My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 105: Two Fingers, Set Straight
The boy's hand shook worse from fear than from the pain itself, Li Fan judged, watching him hold it out across the merchant's kitchen table with his jaw clenched tight and his eyes fixed hard on the far wall rather than on his own swollen fingers. Fourteen years old, and trying very hard tonight to be older than that.
"This will hurt," Li Fan said plainly, no softening in the warning. "Worse for a moment before it's better. I need you still through that moment, not brave. Still."
The boy nodded, jaw tightening further, and Li Fan worked quickly once the nod came, setting the smaller break first with a precise, practiced pressure that drew a sharp, bitten-off cry despite every effort at bravery, then the second, the boy's mother gripping his opposite shoulder throughout with white-knuckled hands of her own. Li Fan splinted both fingers with the same care he'd once given a poisoned child's breathing, wrapped them snug against a thin wooden brace, and pressed a measured dose of pain-easing tincture into the boy's other hand before finally sitting back.
"They'll heal straight," he said, to the room generally rather than only the boy. "Full use again, given six weeks and no foolish attempts to test them early." He looked at the boy directly. "You did nothing wrong that night. Two grown men against one boy in the dark isn't a test of courage. It's simple cruelty, dressed up as a lesson. Don't carry shame over anything you told them. I wouldn't have expected silence from you, and I don't fault you for none."
The boy's composure finally cracked at that, not into tears exactly, but into something close, a shaking breath that spoke more honestly than any brave silence had managed all evening. His mother pulled him against her shoulder, and Li Fan looked away to give them what privacy the small kitchen allowed, busying his hands with cleaning the instruments he'd used.
The merchant drew him outside once the boy had been settled into bed, the night air sharp after the kitchen's close warmth, and didn't waste time on preamble. "Now. Everything you honestly know."
Li Fan gave it to him plainly, stripped down to what he could actually confirm rather than everything he merely suspected. A pouch he'd delivered years ago, sealed, its contents never known to him. A false rumor claiming otherwise, circulating for reasons he still didn't understand. An attempt on his own life weeks back, survived, unreported. Men — he didn't yet know how many, or working for whom — apparently willing to hurt anyone who might hold even secondhand information about him.
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"You didn't report the attempt," the merchant said, something sharp returning to his voice. "Not to the sect, not to the watch. Kept it entirely to yourself."
"I did."
"And in the silence you kept, my boy's fingers got broken by men fishing for exactly the information you were sitting on."
Li Fan didn't defend the choice, though he could have offered a dozen reasonable justifications for it — the danger of drawing sect attention toward a life he'd built specifically to avoid that attention, the uncertainty of who among the sect's own structure might already be compromised, the simple fact that he'd had no proof solid enough to bring anywhere official. None of those justifications changed the plain arithmetic sitting between them now. His silence had been reasonable. It had also, indirectly, cost a fourteen-year-old boy the use of two fingers for the next six weeks.
"You're right to be angry," he said instead. "I weighed my own caution against a danger I thought was mine alone to carry, and I was wrong about that. It was never only mine. I'll not make that mistake again where your family's concerned. If anything else surfaces that touches your household, you'll hear it from me directly, whether the news is comfortable or not."
The merchant studied him a long, hard moment in the dark, some of the sharpest anger finally settling into something wearier, more resigned. "See that I do," he said. "And keep your business away from my boy's deliveries going forward. Send someone else, or come collect the wood yourself. I'll not risk him carrying your name across this city a second time."
"Understood," Li Fan said, and meant it without argument.
Old Mu waited for him at the courtyard gate once the walk home was finished, an unusual hour for the old man to still be standing outside rather than asleep, his weathered face unreadable in the lantern's low light.
"You'll not tell me the whole of it tonight," Old Mu said, before Li Fan had found any words of his own. "I can see that plainly enough in how you're carrying yourself. I'm not asking for the whole of it. I'm only telling you plainly, so there's no mistaking it later — whatever's been sitting on your shoulders these past weeks, sleepless nights and varied routes and a sword worn open at your hip, I've noticed all of it, and I've said nothing because I trusted you'd tell me in your own time." His voice roughened slightly. "A boy's broken fingers is a poor way to learn I trusted wrong."
Li Fan met the old man's eyes, and found, for the first time in weeks, that he had no ready answer prepared to soften what needed saying. "You didn't trust wrong," he said finally. "I kept it from you to spare your heart the strain, not because I doubted you deserved to know. That reasoning feels considerably weaker standing here tonight than it did a month ago."
Old Mu held his gaze a long moment, then nodded once, slow and deliberate. "Then start weakening it further," he said. "Tomorrow. Properly. I've buried enough in my own years to know the difference between a burden shared and a burden survived alone, and I'd rather carry some of yours badly than watch you carry all of it perfectly and still end up bleeding in some alley I never heard about until it was too late."
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