Star Wars.

The Dark Nest Trilogy.

The Joiner King.

by Troy Denning.

PROLOGUE.

The feeling had returned, a sense of desperation that burned in the Force like a faraway star, clear and bright and beckoning. Jaina Solo found her gaze straying through the justice ship viewport, out into the blue- flecked void that hung behind the slowly spinning cylinder of Detention Center Maxsec Eight. As before, the sensation came from the direction of the Unknown Regions, a call for... what? And from whom? The touch was too wispy to tell. It always was.

"Jedi Solo?" The inquisitor stepped closer to the witness rail.

"Shall I repeat the question?"

A tall, stiff woman with a shaved head and deep lines at the corners of her gray eyes, Athadar Gyad had the brusque demeanor of a retired military officer. It was a common affectation among petty Reconstruction Authority bureaucrats, even when the only notation in their service record was a decades-old planetary conscription number.

"When you boarded the Night Lady with Jedi Lowbacca and-"

"Sorry, Inquisitor. I did hear the question." Jaina shifted her gaze to the accused, a ma.s.sive Yaka with an expressionless, near-human face. He wore an engraved Ithorian skull on the lateral cover of his cybernetic implant. "Redstar's crew tried to turn us away."

A glint of impatience showed in Gyad's gray eyes. "They attacked you with blasters, isn't that correct?"

"And it was necessary to defend yourselves with your lightsabers?"

"Right again."

Gyad remained silent, tacitly inviting her witness to elaborate on the battle. But Jaina was more interested in the sense of desperation she felt in the Force. It was growing stronger by the moment, more urgent and frightened.

"Jedi Solo?" Gyad stepped in front of Jaina, blocking her view out of the inquest salon. "Please direct your attention to me."

Jaina fixed the woman with an icy stare. "I thought I had answered your question."

Gyad drew back almost imperceptibly, but continued her examination as though there had been no resentment in Jaina's voice. "What were you wearing at the time?"

"Our cloaks," Jaina said.

"Your Jedi cloaks?"

"They're just cloaks." Jaina had stood at enough witness rails in the last few years to know that the inquisitor was trying to bolster a weak case with the mystique of her Jedi witnesses-a sure sign that Gyad did not understand, or respect, the Jedi role in the galaxy. "Jedi don't wear uniforms."

"Surely, you can't mean to suggest that a criminal of Red-star's intelligence failed to recognize-" Gyad paused to reconsider her phrasing. Tribunal inquisitors were supposed to be impartial investigators, though in practice most limited their efforts to presenting enough evidence to lock away the accused. "Jedi Solo, do you mean to suggest the crew could have legitimately believed you to be pirates?"

"I don't know what they believed," Jaina said.

Gyad narrowed her eyes and studied Jaina in silence. Despite Luke Skywalker's advice after the war to avoid involving the Jedi in the mundane concerns of the new government, the challenge of rebuilding the galaxy obliged much of the order to do just that. There were just too many critical missions that only a Jedi could perform, with too many dire consequences for the Galactic Alliance, and most Reconstruction Authority bureaucrats had come to view the Jedi order as little more than an elite branch of interstellar police.

Finally, Jaina explained, "I was too busy fighting to probe their thoughts."

Gyad let out a theatrical sigh. "Jedi Solo, isn't it true that your father once made his living as a smuggler?"

"That was a little before my time, Inquisitor." Jaina's retort drew a siss of laughter from the spectator area, where two of her fellow Jedi Knights, Tesar Sebatyne and Lowbacca, sat waiting for her to finish. "And what would that have to do with the price of spice on Nal Hutta?"

Gyad turned to the panel of magistrates. "Will you please instruct the witness to answer-"

"Everyone knows the answer," Jaina interrupted. "It's taught in half the history cla.s.ses in the galaxy."

"Of course it is." The inquisitor's voice grew artificially compa.s.sionate, and she pointed to the Yaka captive. "Would it be possible that you identify with the accused? That you are reluctant to testify against a criminal because of your father's own ambivalent relationship with the law?"

"No." Jaina found herself squeezing the witness rail as though she meant to crimp the cold metal. "In the last five standard years, I've captured thirty-seven warlords and broken more than a hundred smuggling-"

Suddenly the sense of desperation grew more tangible in the Force, more clear and familiar. Jaina's gaze turned back to the viewport, and she did not finish her answer.

"Wait."

Tahiri Veila raised a hand, and the two Yuuzhan Vong standing before her fell silent. The two groups of spectators watched her expectantly, but she remained quiet and stared into Zonama Sekot's blue sky. Over the last few weeks, she had begun to sense a distant foreboding in the Force, a slowly building dread, and now that feeling had developed into something more... into anguish and panic and despair.

"Jeedai Veila?" asked the smaller of the speakers. With one blind eye and a lumpy, lopsided face, he was one of the Extolled, a disfigured undercla.s.s once known as the Shamed Ones. They had earned their new name by rising up against their upper-caste oppressors to help end the war that had nearly destroyed both the Yuuzhan Vong and the civilized galaxy.

"Is something wrong?"

"Yes." Tahiri forced her attention back to the group. Their blue-rimmed eyes and leathery faces seemed more familiar to her than the reflection of the blond-haired women she saw in the mirror every morning-but that was hardly a surprise, considering what had happened to her during the war. She was as much Yuuzhan Vong now as she was human, at least in mind and spirit. "But it doesn't have anything to do with this.

Go on."

The Extolled One-Bava, she remembered-bowed deeply, intentionally lowering himself to her height.

"As I was saying, Jeedai Veila, four times this week we have caught Sal Ghator and his warriors stealing from our gardens."

Tahiri c.o.c.ked her brow. "Your gardens, Bava?" La'okio was supposed to be a communal village, an experiment where the contentious castes of Yuuzhan Vong society would learn to work together-and to trust each other. "I thought the gardens belonged to everyone."

"We have decided that every grashal is also allowed to plant an extra plot for itself." Bava sneered in Ghator's direction, then continued, "But the warriors are too lazy to work their own ground. They expect us to do it for them."

"We cannot do it for ourselves!" Ghator objected. Half a meter taller than Tahiri and nearly three times her ma.s.s, he still bore the tattoos and ritual scarrings of a former subaltern. "We are cursed by the G.o.ds. Nothing we plant will grow."

Tahiri fought back a sigh. "Don't tell me you've separated by caste again. You're supposed to be living in mixed groups."

As Tahiri spoke, she felt the familiar touch of a Chadra-Fan searching for her in the Force, wanting to know if she also sensed the growing strength of the feeling. She opened herself to the contact and focused her thoughts on the mysterious fear. Tekli was not particularly strong in the Force, and what Tahiri perceived as a clarion call would seem barely a whisper to the little Chadra-Fan. Neither of them bothered to reach out for their companion Danni Quee; Force-sensitive though she might be, so far Danni had proven numb to the sensation.

"Living in mixed grashals is unclean," Ghator said, drawing Tahiri's attention back to the problems in La'okio. "Warriors cannot be asked to sleep on the same dirt as Shamed Ones."

"Shamed Ones!" Bava said. "We are Extolled. We are the ones who exposed Shimrra's heresy, while you warriors led us all to ruin."

The blue rim around Ghator's eyes grew wider and darker. "Beware your tongue, raal, lest its poison strike you dead."

"There is no poison in truth." Bava sneaked a glance in Tahiri's direction, then sneered, "You are the Shamed Ones now!"

Ghator's hand sent Bava tumbling across the rugra.s.s so swiftly that Tahiri doubted she could have intercepted it had she wanted to, and she did not want to. The Yuuzhan Vong would always have their own way of working out problems-ways that Danni Quee and Tekli and perhaps even Zonama Sekot itself would never fully comprehend.

Bava stopped rolling and turned his good eye in Tahiri's direction.

She returned his gaze and did nothing. Having risen from their outcast status through their efforts to end the war, the Extolled Ones were proving eager to find another caste to take their place. Tahiri thought it might be good to remind them of the consequences of such behavior.

Besides, the feeling was growing stronger and clearer; she had the sense that it was coming from someone she knew, someone who had been trying to reach her-and Tekli-for a very long time.

Come fast... The voice arose inside Tahiri's mind, clear and distinct and eerily familiar. Come now.

The words seemed to fade even as Jacen Solo perceived them, sinking below the threshold of awareness and vanishing into the boggy underlayers of his mind. Yet the message remained, the conviction that the time had come to answer the call he had been feeling over the last few weeks. He unfolded his legs-he was sitting cross-legged in the air-and lowered his feet to the floor of the meditation circle. A chain of soft pops sounded as he crushed the tiny blada vines that spilled out of the seams between the larstone paving blocks.

"I'm sorry, Akanah. I must go."

Akanah answered without opening her eyes. "If you are sorry, Jacen, you must not go." A lithe woman with an olive complexion and dark hair, she appeared closer to Jacen's age than her own five standard decades.

She sat floating in the center of the meditation circle, surrounded by novices who were trying to imitate her with varying degrees of success.

"Sorrow is a sign that you have not given yourself to the Current."

Jacen considered this, then dipped his head in acknowledgment.

"Then I'm not sorry." The call continued in the Force, a needle-sharp pang that pulled at Jacen deep inside his chest. "And I must go."

Now Akanah opened her eyes. "What of your training?"

"I'm grateful for what you have shown me so far." Jacen turned to leave. "I'll continue when I return."

"No." As Akanah spoke, the meditation circle exit vanished behind a vine-strewn wall. "I cannot permit that."

Jacen stopped and turned to face her. "Illusions aren't necessary.

If you don't wish me to return, I won't."

"What I don't wish is for you to leave." Akanah floated over to him and lowered her own feet. She was so immersed in the White Current that even the delicate blada leaves did not pop beneath her weight. "It's too soon. You're not ready."

Jacen forced himself to remain patient. After all, he was the one who had sought out the Fallana.s.si. "I have completed many trainings, Akanah. What I have learned is that every order believes its way is the only way."

"I am not speaking of monks and witches, Jacen Solo. I am speaking of you." Her dark eyes caught his gaze. "Your feelings on this are unclear. Someone calls, and you go without knowing why."

"Then you feel it, too?"

"No, Jacen. You are as clumsy in the Current as your uncle. Your feelings leave ripples, and ripples can be read. Does the call come from your brother?"

"No. Anakin died in the war." It had been eight years, and Jacen could finally speak those words with some measure of acceptance, with some recognition of the purpose his brother's death had served in the Force. It had been the turning point in the war, when the Jedi finally learned how to fight the Yuuzhan Vong-and not become monsters themselves. "I've told you that."

"Yes, but is it him?" Akanah stepped closer to Jacen, and his nostrils filled with the scent of the waha plants that grew in the temple bathing pool. "After someone sinks beneath the Current, a circle of ripples remains behind. Perhaps it is the ripples you sense."

"That does not make what I feel any less real," Jacen countered.

"Sometimes, the effect is all we can know of the cause."

"Do you remember my words only so you can use them to spar with me?" Akanah's hand came up as though to bat him across the ear, and his own hand reflexively rose to block. She shook her head in disgust. "You are a dreadful student, Jacen Solo. You hear, but you do not learn."

It was a rebuke to which Jacen had grown accustomed during his five- year search for the true nature of the Force. The Jen-saarai, the Aing-Tii, even the Witches of Dathomir had all said similar things to him-usually when his questions about their view of the Force grew too probing. But Akanah had more reason than the others to be disappointed in him. Striking another would be anathema to any Adept of the White Current. All Akanah had done was lift her hand; it had been Jacen who interpreted the action as an attack.

Jacen inclined his head. "I learn, but sometimes slowly." He was thinking of the two apparitions he had already seen of his dead brother, the first when a cavern beast on Yuuzhan'tar used one to lure him into its throat, the second on Zonama, when Sekot had taken Anakin's form while they talked. "You think I'm giving form to this call, that I impose my own meaning on the ripples I feel."

"What I think is not important," Akanah said. "Still yourself, Jacen, and see what is really in the Current."

Jacen closed his eyes and opened himself to the White Current in much the same way he would have opened himself to the Force. Akanah and the other Adepts taught that the Current and the Force were separate things, and that was true-but only in the sense that any current was different from the ocean in which it flowed. In their essential wholeness, they were each other.

Jacen performed a quieting exercise he had learned from the Theran Listeners, then focused on the call. It was still there, a cry so sharp it hurt, in a voice he remembered and could not identify... come...

help... a male voice, but one he recognized as not belonging to his brother.

And there was something else, too, a familiar presence that Jacen did know, not sending the call, but reaching out along with it. Jaina.

Jacen opened his eyes. "It's not Anakin... or his ripples."

"You're certain?"

Jacen nodded. "Jaina senses it, too." That was what his sister was trying to tell him, he knew. Their twin bond had always been strong, and it had only grown stronger during his wanderings. "I think she intends to answer it."

Akanah looked doubtful. "I feel nothing."

"You aren't her twin." Jacen turned and stepped through the wall-illusion hiding the exit, only to find Akanah-or the illusion of Akanah-blocking his way. "Please ask the Pydyrians to bring my ship down from orbit. I'd like to leave as soon as possible."

"I am sorry, but no." Akanah's eyes caught his gaze again and held it almost physically. "You have the same power I once sensed in your uncle Luke, but without the light. You must not leave before you have found some. "

Jacen was stung by her harsh a.s.sessment, but hardly surprised. The war against the Yuuzhan Vong had brought the Jedi a deeper understanding of the Force-one that no longer saw light and dark as opposing sides-and he had known before he came that the Fallana.s.si might find this new view disturbing. That was why he had hid it from them... or thought he had.

"I'm sorry you disapprove," Jacen said. "But I no longer view the Force in terms of light and dark. It embraces more than that."

"Yes, we have heard about this 'new' knowledge of the Jedi."

Akanah's tone was scornful. "And it troubles my heart to see that their folly now rivals their arrogance."

"Folly?" Jacen did not want to argue, but-being one of the first advocates of the new understanding-he felt compelled to defend his views.

"That 'folly' helped us win the war."

"At what price, Jacen?" Akanah's voice remained gentle. "If the Jedi no longer look to the light, how can they serve it?"

"Jedi serve the Force," Jacen said. "The Force encompa.s.ses both light and dark."