As one got better at the game—and Dooku was much the quickest learner in his
year—it became more and more like sparring, with victory going to whichever
fighter could make his or her foe lose balance first. As they got older, they
more often started in a fighting stance, fingers lightly on one another's
forearms. Dooku's first push would come light and fast, or slow and heavy; the
energy would come up from below or drop from above, or come in a sudden thrust
right to the chest. He won the Twelve-and-Under Tournament when he was nine,
using the trick of starting with very gentle probes, as if feeling his enemy out
in the kid's version of the game, and then suddenly popping the pressure point
inside his enemy's elbow and attacking in the instant of shock and pain.
But as good as he got, he never beat Master Yoda. No matter what trick he
tried—a Force push from behind, a slap to the eyes—the Master always felt the
blow coming before it landed and twitched aside, like a stingfly dodging angry
hands. Every time Dooku thought he had the old Jedi set up and made his final
push, Yoda would melt away from the blow, and like someone walking down a
staircase with two steps inexplicably missing, Dooku would find himself
flailing, the old familiar lurch and loss of balance. The drop.
What made it more frustrating was that Yoda frequently lost these games of
push-feather. He would shove out at some little boy or girl with half Dooku's
talent, who would twist clumsily to the side, and the Master would pitch
comically to their feet, making woeful faces while the kid giggled and shrieked
with jubilation. He let them win on purpose, Dooku could tell. He was building
confidence in them. But he never lost to Dooku, never once. It was unfair;
blatantly unfair, and for six months Dooku attacked with greater and greater
fury, trying anything to win, but at the same time making his own balance ever
more vulnerable, so when he lost—and he always lost, always, always, always—he
did it in progressively more spectacular fashion. He made a point of losing
badly, painfully. Daring everyone else to notice how unfairly Yoda was treating
him.
Dooku was twelve years old the last time they played. Yoda had been coming to
the unarmed combat classes once a week or so, and that whole spring they had
sparred through a long series of humiliating defeats in which Dooku found
himself taking an increasingly proud, contemptuous, bitter kind of satisfaction.
He was twice the Master's height now, and still Yoda had never let him win, not
even once. Never admitted what he was doing, either, and Dooku would certainly
never give him the satisfaction of crying about it, or complaining.
As they bowed to one another, Dooku decided that he would make this loss
something spectacular: so blatant that everyone would have to acknowledge what
was going on. He decided he would break his own arm.
They straightened from their bows. Dooku settled into his ready stance,
calming himself and preparing for the pain to come.
"I win," Yoda said.
"What!" Dooku had yelped. "We haven't even started!" "When one fighter his
balance has lost, win his opponent has," Yoda said mildly. "I win."
—And at that instant, again, as always, the sudden lurch: the falling: and
Dooku saw Yoda was right. As soft as Dooku had made his limbs, his pride was
still stiff, and that's where Yoda had pushed by never letting him win, until he
was so wound up in his rage and humiliation that he had gone into the match
intending to lose.
The realization was so big he could hardly hold it. He blinked, dazzled by
the genius of the Master's teaching: showing him a weakness he would never have
found, no matter how many times he beat his fellow students. "Th-thank you," he
had stammered, his insides all mixed up between rage and humiliation and abject
gratitude: and the old Jedi's face had broken into a smile. He had gripped
Dooku's hand and brought him close and hugged him, laughing. "When you fall,
apprentice . . . catch you I will!"
That night, lying on his cot, two sensations were still mixing uneasily in
Dooku's chest. The lurching, tipping, drop into space, unbalanced again,
outfoxed and tumbling: and Yoda's tight, delighted hug afterward, a physical
promise, delivered skin-to-skin—when you fall, catch you I will.
It was the lurch and drop, the loss of balance, and the sudden helpless fall
that gripped Dooku again after all these years as he stared out in wonder at the
He had a brief fantasy of letting go with a single blast of Force energy,
shattering the window, flaying the old Master with the shards. He imagined Yoda
tumbling through the air, bloody and insensible, dashing his brains out on the
flagstones far below. Then it would all be mercifully over and Dooku wouldn't
have to feel this strange, jumbled confusion. His hands would stop shaking and
he would be dry inside and tight: dry and tight and empty as a drum, just a drum
for Darth Sidious to play. How easy that would be.
But Yoda would be prepared for that; it would never be so easy. Count Dooku
prided himself on his ability to see reality for what it really was.
He opened the casement window. "Master! Come in."
Yoda hopped from the window ledge to Dooku's desk, stamping through the
various landscapes being broadcast to the holomonitors there and shaking like a
dog, so a shower of Vjun rain spattered off him, splotching the desk top, and
the spines of several of the more valuable titles in Dooku's outstanding
collection of rare books. Yoda had his lightsaber, but for now it was still
belted at his side. In one hand he held his stick—of course he had somehow
clambered to a fifth-story window ledge without letting go of his stick. In the
other he had a Malreaux rose, white petals trimmed in blood red.
"You've been picking the roses from my hedge?" Dooku said genially.
Yoda held up the rose. "Yes. A pretty thing it is," he said, examining the
needle-sharp spines. Gingerly he tipped the cream-and-crimson flower head toward
himself and snuffed. He closed his eyes and sighed with pleasure at the
fragrance. It was an old, wild perfume: heady and sharp and tingling like a
childhood secret.
"Actually, the roses are why I decided to stay here," Dooku remarked. "There
are other mansions on Vjun that would have done as well. But we had roses in the
great house on Serenno; I suppose these reminded me of home."
"Remember them, did you?" Yoda asked lightly.
"Obviously. I just said—"
"From before?"
"Ah." Dooku gave a little laugh. "As a matter of fact, yes. One of the very
few memories I have from before I came to the Temple . It was a hot day, I
remember that; a bright day, and the sun heavy in the sky. The rose smell was
very strong, as if the sun were beating the fragrance out of them. Burning them
like slow incense. I was hiding in the rose garden and my finger was bleeding. I
guess I must have been playing in the bushes and pricked myself. I can still
remember sucking the blood. The way it welled up from this hole in my fing
er."
"Hiding?"
"What?"
Yoda squatted down on Dooku's desk. "Hiding, you said you were." He stuck his
short legs over the edge and let his feet swing. A holofeed from Omwat played
unheeded on the back of his head. "Why went you not into the house to find a
bandage, or get a kiss?"
"My mother got angry if I hurt myself."
Yoda looked at him curiously. "Angry?"
Silence.
"It's not our way," Dooku said abruptly. "The Counts of Serenno do not
complain and cry. We are born to take care of others. We don't expect others to
take care of us.
"And yet, your finger . . . hurt, did it not?"
"I don't expect you to understand," Dooku said. He felt angry at the old
Jedi, absurdly angry and for no reason.
Off balance.
There was a knock on the door. "What?" Dooku called sharply.
The door rattled open, and Whirry came into the room in an obvious agitation
of spirits. "The Baby!" she said. "The Baby's back! But the land is all slipping
too fast for me to read the fortune, and I'm worried your young lady will do him
a mischief, begging your pardon, Count."
The little Vjun fox padded into the room from between her legs. It caught
sight or scent of Yoda, stopped stiff-legged, arched its back, and hissed. Yoda
glared down at the thing from the desktop, bared his teeth, and hissed back.
Whirry jumped with a little shriek. "Which it's one of they nasty
cellar-goblins," she cried, staring at Yoda. "Don't worry, Your Lordship—I'll
get a broom and knock it on the head."
"Master Yoda may be small and old and shriveled up like an evil green
potato," Count Dooku remarked, "but he is my guest, and I would prefer you not
hit him with a broom unless I particularly desire it."
"Oh! Which it is Your Lordship's guest, is it?" the housekeeper said
dubiously. "Each beau his own belle, so they say. But come, will you talk to
your young lady with the knifing eyes and check her before she does the Baby any
mischief? I did what you asked, Lordship; the droid brought them in right as
whip-smelt in a net," she added piteously, and her large chest quivered with
emotion under her grimy pink ball gown.
"
"At the moment, I am occupied," Dooku said sharply. "Asajj may play with her
scrap mice any way she likes for all I care."
"But sir—!"
"Don't pretend you love him," the Count said. "If you loved him, you would
have kept him."
Whirry looked at him, shocked. "Love the Baby? Of course I always loved—"
"You had a fine house, wealth, everything a person could desire, and you gave
him up," Dooku said. "The Jedi arrived like beggars on your doorstep and asked
for your firstborn, your heir, your precious Baby . . . and you gave him up."
The Count's face was white. His traitorous hand was shaking and shaking. "You
sent him away to a distant planet, never a letter or a message, sent him from
the only home he had ever known and let them lock him up in the Temple and steal
everything that should rightfully have been his, and now you have the impudence
to come here and say you loved him? Loved him?" the Count shouted.
Whirry and her fox were backing from the room, frightened. Dooku mastered his
voice. "Mother? Son? Love?" he said wearily. "You don't know the meaning of the
words." He waved at her with his hand. "Leave us."
The housekeeper turned and fled. For a moment the fox stayed in the doorway,
staring at Dooku and Master Yoda. Then it, too, turned tail and scampered away.
Dooku rubbed his forehead with a tired hand. "Forgive me. As you know, most
of Vjun ran mad, and Whirry is no exception."
"Everyone on Vjun, goes mad I think," Yoda murmured. "Later or sooner."
"Forgive my comments on the Temple . You know I have never doubted your
goodness," Dooku said. "But—and I say this with all respect—there are things you
choose not to see, Master. The Jedi principles—your principles—are noble ones:
but the Jedi have become a tool in the hands of a corrupt Republic. If you truly
want to see real justice—"
Yoda looked up and met Dooku's eyes with a look of such infinite, distant
boredom that the Count's speech staggered to a halt. "No lies for me, Dooku,"
Yoda said, knocking a rather fine statuette off the desk with a lazy whack of
his stick. "Through the motions, do not go. No Sora Bulq am I, to be caught in a
web made of ideals. Pfeh. Thin stuff. Save it for the young.
"I am not young," he said, turning his deep green eyes wholly on Dooku. "The
old, easily bored are. Even Yoda, though I try not to hurt feelings by showing
it. But come across the galaxy to hear you tell me about nobility and justice?"
Yoda laughed. It was by far the tiredest, bitterest, most unpleasant sound Dooku
had ever heard him make.
He had thought he was beyond shock: but the disgust in Yoda's voice was
shocking to him.
Yoda looked down at the floor, making little patterns in the air with his
stick. "Something real, tell me about. Show me another way we can end this war.
Tell me something Dooku knows that Yoda does not." The Count looked at Yoda,
baffled. "Come across the galaxy I have for one thing, Dooku."
"Yes, Master?" Dooku said, hating the words as soon as they were out of his
mouth. He only had one Master now, and a jealous one.
"Obvious, is it not, Dooku?" And then Yoda was doing it to him again—the
unexpected lurch, his balance gone, and the world turned inside out as Yoda
said, "Turn me, Dooku. I beg you. Show me the greatness of the dark side."
Far below, in the Crying Room of Chateau Malreaux, Scout snarled and reached
for her lightsaber.
Ventress raked her with a vicious clawing strike across the head, knocking
her to the ground. "Stay still until I tell you to move," she said.
A fire burned in a grate across the room. The wood was wet, making the flames
gasp and sputter. Thin strings of bitter smoke crept from logs and drifted
toward the ceiling.
Scout gasped, crouched on her hands and knees, waiting for the stars to clear
from in front of her eyes. Blood trickled from the cuts in her forehead and
scalp, dripping onto the richly embroidered rug. Little red drops, pit-pat. Red
spots appearing on the carpet.
Pit, tick, pat, tock, drip.
"Thank you," Asajj said, glancing at Fidelis. "Who doesn't relish a nice spot
of gentleman's personal gentle-treason? Oh, don't look so shocked," she said to
Whie. "Did you think it was just your bad luck I was waiting here?"
Whie turned to Fidelis. "But . . . you're supposed to look after me."
"Indeed, sir," Fidelis said, looking embarrassed. "But your lady mother is
still the head of House Malreaux, and she represented to me that it would be
best for you both—in the long-term interests of House Malreaux overall, if you
follow me—for you to come to an accommodation with Count Dooku and his, ah,
representatives."
Ventress chuckled. "You just can't get good help these days. Do you know what
you're playing with, boy? This is a Tac-Spec Footman. Very dangerous. The
hardware alone would retail for the cost of a small planet these d
ays, for the
right collector." She frowned. "As it happens, I could do with a bit of cash.
The price of a small planet is looking pretty good. Present arms," she added
absently. The assassin droids instantly took a bead, every one of them, on
Whie's chest and head.
"What are you doing? I demand to speak to Her Ladyship," Fidelis said. "Put
those things down, or I will be obliged to take steps," he added meaningfully.
"Don't be ridiculous. Even you couldn't take me and six droids out before we
killed the boy. And I will kill the boy if you cause me any trouble. I gave him
his chance to live the last time we met."
Scout lurched heavily to her feet, wiping the blood out of her eyes with her
sleeve. She watched Fidelis, wondering what the droid would do. Numbers and
diagrams poured in a flickering glow across its eyes as it sized up the tactical
situation.
Asajj pulled out a blocky hand weapon. "Do you know what this is?"
The Padawans glanced at one another blankly. Fidelis shifted, coughed.
"Neural-net eraser," he said.
"That's right," Asajj said pleasantly. "Take it." She held it out. "Come on,
droid. Take it, or else." Her eyes flicked over to Whie.
Woodenly Fidelis reached out for the ugly weapon.
"Put it to your head and pull the trigger," Asajj said.
Tip, drip, tap. More blood trickling down Scout's face.
"Come on, droid. Put it to your head and pull the trigger, or I blow the
boy's head off. What are you waiting for?" she asked. "Is this the legendary
loyalty I've read so much about? There is a clear and present threat to a
Malreaux here."
Whie licked his lips. "Fidelis. Don't. I won't die here. I can't. I can only
be killed by a Jedi. I saw it in a dream. Don't throw your life away."
"That would be risking a lot on a dream," Asajj said. "And even if it's true,
why do you suppose that is? Because Fidelis is going to save your life. He is
going to make the ultimate sacrifice, like a good little droid. He knows his
duty, doesn't he?"
If the droid had been programmed to hate, he would have looked at her with
hate. Instead he lifted the neural gun to his head. "Only remember, I served the
House Malreaux," he said.
"Fidelis, no! Don't!"
The droid blinked. "I didn't think it would end like this," he said. Then he