Chapter 19: The Funeral Pyre and the Vow on Naboo

The pyre was built at the edge of the palace gardens, where Naboo's river caught the last light before the city's lamps came up.

Arthur did not know who had chosen the site, but he thought whoever it was had understood something true about the man being mourned — Qui-Gon had been a person who preferred the living world to marble floors, and the garden's edge, with its smell of cut grass and moving water and the faint mineral memory of the day's heat still rising from the stone path, was more his kind of place than any Temple chamber. The pyre itself was built in the Jedi fashion, which Arthur studied with the careful attention he gave to all foreign ritual: logs stacked with economy rather than ceremony, no decoration, the body wrapped in the order's distinctive robes. No sword buried with him. No ring. In Britain they would have given him weapons for the next world. He wondered briefly what the Jedi believed waited.

He had positioned himself at the garden's north edge, between the formal gathering and the open ground — close enough to observe everyone present, far enough that no one felt obligated to speak to him. It was a position he had learned at Camelot in the years before he was old enough to be at the ceremony's center, when he had stood at his father's shoulder at the funerals of lords he did not yet know well enough to grieve, and had discovered that the margin of a gathering often told you more about the thing being mourned than its center did.