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The door to Gardulla the Giantess’s treasury stood tall and gleaming in the light of Shmi’s small lantern, an advertisement for all the riches hidden within: gold, bronze, mahogany, precious stones and magical sigils.
Shmi traced a rune with her finger. It lied. True, the vault stored many a precious thing, but the sigils were merely ornament. Gardulla the Elder was far too cheap to pay a real sorcerer. The lock was pure mechanics, same as the engines that kept the palace working - the same engines Shmi tended, day after day after day.
She knew how to make a machine do what she wanted.
She pulled a cup out of her satchel, propped it upended against the door, and started slowly rotating the dial. There. A click. She turned in the other direction. Here, another.
It took time to coax a lock to open. If someone came by… she didn’t need to worry much, Shmi reminded herself. Gardulla’s guards were poorly trained and poorly paid, and did their jobs poorly as well. Instead of patrolling, they whiled away nights drinking and playing cards. Nobody would come through this corridor until morning.
At last, the lock gave. The door slid open, silent and light as paper on well-oiled treads. Shmi picked up her lamp and slipped inside.
The vault was big, although not as big as the door hinted at. It felt empty too - Gardulla needed a lot of space to move around, after all. Shmi hurried past chest and glass cabinets. Where could it be…
A stand of soul-swords halted her steps.
Hello?
Hello? Is someone there?
She hunched her shoulders and urged her feet forward. I’m sorry, she thought, hoping the swords might hear. I can’t. She wished she could. The Knights of Jedi surely grieved their loss, whether their bearers were alive or dead.
But she could not fix everything. She came here for something else - someone else.
There.
At a pride of place, guarded by two full sets of ancient armor, stood a perch wrought out of gleaming metal. On it sat a white gyrfalcon, head covered by brown leather hood and a chain locked on its leg.
Shmi had never seen a bird of prey as pale as that. Only his wings were ticked with black, like pen marks on paper.
He looked large for a male - but then, he wasn’t a bird at all.
Shmi had been there when the spice skyship captain brought him in. He’d told the whole story with gusto: a great warrior bested at last, tricked, and trapped, and defeated in way he could never fight. Smug and proud, he recklessly stirred up Gardulla’s appetite - he’d thought he could make himself rich with the man-turned-bird.
All he got was a bullet to his head.
The Giants feared none but each other; they cared little for rules and when they wanted something? They took it.
Shmi hissed. “Jango Fett? Sir?”
The falcon stirred. He turned his head this way and that, the small bell on the hood tinkling in the quiet. She’d heard they kept him blinded at all times. How horrible must that be, to only rely on your hearing, and even that so unlike anything a human would know?
Shmi stepped closer. “Please, don’t hurt me,” she whispered, eyes on the needle-sharp tip of his blue-grey beak, and reached for the hood. She gripped the leather - pulled - and it slipped off the falcon’s head.
He looked straight at her, black eyes boring into her like needles. Did he understand? Or had the curse taken his mind away as well as body?
Shmi reached into the pocket of her coveralls and pulled out a small envelope, folded out of a torn blueprint. She opened it, careful, careful, and spilled three tiny shards of charcoal into her palm.
Blessed coal was rarer than gold. Not even Gardulla could afford it more than once a year, to revive the souls of her palace’s engines. And it burned to the last grit - nearly to the last grit. If you were lucky, you might find a tiny piece left stuck somewhere inside the furnace.
Shmi stretched out her palm toward the gyrfalcon. “Here. Eat these, quick.”
Blessed coal was magic, pure magic. It powered spells, renewed enchantments - and burned off curses.
Shmi had been saving the shards for herself, to remove the spell that bound her soul to Gardulla’s will. Only yesterday she received the third piece, a gift from a fellow slave sold to the spice mines. “No more use for it, where I’m going. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”
What a luck she had. Shmi shook herself. Yes, she could keep the coal for herself, but could she live with herself afterwards? How would she sleep at night, knowing that she could have saved this man, trapped much worse than she was trapped? Surely he must suffer worse than her: he’d been free before, and Shmi had only ever been a slave.
She wiggled her palm. “Please, eat it.”
He tilted his head at her. At last, one - two - three, he pecked the blessed coal out of her hand.
For a beat, nothing happened. Then, he cried out, flapped his wings and launched himself into the air.
Shmi jumped back, but he did not get far. The chain on his leg stretched taut; his wings beat the air as he pulled, and then…
How to describe it? As if the falcon split in the middle and the man fell out. He thudded onto the floor: knees first, then arms, straining back then popping free, as if someone roughly pulled a jacket off of him. Beak became a mouth…
…and the transformation stopped. He lay on the ground, face down, in a heap of feathers.
Shmi did not think. She knelt beside him and reached in, found his arms and pulled him off the floor. The change failed halfway through. His legs, arms, chest, throat all looked human, dressed in shoddy pants and a shirt that looked like prisoner garb. His back though, remained a bird. Enormous gyrfalcon wings jutted out of a back covered in feathers. The edge of the spell became a gradient of flesh, fabric and feathers. If he wanted to take his shirt off he’d have to cut it off of himself.
His face was the strangest. It morphed halfway up: wide nose ran into the point of a beak, strong chin and unshaved cheeks disappeared under feathered cheekbones, tightly cropped curly hair melted into white feathers.
His eyes… dark. Human dark, or bird dark? Shmi didn’t know.
He was beautiful.
“You’re the woman,” he rasped.
“Um.” Shmi cringed. How could she look at him so, when he was… what he was?
“You were there, when they brought me in. You…” he shook his head roughly. “Why?”
She met his eyes. What was he thinking, what did he feel? She couldn’t guess. “Why what?”
He grimaced - not quite anger, not quite a frown - and turned his face away. He reached up traced it with his fingers; the point of the beak, the soft edge where human became bird.
“I’m sorry,” Shmi whispered brokenly. “I was so sure it would work.”
He closed his eyes and tipped his head back. “It would have.” The way his hands lay in his lap, his wings drooped to the floor, all spoke of grief. He waved behind him, at the perch and the chain still glinting on the treasury floor. “Beskar. The metal Mandalorians forge into armor. It inhibits magic.”
“Oh. Oh no.” Shmi covered her face. Her ignorance ruined everything. If she’d taken the chain off, moved him off the perch first…
Gentle hands on her wrists pulled them down. “Don’t.” He climbed to his feet, with more grace than she would expect, and helped her up. “Lets look for some more blessed coal. The Giant bitch will have some here, I’m sure.”
Shmi grimaced. “But…” she didn’t want to say it. A curse can only be broken once.
“For you, not for me.” He’d already marched to the nearest cabinet and started pulling out the drawers one by one. “You’re soul-bound, aren’t you? A slave.”
“I.” Shmi’s head spun. “Yes, but… why?!”
He stopped. With a rueful huff, he dropped his head. “Why?” he repeated quietly.
What was so funny? Shmi wrapped her arms around herself. “You don’t even know my name.”
“True.” He turned around pulled himself tall - an impressive figure now, with a pair of nearly snow-white wings reaching above his head and out from his shoulders. He touched a fist to his heart in a warrior salute. “I am Jango Fett, the captain of the True Mandalorian Company and the rightful leader of all Mandalore. Who are you?”
Shmi swallowed through a suddenly-dry throat. “Shmi Skywalker. A mechanic.”
He smiled, all smug, and offered her a hand. “Well then, Shmi Skywalker. Lets get out of here.”
She couldn’t help it - she smiled back. Probably blushed, too. She reached out and took his hand. “Lets.”