A girl and a cloak and a queen

A thick furred cloak lay spread on a table of living wood. The sky above glimmered multi-hued like gems. Birds sang choruses in trellises and wild bowers. The cloak is masterfully made and foreign in nature; the luscious sandy-colored fur plush, and the girl sinks her hand into it far deeper than she'd expected.
 
"Tell me what you know of this," a queen asks the girl. To her credit, the girl does not pale at the sight of her, does not flinch or shiver or have any of those other strange emotions. Queens such as she were all she knew. It was no wonder when she'd leave she'd be gossiped of in every port city and village square. How could she not carry herself like a queen, like the world around her should shift with a glance because she believed it should? Sometimes it even did.
 
The girl knows some things about the cloak offhand. Rumors of where it came from. But that is not what the queen wants. The girl's other hand digs into the furs, recalling the memories of the things she was made of. "A cloak made of desert cat fur was of great value to the communities of the Pall-tanir deserts," she begins, "both seen as an esoteric luck charm and functionally as both a warmth in a cold night and offering no small amount of protection from arrows and other projectile weapons. This is due in part to the desert cat's fur and evolutionary adaptations; its prey in the desert with such size would be small things--mice, tiny lizards, and most commonly insects. The most valuable food for it to eat would be spiders and scorpions, rich in proteins and especially calcium, and thus over generations the cats with thicker fur survived more often the venomous stingers and fangs of their prey, either unable to pierce skin or having little effect due to natural resistances to such venoms."
 
The queen smiles indulgently at the girl. "Very good," she says, and Pari khan'Shald smiles back, bright and happy not that she impressed Queen Calmaria, but that she knew more about the world than she had before. "Keep up your learnings, dearest Pari, and we shall see if you don't make something of yourself in time. The world is filled with heroes shaking their swords, they spawn and die like salmon and dandelion seeds in the breeze. Make yourself a mind sharper than any whetstone could, and you shall be far more useful to the world than a hand wielding an especially pointed rock."
 
And she did.