My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 104: The Boy Who Talked Too Much
The lumber merchant's apprentice didn't come by the shop that week, nor the week after, and it took until the third missed delivery for Li Fan to think anything of it beyond a scheduling change at the timber yard. Merchants shuffled their routes often enough without explanation. He'd have gone on assuming exactly that, if the boy's own master hadn't shown up in his place, cart heavier than usual, face carrying none of its ordinary easy humor.
"Boy's laid up," the merchant said, unloading the cedar planks himself with more force than the task required. "Won't be running deliveries for a while."
"What happened."
The merchant's jaw worked a moment before the words came. "Two men stopped him on the eastern road, three nights back. Not robbers — took nothing off him, not even the coin purse he was carrying for me. Just wanted to know things." He set the last plank down harder than the wood deserved. "Wanted to know about the carver's shop. About the quiet one who works there. How long he's lived in this city, who he speaks with, whether he's ever mentioned family, whether anyone visits him." The merchant's eyes finally came up to meet Li Fan's directly, something sharp and accusing beneath the plain worry. "My boy didn't know anything worth telling. Talked anyway, the way boys do when two grown men have him backed against a cart in the dark. When they'd got everything they wanted out of him, one of them broke two of his fingers. Told him it was a lesson about which conversations were worth having with strangers."
Li Fan stood very still, the weight of the merchant's words settling somewhere far heavier than the news itself accounted for. He'd spent weeks now varying his own routes, reinforcing his own wards, keeping his own blade close at hand — every precaution built around the assumption that whatever danger had found him would keep testing him directly, the way it had in the alley behind the tanner's yard. He hadn't once considered that it might reach instead through the ordinary people who orbited his quiet life, people who'd never chosen any part of this and had no formations, no sword, no years of hardened caution standing between themselves and two men willing to break a boy's fingers over gossip.
"Where is he now," Li Fan said.
"Home. My wife's tending him." The merchant's voice had gone rougher, grief and anger tangled too close together to separate cleanly. "I've kept him off the roads since. Told the yard we're short a hand until further notice." He studied Li Fan a long moment, and something in his expression shifted from accusation toward something closer to genuine question. "You know something about this. I can see it plain on your face, carver, whatever name you're actually going by these days."
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Li Fan didn't answer immediately. Every careful habit he'd built across years of guarding his own privacy told him to deny it, to offer the same practiced ignorance he'd given the soft-handed stranger in his own shop weeks ago. But the boy's broken fingers sat between them now, plain and undeniable, a cost his silence had already helped create once. Continuing that same silence toward the man standing in front of him, grieving over his own apprentice's pain, felt suddenly less like caution and more like something closer to cowardice.
"I know it isn't gossip," Li Fan said finally. "I know it's connected to something dangerous that has nothing to do with your boy, and everything to do with me. I'm sorry it reached him at all. I should have considered sooner that it might."
"Sorry doesn't reset his fingers straight."
"No. It doesn't." Li Fan met the man's eyes without flinching from the accusation's fairness. "I can set them properly myself, if you'll let me, and see that they heal without a lasting weakness. That's the only repayment I have that means anything tonight. The rest — whoever did this, whatever they're actually after — I intend to find out, and I intend to make certain it doesn't reach anyone else's door because of me again."
The merchant studied him a long moment, some private calculation working behind his weathered face, weighing an offer of medicine against a threat that had already proven it could reach into his own household without warning. "You'll come tonight," he said finally, more demand than invitation. "Not tomorrow. Tonight. And you'll tell me plainly, once his fingers are set, exactly how much more danger my family's standing in for having ever let that boy deliver to your shop."
"I'll tell you everything I honestly know," Li Fan said. "It isn't as much as either of us would like."
The merchant gave a short, humorless nod, and turned back toward his cart without further ceremony, the conversation's practical half already settled even as its harder half plainly remained unresolved between them. Li Fan watched him go, then turned back toward the shop's open door, where Old Mu stood just inside the threshold, close enough to have heard most of it, his expression carrying none of its usual dry humor.
"You'll want your needles," Old Mu said quietly. "And whatever bonesetting salve you've got stocked. I'll close early tonight." He didn't ask the questions his face plainly wanted to ask. He simply reached for his own coat, already moving to help however the evening required, and Li Fan found himself, for the first time in weeks, genuinely grateful not to be walking into whatever came next entirely alone.
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