Free Lost Tribe of the Sith 05 - Star Wars Purgatory by John Jackson Miller

Chapter One
    3960 BBY
    Their afternoon began as it always had. The rake fell, gouging orderly grooves into the black mud. Lifting it for another pass, the wielder brought it down again, neatly bisecting the furrows.
    Ori Kitai watched from across the hedge. The young farmer went so slowly. The rake, an insubstantial marriage of hejarbo shoots and flinty rocks, nonetheless parted the rich soil with ease. But Jelph of Marisota seemed to be in no hurry—at this, or anything else.
    How monotonous it must be
, Ori thought. All day, every day, the man in the straw-brimmed hat tended his duties, with no place to go or friends to see. His homestead sat alone at a bend of the Marisota River, far from most centers of Sith culture on Kesh. Nothing existed upstream but volcanoes and jungle; nothing downriver but the ghost towns of the Ragnos Lakes. It was no life for a human.
    “Lady Orielle,” Jelph said, doffing the hat. Sandy hair hung in a long braid outside the collar of his soaked blouse.
    “Just Ori,” she said. “I’ve told you a dozen times.”
    “And that means a dozen visits,” he said in that strange accent of his. “I’m honored.”
    The slender, auburn-haired woman strolled along the hedge, casting sidelong glances at the workman. She didn’t have any reason to hide why she still came here—not with her family’s future about to be assured. Ori could do what she wanted. And yet, as she stepped through the opening onto the gravel path, she felt meek and fifteen again. Not a Sith Saber of the Tribe, a decade older.
    Her brown eyes trained on the ground, she chuckled to herself. There was no reason for modesty. Ori wore the black uniform of her office. Jelph wore rags. She’d passed the tests of apprenticeship on the grounds of the palace, along the glorious promenade walked by Grand Lord Korsin more than a millennium earlier. Jelph’s home was a hovel, his holding less a farm than a depot for the fertilized soils he provided the gardeners of the cities.
    And yet the man had something she’d never encountered in another human: He had nothing to prove. No one ever looked directly at her in Tahv. Not really. People always had one eye on what the conversation could mean for them, on how her mother could help them. Jelph had no thoughts of advancement.
    What good would such thoughts be to a slave?
    Setting down the rake, Jelph stepped from the mud and pulled a towel from his belt. “I know why you’re here,” he said, wiping his hands, “but not why you’re here
today
. What’s the big occasion this time?”
    “Donellan’s Day.”
    Jelph looked blankly at her. “That one of your Sith holidays?”
    Ori tilted her head as she followed him around the hut. “You were Sith once, too, you know.”
    “That’s what they tell me,” he said, pitching thetowel away. It landed in a bucket on the ground, out of his sight. “I’m afraid we don’t cultivate much ancestral memory out in the hinterlands.”
    Ori smiled. He was so learned, for a lesser. Jelph cultivated plenty, out of sight of the trail where she’d left her uvak to graze until she was ready to fly again. Behind the house, past the small mountains of river clay he traded with the Keshiri, he kept six trellises of the most beautiful dalsa flowers she’d ever seen. Like the hut and rake, the trellises were made from lashed-together hejarbo shoots—and yet they made for a display that rivaled the horticultural wonders of the High Seat. Here, behind a slave’s quarters in the middle of nowhere.
    Taking the crystal blade she offered, the hazel-eyed farmer started cutting the specimens she selected. As usual, they’d decorate the urns on her mother’s balcony at the revels.
    “So your event. What is it?” Pausing, he looked down at her. “If you want to tell me, that is.”
    “Nida Korsin’s firstborn was born a thousand years ago tomorrow.”
    “Oh,” Jelph said, trimming. “Did he become Grand Lord or something?”
    She smirked. “Oh,