Sleight of Hand: The Tale of Mara Jade

"Sleight of Hand: The Tale of Mara Jade" is a short story written by Timothy Zahn for Tales from Jabba's Palace. It features Mara Jade as a dancer in Jabba's Palace.

Plot summary

Following the Battle of Hoth, Emperor Palpatine sends Mara Jade to infiltrate Jabba's Palace on Tatooine, disguised as the dancing girl Arica, in order to assassinate Luke Skywalker. Her dark Master believes that Darth Vader may be courting Skywalker as an apprentice to unseat him. However, Melina Carniss, another of the Hutt's dancers and a member of Jabba's secret security detail, suspects her of planning to assassinate the Hutt, and attempts to arrest her. Jade turns the tables on Carniss by using the Force to cause Melina to shoot one of Jabba's Gamorrean guards. Jade flees down a tunnel and comes to a ventilation shaft of the rancor pit. After fighting through three rows of guards, she is able to watch Luke kill Jabba's rancor. She then enters the ventilation shaft of the rancor pit using a force pike, and uses the Force to open the trapdoor and follow the crowd out to the sail barge. Though she begs Jabba to let her join him and others at the Dune Sea, a suspicious Jabba instead provides her with a landspeeder and instructs her to leave and never come back after she tried to use the Force on him. Thus stymied in this attempt to fulfill her mission, Jade returns to Imperial Center and to a displeased Palpatine.

Continuity

Arranging Mara Jade's appearances in chronological order means readers would witness her failure to kill Luke first, prior to Luke actually meeting her in Heir to the Empire (1991), her first published appearance. As such, this reading order dispelled the brief mystery surrounding her animosity toward Luke as presented in Heir. Mara adopted the alias Celina Marniss in "First Contact" (1994), a short story published first but set much later in the timeline.^[2]

Mara exhibited very articulate telepathic communication with the Emperor, a use of Force telepathy far more precise than shown elsewhere in the canon. Such a display of power needed to be vetted by George Lucas, as a July 19, 1994, memo indicates. Lucas specified that this telepathy is due to an innate difference in Mara Jade herself and should be limited to her alone.^[2]

A popular misconception around the time of this short story's publication was that Mara Jade could be spotted somewhere in Return of the Jedi (1983). Given that her character was conceived years after that film was produced and that no unnamed extras have been retroactively identified as "Arica," Mara was not actually in the movie.^[2]