Jade City recap

On the island nation of Kekon, bioenergetic jade gives trained Green Bones superhuman abilities, and the jade trade belongs to the clans. In the capital, Janloon, the Kaul family's No Peak clan is led by Kaul Lan as Pillar and his brother Hilo as Horn. When Ayt Mada, Pillar of the rival Mountain clan, demands that No Peak submit to a single unified clan under her and Lan refuses, the two families slide into open war of street killings, poached businesses and a fight for control of Kekon's government. Lan's sister Shae, home from Espenia, exposes No Peak's own Weather Man as a traitor and is pressed into replacing him. Lan, secretly weakened by a sabotaged supply of the jade drug shine, is ambushed and killed by the Mountain's Horn, Gont Asch. Hilo takes the Pillar's seat and strikes back on New Year's Eve; the attack fails to kill Ayt Mada, but the Kauls' cousin Anden kills Gont with a lethal use of Channeling and is so damaged that he gives up jade forever. The war ends in stalemate: Ayt Mada lives, No Peak survives, and Hilo marries Wen.

Kekon is a small island nation whose mountains hold bioenergetic jade, a mineral that grants trained Kekonese extraordinary abilities: strength, speed, heightened senses, deflection of force and the power to disrupt another body from a distance. Those who wear it are called Green Bones, and the jade trade is controlled by the clans. In the capital, Janloon, two great clans divide the city between them: No Peak, run by the Kaul family, and the Mountain. Both were founded by veterans of the resistance that drove out the Shotarian occupation a generation ago. No Peak's Pillar, its head, is Kaul Lan, the eldest grandson; his younger brother Hilo is the Horn, commanding the clan's warriors; their grandfather Kaul Sen, the war hero who built No Peak, has handed over the title without surrendering his authority, and the clan's businesses are run by his old ally, the Weather Man Yun Dorupon. The book opens with Bero, a jadeless young man from a poor district, robbing a Green Bone of his jade outside the Twice Lucky, a restaurant that pays No Peak for protection, and with Hilo answering the theft in person. Beneath the routine business of tribute payments and protected shops, relations between the two clans are deteriorating, and each is watching the other for weakness.

Kaul Shae, the youngest of the three siblings, comes home to Janloon after two years in Espenia, the wealthy foreign power whose money and culture increasingly shape Kekon. She left after quarrelling with her grandfather and gave up her jade before going, which the clan regards as close to desertion; she now wants an ordinary career and no part in family business, and her brothers cannot understand it. Their cousin Anden, half Espenian and raised in the Kaul house, is in his final year at Kaul Dushuron Academy, the clan's school for Green Bones, where he is the strongest student in his class and privately frightened by what that means. A chance confrontation with Mountain Green Bones at a public festival shows how little goodwill is left between the clans. Ayt Mada, the Mountain's Pillar, then summons Lan to her family's estate and puts a proposal to him directly: the two clans should become one under her leadership, with the Kauls given an honored but subordinate place. She argues that a divided Kekon cannot hold its jade against foreign powers. Lan refuses, and both of them understand what the refusal commits them to.

The Mountain begins taking No Peak apart commercially, poaching its tributary businessmen, the Lantern Men, and pressuring shopkeepers to change allegiance. Lan finds he can get little support from inside his own clan: his grandfather countermands him, and the Weather Man Yun Dorupon treats the clan's finances as private ground. Lan is also concealing a personal problem. He is struggling to carry his jade and suffering the symptoms of overexposure, and he has quietly begun taking SN1, the drug called shine, which raises a wearer's tolerance and which Green Bones consider shameful. Shae takes an outside job but is steadily drawn back toward the clan's difficulties, and her analytical work turns up irregularities in No Peak's accounts. Kekon's entire jade supply is supposed to be mined, refined and distributed under national control; evidence begins to accumulate that jade is being diverted out of that system and off the island, and that people inside the clans know about it.

The rivalry becomes open warfare. Green Bones on both sides settle grievances with clean-bladed duels, and beyond the duels there are ambushes, beatings and killings; Hilo answers every Mountain move at once and escalates. Property is destroyed, and neither clan can back down without losing the loyalty of the people who pay it for protection. Lan is fighting on several fronts at once: against the Mountain, against his grandfather's interference, and against his own worsening condition. Shae is pulled steadily further into the clan's affairs, and her scrutiny of its accounts keeps returning to arrangements the Weather Man has never explained to anyone. The Kauls begin to suspect that some of the damage being done to No Peak is not coming from outside it.

Shae's examination of the clan's finances hardens into proof: Yun Dorupon has been running arrangements he never disclosed, tying No Peak's own Weather Man to jade leaving Kekon and to interests aligned with the country's former occupiers. Lan concludes that he cannot govern the clan while the man remains in place, strips him of the Weather Man's office and turns to Shae to replace him, forcing her to choose between the life she wanted and the clan she was born into. Kaul Sen is enraged at the removal of the friend he has protected for fifty years and turns on his grandsons; the disgraced Weather Man withdraws to a place where clan violence traditionally cannot follow. The street war continues through a typhoon and its aftermath: both clans consolidate territory, mark out which districts and businesses belong to whom, and prepare for something larger than duels. Lan's reliance on shine worsens, and it is noticed by people who can make use of it. His brother and sister both realize that the Pillar has been keeping something from them, and that No Peak's position is considerably weaker than the family has been willing to admit.

Lan goes to the Temple of Divine Return, where the deposed Weather Man has taken sanctuary, meaning to settle the matter himself. Gont Asch, the Horn of the Mountain, is waiting for him. Lan's abilities fail under the strain of the fight, his supply of shine having been tampered with, and Gont kills him and takes his jade. No Peak loses its Pillar without warning. Hilo, who has spent the book as the clan's blunt instrument, becomes head of the family, and the character of the war changes with him: where Lan calculated, Hilo intends to answer a killing with killings. The Kauls are left with grief, a furious and failing grandfather, a leadership in transition, and an enemy who has just demonstrated that she is willing to murder a Pillar.

Hilo takes the Pillar's seat and rebuilds the clan's leadership around people he trusts without reservation: Maik Kehn as Horn, Kehn's brother Tar as his Pillarman, and Shae confirmed as Weather Man. Kaul Sen demands that the disgraced Yun Dorupon be pardoned and left in peace; Hilo has him killed anyway, which ends whatever was left between the new Pillar and his grandfather. The clans then open a second front. The chancellorship of Kekon's Royal Council falls vacant, and each clan works to install its own candidate, since whoever holds the office shapes how the government treats the clans' businesses and their jade. No Peak's man, the councilman Son Tomarho, takes the post. At the academy, Anden finishes first in his class, which means the clan will shortly award him jade, the thing he has spent his life being told he was made for and has come to dread.

Shae uses her foreign education to build relationships for No Peak abroad, reaching toward Espenia's capital and its commercial and political networks, and her work confirms what the accounts had hinted at: the Mountain has been selling Kekonese jade out of the country to foreign buyers, which is both a crime and a betrayal of the national interest that No Peak can use against Ayt Mada. Wen, who as a stone-eye cannot be sensed by any Green Bone's Perception, quietly gathers information the clan could not otherwise reach, and does it without Hilo's permission. With the Mountain overextended and its activities exposed, Hilo assembles a plan to end the war in a single night by removing the people who run the rival clan, and sets it for the New Year.

On New Year's Eve, No Peak strikes at the Mountain's leadership simultaneously across Janloon. The plan does not survive contact: the targets are defended, and the fighting is far bloodier than intended. Anden, who has just graduated and been given the jade he never wanted, is pulled into the worst of it. Confronted by Gont Asch and wearing far more jade than his body can safely carry, he uses Channeling to stop the Horn's heart, killing him. The surge leaves Anden physically wrecked and convinced that jade will destroy him as it destroyed his mother, and he renounces it completely. Gont's death costs the Mountain its military commander and blunts Ayt Mada's campaign, but she survives, keeps her clan, and the war ends in exhaustion rather than victory. Hilo is left the undisputed Pillar of a battered No Peak, with Shae as his Weather Man, and he announces that he will marry Wen despite what the family thinks of the match. Anden, having given up the future the clan trained him for, no longer has a place in it. Bero, still without jade, is alive, unrepentant, and looking for his next opportunity.

No Peak's New Year's Eve offensive against the Mountain's leadership fails to kill Ayt Mada, but it costs her the Horn of her clan: Anden, wearing far more jade than his body can carry, stops Gont Asch's heart with Channeling, and is so badly damaged by the act that he renounces jade permanently, ending the career the clan raised him for. The war between the clans stops from exhaustion rather than resolution. Ayt Mada keeps the Mountain and remains committed to a single unified clan over Kekon. Hilo is confirmed as Pillar of No Peak, with his sister Shae as Weather Man, Maik Kehn as Horn and Maik Tar as his Pillarman, and he announces that he will marry Wen, a stone-eye, over his family's objections. Kaul Sen, estranged from Hilo since the killing of his old Weather Man, is left isolated and failing. The clan has survived, but it has lost its Pillar, the grandfather's blessing, and any illusion that its quarrel with the Mountain can be contained inside Janloon: both clans now have foreign money, foreign buyers and foreign enemies in play, and Kekon's jade has become an international commodity. Bero, the jadeless thief from the opening pages, is still alive and still chasing jade.