And this is where the completed Wife of Deceit books end. Three is on the TFN boards somewhere and the very beginning of Four, but nearly every post is maddingly truncated, and once the truncation stopped, she stopped writing. Ish was going to look those up and reconstruct them. Four was mostly only in her head. Interestingly enough, when the story first went up, she was talking about a Book Five, but by the time we started working together in earnest, there were only four books in her head.
Book Three took place close to the end of the war, followed Amne through some of her humanitarian work, and finished right after Revenge of the Sith. Once again, Amne got pregnant, but Palpatine felt the need to manipulate midichlorians a second time, causing his crushed young wife another miscarriage rather than giving her cancer as he had Cyrah.
(Actually, the issue here was that Ish thought Palpatine would be such an abusive father that she just couldn’t let Amne have a baby … but Amne herself would have wanted children. This ended up working out in the end.)
Being extremely uncomfortable with emotions and unskilled in offering comfort, Palpatine does an even worse job after the second miscarriage than he did with the first, barely making time to show up for the service and the burial. Kaki was of the opinion that he hadn’t intended for Amne to lose the first two babies in the kidnapping, accounting for his attempts to be a bit more present and comforting for the first miscarriage.
Taken together, the two miscarriages and Palpatine’s response to them present a grave empathic rupture in their marriage, and the two grow apart. Resentment festers, and Amne takes on humanitarian work that keeps her away from the Chancellor’s mansion for weeks to months at a time. This is how things stand at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith, when Palpatine is “kidnapped” and the charade is broadcast throughout the Republic. Amne, who is almost on the point of leaving him, breaks down in shock and sorrow when the Separatists kidnap her husband. When she learns he’s been rescued (an extant piece of Book Three):
She should have felt a rush of relief or joy, but whatever emotion overcame her at that moment was one that defied description. It shuddered through her with the power of an electric current and left her bowed forward, sobbing in great heaves. Amia immediately moved to sit on the bunk beside her, pulling her into the circle of her arms. She had not cried like this since the loss of the twins because the intervening years had convinced her that she could not afford to feel something this strongly again, but the news of her husband's release had proved her wrong.
Instead of working herself into a frenzy, however, she filled every space of her mind with the comforting thought that Sheev was safe and waiting for her.
Amne arrives home after his rescue:
The mansion was quiet enough that she could hear the clack of her boot heels on the red marble floor and the sound of her own breathing. It was not the natural order of things, but it meant Amne might have space and time to reunite with the husband she had wronged and misjudged.
And, just when she was about to set herself free, she is so relieved to see him, she makes her fatal mistake and sleeps with him again.
For ten years of marriage, Amne had dreamed of her children. Her days were filled with meetings and obligations and reminders of how little a government could do for its people, but her nights belonged to idealism. The dreams were always different. Sometimes, she would find herself fitting a shoe onto a tiny foot while she listened to the music of a baby's chortle. At another time, she found herself older and starting to silver as she sat at a wedding feast and waited for her son to bring his wife for the formal introduction. One night, she had dreamt of nothing more complex than the act of boxing up baby clothes for storage.
It was no secret that she wanted children. Stars knew that she tried hard enough to bring children into the Palpatine family, but her body did not cooperate. For ten years, she had been happy for her friends and kept the jealousy out of her smile when she met small children in her travels. She had always been the sort of teacher who would make time for her students, but she had to refrain from parenting them in turn.
The night before her physician had confirmed her pregnancy with Michel and Davit, she had dreamed in specifics and known that her wish would be granted. Amne saw a girl with her hair and the green eyes that Sheev must have passed on from his father. She saw Vali's grace in the girl's lithe limbs and a bit of herself in the firm set of the girl's chin. The only imperfection in this vision was that the girl had inherited her father's stoicism and then hardened it into a lack of emotion.
When she lost the twins, her world had crumbled, but there was one glimmer of hope for Lady Palpatine. She knew that she had lost her sons, but her dreams had promised her a daughter. There was hope to come.
She had dreamed of the flame-haired girl the night before she learned that she was expecting again. The night after the miscarriage, she had dreamed of the girl, grown into a woman and even more proficient at hiding her emotions. Amne had taken it as a sign that this loss was not the end of the world as she felt.
Tonight, Amne awoke in her husband's arms for the first time in six months with a new dream burned into her mind. She had seen the woman of her last dream again and recognized Sheev's smile on her daughter's lips. It was the first time that Amne had dreamed of her daughter's joy and it gave her something to look forward to.
Sheev was still asleep, that familiar smile on his lips and his left arm coiled protectively or possessively around her waist. She shifted her position so that she could mirror the gesture and fell asleep with one thought on her drowsy mind.
One way or another, her wish for that child would be granted.
And it is. This baby girl is the future Mara Jade. Book Four would have detailed Amia’s rescue of Amne once Palpatine proclaims himself Emperor, their escape from the Jedi Purge, and Amne raising Palpatine’s daughter in hiding. For Sheev feels a link with his child and is on the hunt for his estranged wife.
As you might surmise from the prologues you’ve read, Imperial forces eventually capture Amne, and she is held prisoner and tortured. At the end of Wife of Deceit, Palpatine himself appears, at last extracts the location of his daughter from the woman he once married in love and truth, then bursts a vessel in her brain and watches impassively as Amne dies.
Ish wrote:
“Books 1 and 2 are completely preserved off-line. Book 3 is truncated. Book 4 I need to get back to and finish because oh my gosh, book 4. There are scenes I've had written in my head for YEARS coming up.”
“In Wife, Palpatine hunts down Amne and takes their child. I think he might have just let her go and be a casualty of the Republic, but he feels his child being born. And he doesn’t manage the same connection, just knows there’s someone with the Force who is HIS and has to be reclaimed. That’s why it’s not immediate that Amne or her friends are in danger.”
When we started merging Palpyverses, we ended up with two timelines: Ish’s story followed the canon story of the prequels, but Midnight threw a monkey wrench in it. If Anakin had loved Palpatine, there would have been an intervention ending in Palpatine’s death. Amne would have been his widow and would have lived to raise their child. In this timeline, Ish changed Mara Jade’s name to Naome, meaning “joyful” rather than “bitter and jaded.”
But then …
We kept on working. What would have happened if Anakin, Padme, and Valorum had intervened the night the war ended, but Palpatine didn’t die? So, then a third timeline was born, in which an unholy bargain kept Palpatine in the Chancellor’s box for eight more years, the agreement deeply challenged both the Skywalkers’ and the Valorums’ marriages, Amne divorced the Chancellor and lived to make a happy marriage to someone else and have more children … and Naome Palpatine married Luke Skywalker. Ish loved this timeline because it gave Amne a happy ending, and we both liked it because A Larger View of the Force would have revolved around ideas we both found we had about religion, and things we both wanted to say about it, not to mention reforming both the Jedi and the Sith Orders.
It wasn’t the easiest thing at first to merge universes. Someone else’s thoughts about your characters always take some degree of ducking and diving. But in the end we found we could trust one another, and I have to say that plotting and planning the alternate ending to Midnight, in which Amne had four more children, was some of the most fun writing I ever had. Signing on to Facebook to yap with Ish every night, I never knew what esoteric thing I was going to learn. Somehow ballet, music theory, Russian literature, Native American issues, and foreign languages all got pulled into our discussions, along with hefty doses of LDS and New Age cosmology. All I really had to contribute was psychology and New Age. Between the times when those came up, I learned a lot.
Ish had a degree of caring for other people and a depth of interest in life one doesn’t encounter very often. We often put our wishes for how life could have been into our characters, and I think she did that with Amne to some extent.
She had some fifteen projects she was trying to write all at once. She had a tough life, but it was a full life, with tons of friends, exercise, music, church, languages, the ballet, and international travel. I like to think wherever she is, she’s just taking the whole universe in.
She sure did while she was here. I miss her.
On behalf of Ish and her poor Amne, thank you for reading.
