Something was different in the morning and I felt it before I was fully awake.

  I lay on my pallet in the gray pre-dawn with the orange crystal warm against my sternum and I listened to the ocean and felt the Force moving through the island the way it always did, through the stone and the roots and the salt air, and it was the same as it had always been and it was not the same at all. It was louder somehow. Closer. As though someone had adjusted the distance between me and it without telling me.

  I dressed and went out to the training shelf and did not examine the feeling too closely. I was afraid that examining it would change it.

  Warren was already there.

  He looked up when I came through the archway and did not look away, which was itself different from the careful management of eye contact that had characterized the last several weeks. He just looked at me, openly and without apology, and something in my chest responded to it like a string responds to the correct note played nearby.

  The morning session paired us together. Morvin watched from the edge of the shelf with his hands folded over his cane and said nothing, which was either approval or the particular patience of someone waiting to see what happened next.

  We were not fighting to win. That was clear within the first exchange. Warren moved toward me rather than away, closing distance instead of creating it, and every parry became something that lasted a beat longer than it needed to. His smirk was different this morning, softer and more private, a thing made for me rather than for the room. When he caught my wrist on a disarm and held it rather than completing the move, the Force between us hummed at a frequency I felt in my back teeth.

  My blade was moving differently. That was the first time I noticed it consciously. I was faster than I had been yesterday. Not marginally. Noticeably. The Force was responding to my movements with a fluency and immediacy that I had not earned through any additional training. It was simply there, more available than it had been, like a door that had been slightly ajar for months and was now standing open.

  Warren disarmed me cleanly in the fourth exchange, a clever flick of his wrist that sent my blade clattering across the wet stone, and stepped into the space it left with his hand catching my waist. His eyes were searching mine with an expression that had no irony in it.

  "You are distracted, Princess," he said, quiet enough that it was only for me.

  "I am focused," I said. "Just not on the steel."

  He held my gaze for a moment. Then that small, private smile again, the one that cost him something to show, and he stepped back and retrieved my blade from the stone and handed it back to me without ceremony.

  I held it and felt the Force running through my grip like current through a wire and thought about the door standing open and what, exactly, had opened it.

  I carried the thought with me through the morning and into the afternoon, when Thorne gathered us in the sheltered grotto of the library. He was more animated than usual, standing rather than sitting, his spectacles pushed up his nose with an energy that suggested whatever he intended to say today he had been thinking about for some time. In his hand he held a small holographic locket, old technology, the projection it cast flickering slightly, but clear enough to show a woman with a kind face and steady eyes and beside her a young girl with Thorne's own inquisitive expression and his same slightly too-large ears.

  Shebi and Lindy. I recognized them from the Prelude I had read before coming here. His wife. His daughter.

  "There are those who believe the Force requires a hollow heart," Thorne said, and his voice had the quality it got when he was about to say something he considered important enough to write down. "That to serve it fully one must first empty oneself of all other allegiance. The Prime did not teach us this. We are vessels, yes. But a vessel is defined entirely by what it holds."

  He closed the locket and set it carefully on the stone beside him. Then he turned to the pile of massive obsidian boulders at the edge of the grotto, each one larger than two of him, and he reached for the Force.

  Three stones rose. Slowly, with effort, wobbling slightly in the air as though reminding themselves which direction was up. Thorne held them for a moment and then lowered them back with the careful deliberateness of someone who knows their limits.

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  "That," he said, "is my mind moving weight. The Force obeying the instruction of a disciplined scholar." He adjusted his spectacles. "Now."

  He closed his eyes. He was quiet for a long moment. Whatever he was reaching for was not technique. I could feel the quality of it change, the way the Force in the room shifted from something mechanical to something alive, and the shift had a texture I recognized from my own healing work, the feeling of the Force moving not because it had been directed but because it wanted to, because the channel it was being offered was the right shape for it.

  Thorne opened his eyes and reached out and the boulders did not rise so much as they were lifted, all of them, a dozen at least, sweeping upward in a single motion and spreading into a wide, slow orbit around the ceiling of the grotto, moving with a stately, complex grace that had no business belonging to a small slight man in thick spectacles. He held them there and the look on his face was not concentration. It was peace. The specific peace of someone doing exactly what they were made to do in the presence of the people they are doing it for.

  He lowered them after a full minute and sat down heavily on his stone and removed his spectacles and wiped them, which I understood was partly because they needed wiping and partly because he needed a moment.

  "Love," he said, "is not a distraction from the Force. It is the most potent conduit the Force has ever found in us. It is the anchor that keeps us from drifting into the cold." He replaced his spectacles and looked at us over the rims. "A Jedi with an empty heart is a Jedi moving weight. A Jedi who loves is a Jedi moving the world."

  The orange crystal against my sternum had been growing steadily warmer since the boulders began to rise. By the time Thorne finished speaking it was the temperature of a held hand.

  I understood, sitting in that grotto with the smell of old vellum and candle smoke around me and the crystal warm against my skin, that I had not been imagining what I felt on the training shelf this morning. The Force had been responding to me differently because I was different. The door that had been standing open all day had been opened by the Choice. By Warren. By the particular quality of what I felt when I thought about him, which was not the careful, guarded warmth I had permitted myself in the weeks before last night but something unguarded and total, a feeling like the Force itself, vast and present and not especially interested in being managed.

  Thorne had just told me this was right. Thorne, who wrote everything down and chose his words with the precision of a man who understood their weight, had just told me that love was the anchor, the conduit, the most potent guide the Force had ever found in us.

  I thought about the Kraken rising from the deep and the dark satisfaction I had felt holding something that vast, and I thought about what it would mean to feel that way all the time, to have that door standing open not as a new thing but as a permanent condition, and the thought was so large and so bright that I had to set it down carefully and come back to it.

  The Force was guiding me. That was what I understood, walking out of the grotto into the gray evening with the crystal warm against my chest. I had felt it pulling me toward Warren from the first days on this island, the particular way the Force organized itself differently in his presence, steadier, more available. I had called it recognition and then warmth and then something I was not ready to name, and all along it had been the Force showing me the shape of my own anchor.

  The thought settled into me with the clean, certain quality of things that are true.

  The moon was a silver sliver over the water when I left my hut. I had taken off the red leather pauldrons. I had taken off the crown. I walked through the shadows of the stone huts in a simple white shift with the orange shard glowing softly against my chest and I did not feel like a Princess and I did not feel like a student. I felt like the Force itself had a direction and I was finally walking in it.

  I knocked on Warren's door.

  He opened it as though he had been standing on the other side of it, waiting without quite admitting to himself that he was waiting. He was without his jacket, the candlelight from behind him catching the lines of his shoulders and the particular stillness of a person who has been alone with something for several hours and has arrived somewhere on the other side of it.

  "Velara," he said. Just my name. The way he said it was enough.

  "I have made my Choice," I said. I stepped into the doorway and looked at him directly, the way I looked at wounds before I healed them, without flinching from what I saw. "On Misith a kiss is a vow. It is permanent and it is sacred and I have known for longer than I admitted to myself that it was going to be you." I reached up and put my hand against his face. "The Force has been telling me since I arrived on this island. I am done not listening."

  He was very still for a moment. Looking at me with that open, unguarded expression he had shown me only glimpses of before. He did not fully understand what I meant about the Force, I could see that in his face, but he understood what was underneath it, the totality of it, the weight of being looked at by someone for whom you are not a moment or a warmth or a passing comfort but something permanent and chosen, and it moved through him visibly.

  He brought his forehead down to mine. His hands came up and held my face the way my father had held my face on the boarding ramp, with care, with the specific tenderness of someone handling something they understand the value of.

  Then I pulled him down to me and the Choice was made.

  The Force did not hum. It sang. A warm, golden flood of it that moved through the room and through the stone and I felt it reach outward, past the walls of the hut, into the island itself, into the roots of the Great Tree and the rock of the cliff and the cold water far below where an ancient creature moved in the deep and felt, perhaps, something shift in the current above it.

  The candle went out.

  The orange glow of the crystal was the last thing I saw and then I did not see anything for a while and that was exactly right.