The descent was a violent shudder of clouds and sea spray. When the transport's ramp finally hissed open, the air that rushed in was not the recycled ozone of the ship. It was cold and salt-heavy and tasted of something so old it had no name.

  I stepped out onto the landing shelf and the wind hit me like a reprimand. It nearly tore the silver crown from my head. I caught it with one hand and stood there for a moment, blinking against the spray, trying to take in what I was seeing.

  Ahch-To was nothing like Misith.

  There were no boulevards. No gilded mirrors. No crowds. There was only rock, black and ancient, rising in sheer vertical walls directly out of a churning gray ocean. Thousands of steps had been carved by hand into the cliff face, winding upward toward a cluster of small, beehive-shaped stone huts that clung to the hillside as though they had grown there. The sky was the color of old iron. The sea below was loud and indifferent.

  I had imagined something grander. I was embarrassed, standing there with the wind pulling at my white silk, to realize I had imagined something grander.

  In the shadows between the rocks I caught glimpses of small, avian figures in gray robes, squat and bird-like, scurrying away the moment my eyes found them. The Lanai. The Caretakers. They tended the stone in silence and wanted nothing to do with us. I could not blame them.

  "Move it, Princess. The stairs do not climb themselves."

  The voice belonged to the boy from the cargo bay. Warren. He was already several steps above me, grease-stained leather jacket open at the collar despite the cold, a smirk on his face that suggested he found the whole situation privately amusing. He did not wait for my response. He just turned and kept climbing.

  Beside him walked a Dowutin I had not seen on the ship, a woman with skin like textured bark and small horns along her chin. She moved with a heavy, unhurried grace that made the stone steps look small beneath her feet. That was Mobe-Joan. Behind her came Kit, the Twi'lek I had seen perform on the ship, his scarred blue lekku shifting with every step, one hand resting habitually near the metal hilt at his belt as though he expected trouble from the cliff itself.

  I gathered my white silk off the wet stone and climbed.

  We did not speak on the way up. The wind filled the silence well enough.

  The High Circle sat at the crest of the hill, a wide flat ring of ancient stone beneath the spread of a massive, gnarled tree whose roots had cracked the rock and grown into it over what must have been centuries. Five figures waited there. At the center stood Master Morvin. He was small and green and so deeply wrinkled that his face looked like a map of somewhere very old. His eyes, though, were clear and still and full of something that felt less like wisdom and more like patience, the kind that had outlasted many things and expected to outlast many more. To his left sat Thorne, the Scroll-Keeper, his thick-lensed glasses catching the gray light, his quill already poised over a fresh sheet of vellum.

  I felt a small, private warmth seeing Thorne there. I had read of him before leaving Misith. He was the one who wrote things down. I understood that impulse.

  "To the center, come," Morvin said. His voice was low gravel, unhurried. "The Force has whispered your names across the stars. Here we seek not power alone but Balance. The Light is a hearth. The Dark is the cold beyond. We are the tenders of the flame."

  His gaze moved across each of us in turn. When it landed on my red leather pauldrons it stayed a beat longer than the others. I resisted the urge to adjust them.

  "Speak," he said. "Tell the Force who you are, and what gift you bring to its service."

  Warren went first. He stepped forward with his thumbs hooked into his belt, relaxed in a way that I suspected was deliberate. "Scavenger. Grew up on a junk freighter in the Mid-Rim. When the pirates came I did not need instruments to know where they were coming from. I felt the air change. I can see the next ten seconds before they happen. I can move faster than a blaster bolt when I need to."

  He said it the way someone states a price. No performance. No apology. I noticed the others shift slightly toward him, a small unconscious lean, the way people move toward heat.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Mobe-Joan bowed low before she spoke. "On my world the gift is a curse. My people believe it is a rot of the spirit. I have spent my life hiding the fact that I can lift the mountain stones with a thought." A pause. "I am here because I do not want to be a monster anymore."

  No one laughed. No one moved. It was the most honest thing I had heard since leaving home.

  Then Kit performed. There was no other word for it. He drew a heavy metal practice blade from somewhere and spun it in a blur of silver that whistled through the salt air, leapt clean over a stone training table, landed, and shoved his palm forward. The table groaned and slid back five feet on the stone as though struck by something invisible and very large.

  "I am a warrior," he said, breathing hard, his blue skin sheened with mist. "I have bled for my people. The Force is my shield and my sword."

  The circle was impressed. I could feel it, the way the air changes in a room when something lands right.

  Then Morvin turned his eyes to me.

  I felt the stares before I saw them. Warren's was cool and curious. Mobe-Joan's was measured. From the back of the group came the particular quality of attention that Vane had been directing at me since the ship, not quite a glare, but close enough that I felt it in my shoulder blades.

  I stepped toward Kit. Not toward the Masters. I kept my eyes on the Twi'lek's arm, on the place beneath his tunic where I had already noticed, the way I always noticed, a shadow of old pain in the way he held himself. A scar on his bicep, long and improperly healed, the flesh around it still carrying the faint warmth of chronic inflammation.

  "I am Velara Mahlynn Misith," I said. "I was raised in a palace of peace. My gift is not for ruling."

  I reached out. Kit's hand went immediately to his blade and his whole body pulled back half a step. I did not stop. I placed my bare palm over the scar.

  I closed my eyes and found the golden hum I had known since I was small enough to frighten myself with it. I did not look at the wound the way a surgeon looks at a wound. I looked at it the way you look at a knot in a rope, finding the place where the tension had gone wrong, following the thread back to where it had pulled too tight. I poured light into the gap.

  My hands began to glow. I felt the warmth move through my palms and into his arm. I felt the cells knit. The inflammation dissolved. The jagged edges of the scar smoothed over and then were simply gone, the flesh as clean and blue as if the wound had never been made.

  I pulled my hand back. Kit stared at his arm. He flexed it slowly, then quickly, his mouth open. He rotated his shoulder in a full circle for what I suspected was the first time in years.

  The silence that followed was complete. Even the wind dropped, as though the island itself had paused.

  "Healed he is," Morvin whispered. He had leaned so far forward on his cane that Thorne put a steadying hand on his shoulder. "To mend the living tapestry. A rare thread this is. Never before has the Prime seen the Light used to rewrite the body's end."

  Thorne's quill was moving so fast the ink blotted. He did not seem to notice.

  I should have felt proud. That is what I told myself afterward, standing there with the warmth still fading from my palms. I should have felt proud. Instead I felt the heat crawl up the back of my neck and I became very aware of my white silk and my silver crown and the fact that every face in the circle was now pointed at me.

  "Of course," came Vane's voice from the back. Quiet. Flat. "The Princess does not just have gold. She has the gods on her side too."

  I did not look at her. I looked at the stone.

  "Enough," Thorne said, sharp and final, without looking up from his scroll. "The Master will show you to the sleeping huts. Rest. Tomorrow the true work begins. The Force gives, but it also demands."

  We were led away down a narrow path toward the huts. I walked at the back of the group. Kit was ahead of me, still flexing his newly healed arm with a quiet wonder that I might have felt good about under different circumstances. Warren was beside him, saying something low that made Kit huff out a short laugh. Mobe-Joan walked alone. Vane walked with two others from the group whose names I did not yet know, and the sound of their voices dropped when I drew near and rose again when I passed.

  I was nearly to my hut when I felt a hand close briefly on my shoulder. I turned. It was Warren. The smirk was gone. His eyes were dark and direct in a way that was different from the careless confidence he had worn all day.

  "That was quite a trick, Princess," he said, his voice low enough that only I could hear it. "But be careful. On the ships I grew up on, people kill for a doctor who can do that. And they kill even faster for someone they are afraid of."

  Then he was gone, back up the path toward the others, the gravel crunching under his boots.

  I stood outside my hut for a long time after that. The sun was going down behind the gray horizon, turning the water a dull, bruised copper. The Lanai moved in the shadows of the rocks below, tending to things I did not understand yet, wanting nothing from me.

  I had healed a man's wound in front of a circle of strangers and been praised by a Master who had never seen anything like it, and what I felt, standing there alone in the cold with the salt on my lips, was not pride.

  It was the particular loneliness of being too much of one thing and not enough of another. Of taking up the wrong kind of space. Of being seen so completely by a room full of people and recognized by none of them.

  I took the crown off and held it in both hands and looked at it for a moment. Then I ducked into the hut and set it on the stone shelf above my pallet and lay down in my clothes and listened to the ocean until I could not tell where the sound ended and sleep began.