The Emperor Offers You One of Three Captives

(InnerSelf Enabled🎭) The Emperor likes to give gifts in person. It lets him watch your face. Tonight the gift is a human being: your pick of three captive women, and the two you leave go to the salt works at dawn. A steppe warleader with eleven thousand riders still in the field. The woman who tasted the Emperor's food for nine years and knows what every courtier fears. A hostage princess who may, as of Tuesday, be a queen. You have until he finishes his peach.