Chapter Text
And the same year Bo-Katan Kryze was named Mand’alor, and reigned for a brief time and unhappily; and shortly afterwards came the Great Purge.
– The Mandalorian Chronicle
There is blood on her hands when she wakes up. Rust-red, vivid with iron: a fevered rich colour. She stares at her open palms for a long, dull moment, half-sick with sleep, willing the blood to disappear. It runs down her wrists and into the sleeves of her synthsilk pyjamas.
Out of the corner of her eye, a flash of scarlet. The shade of her mother sits down on her bed.
‘Sleeping so late?’ says her mother. She wears the Saxon colours of her birth clan; her pale hair is plaited, her angular face deep in shadow. ‘Get up, Bo-Katan.’
‘No.’
‘Get up now, and stand straight like a princess of Kalevala.’
‘I’m not talking to you,’ Bo-Katan says. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’
Nevertheless, she climbs out of bed—her childhood bed, canopied in gold brocade, carved from the finest veshok hardwood. Its velvet curtains are embroidered with the sigil of House Kryze. She shoulders her way through them; she doesn’t want to stain anything by touching it with her hands. The scent of blood is sweet, metallic, a sharper note beneath the fragrance of her synfur bedding.
She closes her fists. Liquid squelches between her fingers.
‘Wash your hands and face,’ her mother says.
‘It’s not real. The blood isn’t real.’
Jarl Saxon’s voice is very dry. ‘Washing is the first thing everyone should do after waking up.’
It is late afternoon, the sunlight a fine translucent colour. Sifting through the narrow windows, the light rests on cool ferrostone: Taungs locked in an eternal battle. Their limbs bulge, thick with muscle. Her sister thought the carved reliefs unsuitable for a young girl’s bedroom. But her father loved the mythic, the monstrous, and his dreams were filled with giants; he fancied himself their heir.
At the washbasin, her hands leave sticky-sweet prints on the faucets. The water runs reddish-brown. These days, her dreams are a succession of bright images: unsteady as a flicker of sunlight, a passing shaft. Death Watch. The bodies of the massacred cooling in the snow. The survivors stumbling and crying, slipping in their own blood.
She’ll never be clean again.
She touches her cheek, smearing hot blood across her face. Her reflection grimaces at her, hollow-eyed and cold. How different she is from her father; how brutal and broken her dreams.
Weightless fingers encircle her wrists. The ghost of her mother leans over her shoulder, breath sweet on Bo-Katan’s neck. Her perfume lingers—nlorna flowers, jesmin. ‘Focus.’
Bo-Katan scrubs hard between her fingers. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Your hands are clean. Stop this now.’
She glances down. The blood is gone. The faucets sparkle. Water swirls into the basin, perfectly clear. I am going mad , she thinks, or I am still dreaming. And what’s the difference, in the end?
Her eyes, when she meets them in the mirror, have the fixed stare of a soldier after the battle is won. Her hands are raw and well-scrubbed. Sullenly, she splashes water on her (clean) face, and turns the mirror to the wall.
‘You should eat,’ Jarl calls after her as she walks away.
Her mother slides into the shadows: a long, liquid streak of red, the edge of her mantle fluttering behind her.
Breakfast. She sits at the head of a long table. Her sister’s ghost watches her eat.
‘You’re late,’ Satine says. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
‘You shouldn’t have.’
She’s given up on not talking to the ghosts. If she ignores them, they get louder.
Satine is draped in blue velvet; she wears her hair loose, as she did when she was a girl. Her face is a blurred oval, the colour of autumn mist. When she exhales, her breath fogs the air.
‘Where is your armour?’
Bo-Katan is still in her pyjamas. Her days stretch long and bleak. ‘I am not worthy of it.’
‘That never stopped you before.’
She’s missed Satine’s cruelty, her placid self-righteousness. ‘Why aren’t you angrier at me?’
‘I’m dead,’ says Satine. ‘It’s hard to feel strong emotions.’
Dead and entombed; her arms crossed, encased in duracrete. Satine has gone down, like their brother before her, into the chill of the family crypt. Bo-Katan can picture it so clearly. The fragrance of vormur blooms in a vase beside the sarcophagus. Bronzium memorial plaques beneath her feet. Her ancestors stand in one unbroken line stretching back to the age of Mand’alor the Great. At the end of them all, there is Bo-Katan, alone: sodden with gore and guilt.
‘I’ve been reading,’ Satine says. ‘Our father’s histories. They are quite misleading, aren’t they?’
Gemwe Jat. The Deeds of the Rulers of Mandalore. Its pages are crimson with glory. In Gemwe’s history, kings are wise and queens are martial; they wrestle with mythosaurs, with giants the size of wroshyr trees; they grant lands and build cities. They suffer no self-doubt. Their descendants are warriors like themselves. Each generation is greater than the last.
‘You would be a fool to believe them.’
Light filters through Satine, as pure and cold as a pane of transparisteel. ‘Am I remembered?’
Manuscript A. The Saxon Chronicle. Sponsored by Gar and Tiber Saxon, those Imperial collaborators, which is why it survives to this day—the only complete manuscript of the Mandalorian Chronicle. It smoothes over the bloodshed and the strife, all the tangled branches of civil war whittled down to a single line: This year Satine died, and Maul succeeded her in government. Reading it, you’d think Maul was her appointed successor, and she died of natural causes.
‘You are remembered,’ Bo-Katan answers. Even now, she loves her sister too much to bruise her with the truth. ‘A thousand years from now, scholars will learn your name.’
Satine seems satisfied. Her flesh shimmers and dissolves, amber-hued, insubstantial. And is this all that’s left of her sister? A name, a memory; the echo of her sigh.
The chronicles don’t preserve your dreams. They say nothing of your ideals, your aspirations. Only your deeds are recorded in the annals of Mandalore. And so you fight all your life for a place in the histories: for a single blood-soaked line.
In the castle’s south wing, the stench of decay has set in. She drags the mouldering tapestries out into the courtyard to burn. Her brother’s ghost walks beside her; his dead flesh has a tender, pearl-like hue. She can’t look at him directly. He doesn’t have a face.
‘I should never have let them grow damp.’ The tinder won’t catch; she strikes again and again, growing frustrated. The wind ruffles her hair. ‘It’s hard to maintain a castle all on your own.’
Her brother is silent. She runs a hand along one ruined tapestry, jewel-bright jogans and oranges blackened with mould.
‘I couldn’t repair the damage. I don’t have the skill.’
‘I wasn’t judging.’
Together, they watch their ancestral riches go up in flames. It is dusk; the wind carries away the smoke, which dissipates into the violet sky.
‘After the battle of Sundari,’ she says, ‘we piled the corpses onto a pyre. They burned for days.’
‘I see,’ her brother says. Smoke blurs the edges of his form. The dying light rests on his cropped hair, a sickly reddish-gold.
Axai died when she was a child, from the plague. She barely knew him, and she can’t fathom why he appears to her now. His widow, Mal Vizsla, is entombed beside him in the family crypt; their son Korkie’s body was never recovered.
‘We buried you with honour. Our father… It was the first time I saw him weep.’
His voice is mild, curious. ‘Am I dead?’
Her hands tremble. The smoke is making her eyes water. ‘Yes. You don’t remember?’
Axai says, ‘How do you know you aren’t?’
‘Have you been sleeping?’ Ahsoka’s hologram asks kindly.
Bo-Katan closes her eyes. Tears prickle behind her eyelids. ‘I knew you wouldn’t believe me.’
‘I do, I do believe you.’ Ahsoka hesitates; the holoprojection wavers. ‘And you see these ghosts every day?’
‘Yes,’ she says bleakly.
Ahsoka wets her lips. Her muscles ripple as she crosses her arms. ‘If they bring you comfort—’
‘I hallucinated blood on my hands this morning. I think I’m going insane.’
‘Well, you’re not dead, I can assure you of that,’ Ahsoka says. ‘I’m coming to visit you. Give me two rotations.’
In the corner of the throne room, her father’s ghost hovers. The chain of office hangs around his neck and his tunic is soaked with blood. He doesn’t glance at her; his face is turned to the wall.