Lost Tribe of the Sith 05 - Star Wars Purgatory

own day?”
    The Sith liked the message of Donellan’s story, she told him. Many Sith were patient about engineeringtheir ascensions, but it was possible to be too patient. “Donellan’s Day is also called the Day of the Dispossessed. And think about it,” she said, admiring his muscled arms through the slit sleeves. “Has the Tribe ever really
needed
a cause for a celebration?”
    He laughed once, a throaty chuckle that made Ori smile. “No, I guess not,” he said. “At least it keeps people in my line of work busy.”
    The seven High Lords were always trying to outdo one another in decorating their boxes at the games. Taking the design of her mother’s booth into her own hands eight months earlier, Ori had learned about Jelph and his secret garden from one of the Keshiri florists of Tahv—if indirectly. Sensing a lie when the Keshiri claimed that the flowers were his own, Ori followed him on her uvak one day. The flying beasts still forbidden to the Keshiri, the florist had traveled on foot to meet a caravan of carts bringing fertilizer from the Marisota. She found Jelph—and had found him again many times since, except when he was away on his raft, up in the jungle.
    The jungle
. Ori looked over the trellis to the green hills, climbing away to the smoldering peaks of the east. Even the Tribe didn’t go up into that tangle of underbrush and overhanging foliage. “No sane person
should
go there,” Jelph had said. But what he brought back on his little barge was the secret to his horticultural success—and the successes of all his customers along the line. “By the time the runoff comes downstream,” he’d explained once, digging his hands into a mound of soil, “a lot of the nutrients are gone.” Ori had lain awake nights imagining the man waist-deep in a dark mountain stream, shoveling muck into his flatboat.
    Silliness. A hedonistic excess. But she was Sith, wasn’t she? Who else should she please?
    Kneeling, he arranged the cuttings neatly upon a cloth draped across the ground. Large, dirt-stained hands worked with surprising gentleness, prying away the buds that had come to nothing. Jelph looked at her keenly. “You know, I can give you the names of my customers closer to Tahv. They’re growing their plants in the same dirt.”
    “Yours are better,” she said. That much was true. Perhaps the flowers simply grew better in air closer to their native soil. Maybe it was the workmanship of a human, rather than a Keshiri.
    Or maybe it was
this
human. When she’d met him, she’d imagined Jelph had only recently become a slave. No laborer she’d met, human or Keshiri, had his vocabulary. He must have
been
someone before, back in the Sith cities. But he’d answered without hesitation: “I’m nobody. I never
knew
anybody, before you.” He’d been born into slavery, and there he’d stay. He, and whatever children he might ever have.
    The human slave class had developed soon after the Korsin line ended. While many of
Omen
’s descendants were Force-sensitive, those who weren’t had formed their own layer of society beneath those who served the Grand Lord. Free members of the Tribe, this yeomanry helped to keep the Keshiri, who stood at the very bottom, productive. But when any Sith citizen stood condemned by a Lord, birthright could be lost forever. Jelph of Marisota had no surname because his father had none to give. He was better than a Keshiri—she’d
never
let one of the purple-skinned serfs call her by her first name—but only because he was human, not because he was Sith. Jelph owed fealty and service to the Sith, should they want it, but only Ori had ever prevailed upon him directly for anything.
    Such a waste
, she thought, admiring both worker and workmanship. “You know, my mother’s a High Lord.”
    “You’ve mentioned it.”
    “She’s powerful, but the traditions are so strong,” she said. “It’s a shame there isn’t some kind of path for you to get back in.”
    “I never
was
in,” he said. “And what would I do in Tahv? I’d hardly fit with your beautiful people.” Looking up at her, he winked. In the sunlight, she could see the long, ruddy scar running from his right cheek down his neck. She’d sometimes imagined it as being from some great battle, rather than some farm accident, years ago. But he was right. Even if he had his name, his disfigurement would make him an ill fit for the Tribe.
    Jelph stood abruptly.
    “You
are
going to roll those up,” she