Read Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 01 - Precipice for Free Online

and flew into hers. She grasped it and dropped into the Jar’Kai stance, ready to come at him with both blades. Ahri looked up and sighed, dropping back into the sand.
    “And you get distracted far too easily. Focus, Ahri, focus,” she chided. She gestured casually, just a slight jerk of her chin, and a handful of sand flew toward Ahri’s face. Muttering, he lifted his empty hand and used the Force to deflect the grains.
    “It’s just training, Ves,” he muttered, getting to his feet and dusting himself off.
    “It’s
never
just training,” she shot back. She deactivated her training lightsaber, hooked it back on her belt, and tossed Ahri’s to him. The Keshiri youth caught it easily, still looking disgruntled. Vestara undid her hair and fluffed it for a minute, letting the air penetrate to the roots to cool her scalp. Her long fingers busily re-braided it, properly this time, as she continued to speak, while Ahri shook grains of purple sand out of his own white, shoulder-length hair.
    “How often have I told you that? Say that in the presence of one of the Masters and you’ll never make it beyond a Tyro.”
    Ahri sighed and rose, nodding to acknowledge the truth of what she said. Neither of them had been formally chosen as an apprentice yet, although they had been training in classes under the tutelage of various Masters for years, their strengths and weaknesses in the Force noted and analyzed and pushed.
    Vestara knew that, at fourteen, it was still possible, even likely, that she would be chosen by a Master as his or her formal apprentice. But she chafed horribly at the delay. Some Tyros were chosen at much younger ages, and Vestara knew that she was strong in the Force.
    She reached out for a flask of now warm water and the canteen resting on the sand floated to her, the lid unfastening as it moved. Vestara gulped down the liquid thirstily. Sparring at the height of the sun was exhausting, and Ahri always muttered about it, but she knew it toughened her. Vestara handed the canteen to Ahri, who also drank.
    She regarded him for a moment. He was a nearly perfect physical specimen of a species whose physical strength, agility, and harmony of features and form had become an ideal for her own people. He could easily pass for a member of her own species—he would make a striking human, but a human nonetheless—were it not for the pale purple cast to his skin. His eyes, too, were slightly larger than a human’s; large and expressive. His shoulders were broad, his hips narrow, and there was not an ounce of superfluous fat on his frame. His face, though, was flushed a darker purple than usual because he was overheated, and his hair had far too much sand in it.
    “That’s two for two,” she said. “You up for another round?” She gave him a wicked grin, which was exaggerated by the small scar at the corner of her mouth. The scar that the Tribe saw as a flaw. It was plain on her face, right out in the open—there was very little shecould do to disguise it. Attempts had been made to heal it and to correct it with cosmetic surgery. Those attempts had been mostly successful and now, to be sure, it was not all that noticeable. But this was a world where any flaw, any scar or deformity, was a strike against one’s potential for advancement.
    The scar added insult to injury, as far as Vestara was concerned—because of its location, the thin line almost always made her look like she was smiling, even when she wasn’t. She had hated that about it until Lady Rhea, one of the most respected of the Sith Lords, had told her that deception was actually a very useful thing indeed.
    “It mars your beauty,” Lady Rhea had said bluntly, pausing as she strolled down the line of potential apprentices after a formal ceremony. “A pity.” She, whose beauty was only slightly diminished by the cruel ravages of time, reached out a long finger and touched the scar. “But this little scar—it can aid you. Make others think you