Chapter 1: Misith

  The air in the capital of Misith did not just carry the scent of celebration. It carried the weight of a planet's hope.

  I had stood before those mirrors a hundred times. Floor to ceiling, framed in hammered gold, they lined the High Chamber in a row so long that my reflection multiplied until there were a dozen of me stretching into the distance. I used to think that was a comfort. Today, the girl in the glass looked like a stranger.

  My handmaids moved around me without sound, their fingers trembling slightly as they smoothed the final layers of my departure dress. It was a garment my mother had commissioned six months ago, designed to bridge two worlds at once: the ivory silk of a healer and the deep crimson leather of a ruler. The white fabric pooled around my feet like seafoam. The red leather pauldrons, tooled with the crest of my house, gave me the silhouette of a commander. I was neither, not yet, but I had been dressed as both for as long as I could remember.

  Finally, the crown. A delicate weave of silver filigree, light as a thought upon my brow. The mark of my bloodline. A signal to the galaxy that Velara Mahlynn Misith was not merely a student going away to school. She was a sovereign, and she would return as one.

  I believed that then. I write it down now exactly as I believed it.

  "The people are waiting, Highness," my head handmaid whispered.

  I stepped onto the balcony and the sound hit me like something physical. Thousands of voices rising together, a rhythmic chant that moved through the stone floor and up through my feet. The grand boulevards below were a sea of faces, a blur of outstretched hands and white flower petals drifting down through the warm midday air. They were not cheering for a princess going away to study. They were cheering for a miracle. To them, my ability to mend a shattered bone, to pull a fever from a dying child with nothing but my hands and the hum in my blood, was a gift from something holy. Now I was going to the source of it. To the Jedi. The legendary keepers of the Force.

  I wondered, standing there in the noise and the light, if I would come back different. I hoped so. I was afraid so.

  The walk to the royal transport was a blur of petals and reaching hands. We passed the last of the market stalls lining the processional road — vendors calling out final blessings, pressing small vials of vel'ori oil into the hands of anyone within reach. It was what Misith was known for across the galaxy before it was known for me: the golden oil pressed from the vel'ori fruit, warm and rich, a fixture in the finest kitchens from the Core to the Outer Rim. My people had built their pride on those groves long before they built it on my healing hands.

  My parents waited at the boarding ramp. My mother stood straight, her face composed in the particular stillness she wore for public occasions, the one I had spent my whole childhood trying to read. My father was less practiced at stillness. His jaw was set hard and his eyes were wet.

  He stepped forward and took my face in both his hands, the way he had when I was small and had frightened myself with what I could do. He looked at me for a long moment without speaking. Then he pressed his forehead to mine, just briefly, and straightened.

  "Bring honor to the Misith name, Velara," he said, his voice thick. "Show them that the Light lives in the Core as strongly as it does in the stars."

  I nodded. The silver of my crown caught the midday sun one last time. Then the heavy hydraulic doors sealed the world away, and the noise of the crowd became nothing.

  The interior of the Jedi transport was a cold shock after the warmth of the send-off. The ship was functional and gray and smelled of recycled oxygen and burnt oil. No ceremony in here. No flower petals. A small protocol droid, battered and missing its left index finger, stood near the cargo corridor entrance and tilted its head at me as I boarded. "Welcome aboard, Highness," it said, in a voice slightly too cheerful for the occasion. "I have been instructed to inform you that refreshments are limited to ration packs and water. I apologize that we have no vel'ori oil. I did ask." It turned back to its wall panel without waiting for my response.

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  In the center of the common area sat three others. They did not stand when I entered. They did not cheer.

  "Look at that," a girl said. Her voice was low and flat, like stone grinding on stone. She had a scar that split her left eyebrow clean in two, and her tunic was a drab, patched brown that looked as though it had been dragged through a trench and then worn for another year afterward. "The Star of the Core has arrived. Did you bring the throne, or do we have to build you one?"

  One of the boys, tall and muscular with his arms folded tight across his chest, let out a short, dry sound that was not quite a laugh. "Red leather and white silk. She thinks she is going to a ball, not a monastery."

  I felt the heat rise in my cheeks. The elegance of my robes, which had felt like armor twenty minutes ago, suddenly felt like a costume. I crossed the room and took a seat across from them, keeping my spine straight the way my tutors had drilled into me since I was old enough to sit at a formal table.

  "I am Velara. I am honored to share this journey with you."

  "Save the speech for the Masters, Highness," the scarred girl said. "We have spent the last ten years fighting for scraps of bread on planets you cannot even find on a map. We are here because we survived. You are here because your parents wanted a Jedi in the family tree."

  I did not answer. I could not find the words, and even if I had, I was not sure they would have helped. The silence that settled between us was thick as the recycled air. Outside the viewport, the stars stretched into the long blue tunnels of hyperspace. We were told the journey to Ahch-To would take only a few hours, a short jump through the local sector. It felt longer than that.

  After an hour I could not sit still any longer. I told myself I needed to move, to feel the hum of the engines, to do something with my hands. I walked toward the back of the ship.

  In the cargo bay I found the muscular boy. He was standing in the center of the hold, surrounded by heavy iron canisters, his face slick with sweat and rigid with concentration. He was not lifting them with his hands.

  I stayed in the shadow of the bulkhead and watched. He was strong. I could feel the raw power radiating off him the way heat radiates off sun-baked stone. But the power was jagged and uneven, like a river that had not yet found its bed. He would lift a canister a few inches, teeth bared, and then it would slam back to the deck with a clang that rang through the whole hold. He would lift another. It would drop. He would lift another.

  "They say the best are there," he hissed to himself, kicking a crate hard enough to slide it two feet across the floor. "If I cannot even stack these, I am nothing. Just another street rat."

  He turned. His eyes found me in the shadow for only a second, and what was in them was not anger. It was shame, pure and unguarded, the kind a person shows only when they think no one is watching. Then it was gone, replaced by the set jaw and the crossed arms, and he walked out of the hold without a word.

  The protocol droid shuffled past the cargo bay entrance a moment later, glancing at the scattered canisters, then at me. It said nothing and moved on. I was grateful for that.

  I stood there for a moment after the boy left. I knew that look. Not from my own face, but from the faces of the people I had healed on Misith. The ones who had endured something long and private and had stopped believing anyone could help. The ones who flinched when you reached for them, not from pain but from the expectation of it.

  I stepped into the center of the hold. The Force here felt different from the gardens of Misith, older somehow, as though the cold vacuum of space just beyond the hull had weight and age and memory. I reached out to the canisters, not with the grip of a wrestler but with the open hand of a healer. I felt the density of the iron, the stillness of the metal. I did not strain. I simply invited them to rise.

  One by one they floated upward. They did not wobble. They did not shake. I stacked them in a clean vertical line, higher than he had attempted, and then I lowered my hand and they stayed.

  I looked at the tower for a long moment. It was so easy it frightened me.

  I walked back to the common area and sat down in my original seat. The scarred girl was asleep against the viewport. The other boy was staring at the ceiling. Neither of them looked at me.

  I folded my hands in my lap and watched the blue of hyperspace move outside the glass and thought about the look on the boy's face when he believed no one could see him. I thought about how the crown on my head, which had felt like pride on the balcony in Misith, felt like something heavier now. A wall, maybe. Or a target.

  I had never in my life wanted so badly to simply be liked. I had not expected that to be the hardest part.