one hand on his friend's shoulder. It felt good now to have Garth close to him, not to be alone with the weight Varda carried. He felt bewildered; it was normal to feel grief in the face of the news he'd brought her, but still, she seemed almost like a different person than the Varda he remembered.
Garth, however, didn't seem to catch any of what Devin was feeling. He cracked a grin. "Great! Let's do this!" he said and with the push of a lever, he sent the starship surging into the maze of asteroids and other interplanetary rock, that labyrinth of brownish-grey against the star-pricked black of space.
Before dipping and diving around asteroids took up all of Devin's headspace, the last thought he had was of a new worry: between the trouble with her hip and weight of all she was feeling, he could only hope that Varda would still have enough to offer to help him deal with that darksider.