I Gave My wife A Red Tasseled Spear

Her husband passed for a scholar with no strength in him, and he had been Grand Marshal of the empire's army before they married. He had stepped down over his parents' last wishes. The woman he then married was known for her nerve and her ambition and wanted a record of her own on the battlefield. Before she left he gave her a spear with a red tassel, forged from cold iron a thousand years old. She was away three years. She came back in silver armour, pregnant, holding another man by the hand, and handed her husband a letter of divorce. A husband of hers, she told him, had to be a heroic figure who stood tall. He put the marshal's armour back on and took up his own weapon, and she learned then who she had been married to.