In a World… where a civil war is looming, and saying the wrong thing can earn a whipping, or worse, funny events can still happen.
- Shen Tai finds out how hard it is to give away 250 un-asked-for Heavenly Horses (mostly in a Black Comedy way):
- An army commander demands that Tai 'gift' them to the Second Division, but Tai has to point out that he has to visit the Emperor first; to do otherwise would be almost treasonous.
- He tries to offer them to An Li, who decides that it would be too much of a hassle at the current time to try to claim them (and if he thought that one of his rivals could manage a strong claim for them, then it would almost worth it to kill Tai to deprive the horse to those rivals).
- He then tries to offer the horses to Wen Jian, who has to inform him that it's difficult enough, politically, for the Emperor to honor him for his work at the battlefield, after a foreign princess has already done him so much honor with the gift. (Never mind that the "foreign" princess is one of his own daughters given in an arranged marriage...) But to put the Emperor in a debt of honor trying to "repay" him for a gift from Shen Tai to the Emperor of so many horses? This doesn't stop her from requesting 10 for herself, though. She wants to train them to dance.
- And while Shen Tai and Wen Jian are talking, she's spending most of the time in the covered sedan chair flirting with him, which leads him to believe he's a dead man once the Emperor hears about it. (She lets him know soon enough that he isn't in trouble, since her husband already knows where she is, and why.)
- And in something of a repeat of his conversation with the army commander, the prime minister demands he make his horses available to the Empire. Then Tai has to point out, again, he needs to be seen by the Emperor first before he can, officially, do anything like that.
- Before Shen Tai meets with Wen Jian, he meets with one of her servants, wishing to set up the meeting. There's a bit of a furious argument, since the servant ordered Tai's own Sardian horse to be moved. But Tai finds a way to get back at him- in asking for help to make his points, in an argument about respect and following orders as part of the Mandate of Heaven, Tai... aims a poet at the servant. Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal.
- Never mind that Zian's friends found it necessary to tell him to leave the capital for a quick 'vacation' due to some poetry that Wen Jian didn't appreciate at the time....
- Tai spends most of the book meeting with various officials that wish him to pledge his horses to them, with Tai protesting each time that, due to politics (phrased mostly as a matter of honor, being a loyal subject), he's expected to meet the Emperor first, to 'officially' announce that he has the horses; anything else would be dangerous, especially to his health. Near the end of the book, he ends up trying to come up with a way to go straight home and avoid meeting the (new) Emperor in person. (Wei Song yells at him for this; but she has a point.)
- The Taguran commander, Bytsan sri Nespo, made a few suggestions to 'modify' the terms of the gift, to make sure that Shen Tai can actually survive to claim the horses: make sure they're only claimable by Tai, and stored at a certain military posting until claimed. It then turns out "He also knew, each morning and through each day and into each long summer night, what his father thought of all this.""Principally, because his father was the commander of Dosmad Fortress. Dosmad, where Bytsan was posted to await the arrival of a Kitan gifted with an absurd number of Sardian horses.
"Bystan hadn't known who had just been made fortress commander when he'd offered his clever suggestion[.] [...] It was an unhappy surprise." - Shen Tai and Wei Song eventually end up hooking up, with her claiming she's "inexperienced in these things." Then she later claims to be 'demure'/submissive. Tai asks "Is that like the inexperience, before?" Song decides to bite him in revenge....
- They end up engaged, which lead Tai to laugh for several minutes when he finds out who her father is; he considers it oddly appropriate (including the laughter), with his life experiences. Her father, possibly, is the leader of the Kanlin temple where Tai studied for a time.
