Read Online Yoda by Sean Stewart - Free Book Online

assign her to. “Worthy work,” people always said. “Honorable work.” The hypocrisy of it made her furious. As if it weren’t humiliating enough to fail at the only thing she’d ever wanted, they had to make it worse by pretending a hoe was the same as a lightsaber, and the mud of a potato field was as exciting as the dust of a hundred planets beneath her feet.
    By the time she’d entered the room, her face had been slimy with tears and there was a big wet splotch on the arm of her tunic where she kept wiping her sniveling nose. Master Yoda had looked at her, his wizened, round face wrinkled with concern, and asked why she was weeping. “Only Jedi have to strive for nonattachment,” she’d said defiantly between snuffles. “Farmers can cry all they want.”
    Then he’d told her that Chankar Kim had asked that she be her new Padawan, and Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy, known as Scout to her friends, was left with what she later decided was the classic post-Yoda feeling: breathtakingly stupid, heartbreakingly happy.
    Three months later Chankar Kim was dead.
    If her whole life hadn’t been a struggle, Scout thought, that would have broken her. It was sheer will that kept her going, sheer bloody-minded un-Jedi-like rage, against the Trade Federation, against Fate, against herself. “I’ll let you come along on the next mission,” Master Kim had said with a smile. “Let’s polish off a few more of those rough edges first. You can come next time, I promise.” Only here was the joke: Chankar Kim bled her life out on a distant planet, and
next time
was never going to come.
    And so Scout was an orphan, an aging apprentice with no Master anymore. The only way she could become a Jedi was to be made a Padawan, taken on missions, given a chance to prove that she could make a difference. And the only way to do that was to gain the other Jedi’s trust.
    She drove herself to the top of class after class, practiced joint locks on herself until her wrists were numb, went sleepless late into every night until star maps danced before her aching eyes. She trained harder than she had ever trained in her life—astrocartography, unarmed combat, hyperdrive math, comm installation tech, lightsaber technique. She was slightly built, and her girl’s body was agonizingly slow to gain muscle, but she worked out until the sweat ran in rivers down her back because she
had
to, she had to: she couldn’t rely on the little cheat the rest of them had, the Force.
    And still every day there was the torment of classes in using the Force; Scout grouped together with the eight-and nine-year-olds, looming among them, an awkward bumbling giant: and every day, as hard as she tried to fight back despair, her footsteps came more heavily, as if she were already slogging through the muddy potato fields that were her destiny.
    â€œHey, Scout—relax!” The voice pulled Scout’s attention back to the here and now: combat chamber. Tournament day. It was Lena Missa calling, a good-natured Chagrian girl Scout’s age. “You’re wound so tight I can hear you squeak when you walk.”
    Easy for Lena to say—she, too, had lost a Master in the last year, but Lena was witty and well liked, and her touch with the Force was deft; Jedi Masters had been lining up for the right to choose her as their Padawan as soon as an appropriate grieving period was up. Scout forced a tight smile. “Thanks. I’ll try,” she said.
    Lena leaned in confidentially, so her forked tongue flickered between her blue lips, and her soft lower horns swung forward. “Scout, don’t worry. You’re really good at combat. Just relax and use—” She hesitated. “Just trust your ability.”
    Scout forced a smile. “You’re only being nice to me in case you end up in my bracket.”
    Lena grinned back. “You bet. My elbow is still tingling