During the Zhengde era of the Ming dynasty.
A knife sharpener sat beneath the pass wall for two years. Three coins a knife, and sharpen ten, get one free.
The knives were dull. His sheath was half a stone stele, bearing just one surviving character: “Fault.”
No one knew that he remembered what had happened forty-four years ago.
His father, dead for nine years, had been ranked tenth on the Blade List. At fourteen, he himself was exiled to the frontier. On a riverbank, he washed two hundred and thirteen heads and counted thirty-seven belonging to women and children.
He tore a page from the Register of Kills and hid it in his shoe. His own name was written on that page.
That winter, two Imperial Brocade Guards arrived.
