My day for Annes, I guess. Found this one in the same box as the previous one. This Anne, however, really is Anne McCaffrey.
Basic fairy tale: runaway princess meets runaway prince and they eventually fall in love all while incognito. The "gifts" are the fantasy twist in this one. The princess's gift is a green thumb, and she has run away because it is deemed unsuitable for a princess - oh, yes, and because she is about to be forced to marry a rotten old baron. The prince's gift is the ability to cast a "glamour" and cause people to see what he wants them to see, and he has run away because he has been beaten for refusing to use his gift to trick our very own runaway of the first part into marrying the evil baron.
I'm guessing the story is primarily a vehicle for the illustrator, whose work in this context I found disappointing. All pages had wide, drawn borders resembling woodcuts - and they were all the same and not particularly illustrative of the story. There were also a very few (three, I think) full page illustrations also in the woodcut mode, which were supposed to represent scenes from the story - and didn't. McCaffrey is one of the best at word images and it was unclear to me that the illustrator had read the story. Of course, without those page borders, the book barely would qualify as a short story.
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