Pretending to be a princess wasn’t any hardship. Dao hadn’t grown up in a palace, dressed in silk and jewels. She didn’t miss her cot in the Chang family’s servant quarters. Now there were no more clothes to mend, floors to sweep, chamber pots to empty. The only thing required of her was that she recline inside a gilded palanquin while the wedding procession made its way through the steppe toward the Khitan central capital. She even had an army of her own attendants to wait on her. No hardship at all…another day of it and she would go mad. Dao stabbed her needle through the eye of crane she was embroidering. The afternoon was lazy and warm as the palanquin rolled over the wild grass of the northern plains, lulling her to sleep with the rhythm. It seemed that was all she did on this journey: embroider or nap. With a snap of her wrist, she pulled the curtain aside. A square of sunlight opened up revealing the endless green of the steppe and cloudless sky beyond.
