The Iron River Sect had no elders present at all, so Hua simply climbed into the carriage. Sun Mei informed the Wei family's steward that she would be home for her father's birthday, and holidays only, and that her sword now exceeded the family armory, and climbed in after her.
The carriage was mammoth bone and white lacquer, drawn by eight oxen the size of houses, and it rolled out of the camp with its curtains drawn, and the recording stones followed it until the road bent, and the camps talked about nothing else for a month.
Inside the ring on Cang's finger, in a pocket dimension furnished with a bed, a bath, and a view of an artificial moon, Lady Salma of the Golden Fox sat naked at the window, watching the real world slide past through the ring's aperture like a picture show, three hundred years of power reduced to a spectator's seat in her captor's jewelry.
"Enjoying the view?" the ring's walls occasionally asked her, in his voice, when he was bored.
