Princess Jade

Princess Jade of Moradim arrives at the healer's gate "like a storm trying to pretend it was merely a breeze," in traveling clothes that try desperately to be simple and fail at every turn—the fabric too fine, the cut too precise, the color too perfectly matched to the warm undertones of her tanned skin. Her black hair is braided in what is clearly meant to be a practical style and still catches the light like polished obsidian. She is, she announces, traveling incognito, "blending in with the common folk, experiencing life beyond palace walls, very educational"—wearing enough jewelry to fund a small village for a year. She has opinions about window boxes. She thinks cascading petunias would be divine.

Beneath the practiced laugh and the constant chatter is a young woman who has not slept properly in two months. Every night she walks through a grey and dusty city that is her city and is not—empty streets, toys left in the dust, perfectly good books with their pages flapping, a woman screaming somewhere she can never find. Sometimes there is a man: a brooding prince with cheekbones you could cut glass with, whose eyes are actually black, "like looking into nothing," and shadow-things beside him that make people simply stop existing. Sleeping draughts made her fuzzy. Wine gave her a headache. Philosophy before bed only left her more confused about existence and still dreaming about abandoned cities. So she comes to the woman by the river that Countess Meredith told Lady Pemberton about, who told her friend Celia.

What Khali finds when she sings the princess to sleep and follows her down is no anxiety dream. It is prophecy—a Moradim of centuries hence, unmade by a hungry silence—and Jade, silly and vain and unexpectedly endearing, has the Sight. What she does with the friendship that grows out of that discovery, and how the world comes to remember her, is the tale the anthology's blurb calls The Song of Blood and Stone: "how wealth rewrites history."

Jade performs. Her laugh "had definitely been practiced in front of mirrors"; her mannerisms are cultivated; she can find the superficial even in cosmic horror ("Do you know what this is going to do to my social calendar?"). But intelligence flickers behind the affectation, and when the mask slips—hands trembling around a teacup, knuckles white at the memory of a rival's sincere apology—what shows is someone raw, frightened, and starved for a friend who values her for more than her bloodline. She has never gardened; "we have people for that." She turns out to be surprisingly good at following instructions when she wants to be.

Jade's gifts are a princess's gifts—gold coins pulled from a purse that cost more than the cottage, a palace with a breakfast room of crystal and silver, a court that will believe what it is told—and one that no one, least of all Jade, expected: the rare ability to see possible futures in her dreams. Khali cannot remove it; it is "part of you, woven into your very being." She can only build walls between the dreaming mind and the visions.

The two chapters online end with Jade clutching a bundle of herbs and threatening to haunt Khali first if the world ends. What comes after—the friendship in the garden, the fiancé from Fayespire, the road to High Pass—is the rest of the tale, and its ending is the reason the Historian sat with this story "longer than any other" in his collection.

Jade's world is the palace of Moradim—its portraits, its seating feuds, its ladies-in-waiting who pretend to sympathize—and, for a while, a garden by a river where nobody expects her to perform. "You're the only real friend I have," she tells Khali. What she does with that friendship is the whole of the tale.