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His grandmother is the one to show him how to use a knife.
“Like this,” she says, her leathery hand over his smooth one, holding the blade’s edge to the neck of their injured horse. “One stroke, that’s all. Anything more is a waste of your strength, and an insult to your victim’s.” She mimics the action in the air once, urgently, and lets go. This stroke must be his.
His hands are cold. The blood, when it spills, is warm.
She had been born, he knows, a noblewoman of China, her father a busybody in the Emperor’s court. She had been raised gently, her every beauty cultivated, her hands never holding anything more dangerous than an embroidery needle.
In her seventeenth year, her father had offended the Emperor with some slight. She was never sure of its exact nature; politics were men’s work, and women had only to concern themselves with the consequences. She comforted herself that it was some middling thing; but, regardless, it was enough to have the Emperor include her name in a list of highborn women sent to appease the Huns.
She had been angry, for the first time in her life. She had flung down her sewing, pouted her rosebud mouth and torn her hair, bowed again and again before her father and the Emperor, and in the end, it made no difference. A carriage rattled northwards the next day; by the next moon, she married her barbarian.
It was lonely, on the plains. The Hun women laughed when the bride-exiles shied from dressing the spoils of the hunt, when their fingers fumbled when opening their yurts. Some of the women had turned to poems, or music, or intoxicants instead; his grandmother had not. She had counted instead--one day more and they’ll come for me, twenty days more and they will realize their mistakes, thirty days more and I’ll wake up from this dream--
By her fifth year amongst the Huns, she had learned how to skin a gazelle, how to ride a horse, how to defend herself and her children with teeth and dagger if needed. She had almost run out of numbers. That was when the ambassador from China arrived.
He did not say much. Her father had continued to irritate the Emperor with his plaints about his lost daughter. He had been executed. In fact her whole family had been executed. She was required back in China to put their spirits to rest, as a filial daughter must. In exchange for his generosity, the Emperor only expected her compliance with what was a a trivial thing: to bestow her hand in marriage as a reward for one of his most favored official—
That was all the ambassador managed to say before she who had once been a jewel of the Imperial Court, whose beauty shone even in rough furs, lifted up her jagged knife and stabbed him through the heart.
She never spoke of China again.
His grandmother teaches him how to use a knife. Hating the Emperor, and China, for its weakness and cruelty? That comes naturally. When the news of the new Emperor’s wall—of his arrogance, of his pride—comes north, his grandmother is old. He steps into her yurt, kneels by where she lies on her blankets. Even the wisest of his healers admit she won’t see another spring.
He looks at her age-worn body, and thinks of her younger self, so much frailer, bowing low and desperate before the Emperor of her youth. The current Emperor might have been present then too, might have taken pity on her and interceded on her behalf, but he had not. He had feared that his father’s rage would turn on him instead and had done nothing.
So much the better. She had become stronger among the Huns.
She takes his hand and opens her mouth and he thinks she might ask: Let me go home. Or Give me revenge. He cannot explain that the Great Wall is said to be insurmountable, even by his forces. He will cross the Wall for her, bring China to its knees as well as the Emperor who wronged her. He leans closer.
She says: “One stroke, that’s all. Make it count.”
He does.