Sacrifice

Mirta found she was clutching the heart-of-fire pendant tight in her fist. It was just half of the original stone. The other slice, split from it with a blow from the butt of Fett's blaster, was buried with Ailyn Vel in a modest grave outside Keldabe, in an ancient wood that the vongese hadn't managed to destroy.

I can't feel anything from this stone. It ought to tell me something. I'm Kiffar. Part Kiffar, anyway.

"She hung around Mando'ade to get a better idea of how to hunt you.

Then she met Papa. It didn't last."

"Romantic."

"She cared about him."

"And she let him make a Mando of you."

"I spent two summers with Papa on Null, after he and Mama split up.

He taught me everything he could. And then he got killed."

She didn't say it to shut Fett up. He was hardly a talkative man anyway, but there was quiet, and then there was breath-holding silence.

That was what she heard now.

"That's too bad," he said.

"Don't try to out-orphan me, Ba'buir. I know what it's like."

She struggled between the hatred she'd been taught to feel for him and the evidence of her own eyes that he wasn't a monster—at least not the monster painted by her mother. The very thought felt disloyal to the dead. After almost two months, she'd reached the stage where she had days when her mother wasn't her first waking thought, and didn't haunt her dreams. That felt like betrayal, too.