Yoda Read Free Page A

is? Every Jedi is a child his parents decided they could live without.” Yoda stirs, but does not speak. “I wonder, sometimes, if that is what drives us, that first abandonment. We have a lot to prove.”
    A glow-fly comes flickering out of the tangled vines to zip over the surface of the pond, like a spark shot from a fire. The student watches it make its dizzy pattern over the quiet water.
    Yoda has a question he likes to ask:
What are we, think you, Dooku?
Every time the student tries a different answer:
We are a knot tied in the Force
or
We are the agency of Fate
or
We are each cells in the body of History
…but tonight, watching the glow-fly hiss and flicker in the night, a truer answer comes to him.
In the end, what we are is: alone.
    With a faint
pop,
like a bubble bursting, a fish rises from the dark water and snaps. The glow-fly’s light goes out and is gone, leaving no trace but one weak ripple that spreads slowly across the surface of the pond.
    â€œI guess even then I was like that hermit crab,” the student says. “Too big for my parents’ house. So you brought me here, and it’s been years, now, that even the Temple has seemed a tight fit for me. I guess…” The young man pauses, turning, so the light falling against the edge of his hooded robe throws a shadow across his face. “I worry that once I am out in the big world, I will never be able to fit inside here again.”
    Yoda nods, speaking almost to himself. “Proud, are you. Not without reason.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œNot without danger, either.”
    â€œI know that, too.”
    The student rubs again at the hermit crab shell, and then drops it into the pond. Startled water-skeeters skitter madly from the splash, trying to stay afloat.
    â€œBigger than the Jedi, bigger than the Force, you cannot be,” Yoda says.
    â€œBut the Force is bigger than the Jedi, Master. The Force is not just these walls and teachings. It runs through all life, high and low, great and small, light—” Awkwardly the student stops.
    â€œâ€”and dark,” Yoda says. “Oh, yes, young one. Think you I have never felt the touch of the dark? Know you what a soul so great as Yoda can make, in eight hundred years?”
    â€œMaster?”
    â€œMany
mistakes
!” Wheezing with laughter, the old teacher reaches out with his cane and pokes his student in the ribs. “To bed with you, thinker of deep thoughts!”
Poke, poke.
“Your Master, Thame Cerulian, says the most gifted Padawan he ever saw, you are. Trust in yourself, you need not. I, Yoda, great and powerful Jedi Master, will trust for you! Is it enough?”
    The apprentice wants to laugh along, but cannot. “It is too much, Master. I am afraid…”
    â€œGood!” Yoda snorts. “Fear the dark side, you should. In the mighty is it mightiest. But not yet Thame’s equal are you; not yet a Jedi Knight; not yet a member of the Council. Many shells have we left for you, Dooku—as long as you can fit inside
this
one,” he says, rapping his student’s skin. “Tomorrow, go you must, into the darkness between the stars. But home always will this place be. If ever lost you are, look back into this garden.” Yoda hefts his glow light, so shadows like water-skeeters dart away from them. “A candle will I light, for you to find your way home.”

    Sixty-three years later, Jai Maruk had been sent to the infirmary, and Ilena Xan had returned to her room, making preparations for the Jedi Apprentice Tournament. Mace Windu alone lingered with Yoda.
    â€œDooku asks to come home,” Yoda said. “A trap, could this be.”
    â€œProbably,” Mace agreed.
    Yoda sighed and studied the shell. “A question, he called it. Yes, such a question! But ignore it we must, do you agree?”
    Unexpectedly, Mace shook his head. “Dooku should be dead. I should have killed him on