THE VOID THRONE

Chapter 30

# THE MORNING AFTER

The healer's name was Peg.

She had been treating injuries in Weston Creek for forty years. Farming injuries mostly — broken fingers, cracked ribs from falling off carts, cuts that farmers kept working through when they should have stopped. She had seen everything a body could do to itself through hard labour and bad decisions and occasionally just bad luck.

She had not treated someone who had fought forty-seven people at once.

But she did not say that. She just looked at Wei Liang's arm and his shoulder and his jaw and his ribs with the flat professional calm of someone who has decided that the how and the why of an injury is not her department.

"Sit still," she said.

He sat still.

She worked in silence. Cleaning the cut on his forearm first. Strapping the shoulder — deep muscle damage, she said, possibly a hairline fracture at the collarbone. She said it the way you read a list of things you need from the market. Then she checked his ribs one by one with two firm fingers while Wei Liang breathed in and out on instruction.

"Two cracked," she said. "Maybe three." She pressed on the third one. Wei Liang's vision went white for half a second. "Three," she said. She did not apologise. She cleaned the cut on his jaw. Checked his eyes to make sure they were tracking properly after the hit to his head.

Then she looked at him directly for the first time since she came in.

"Rest," she said. "One week minimum. Do not cultivate through the damage. You will turn the hairline into a full fracture and the cracked ribs into broken ones."

"I can't rest for a week," Wei Liang said.

"Then you'll fracture it," she said. Exactly the same tone. The tone of someone who has told people this before and watched them fracture things and felt no particular surprise about it. She packed her bag. "Eat something. Sleep. Come back in three days."

She left.

---

Wei Liang sat in Dou's kitchen.

His mother put a bowl of rice in front of him. Warm. Properly cooked — the kind you make when someone needs feeding and you need something to do with your hands because the alternative is standing there feeling things very loudly in a way that doesn't help anyone.

He looked at it for a moment.

Then he ate it.

Zhao Peng sat across from him with his own bowl and the bandage above his left eye and the expression of a person who is also very tired and is also eating because the body needs it regardless of whatever the head is doing.

They ate in comfortable silence.

After a while Zhao Peng said: "How's the shoulder?"

"Bad," Wei Liang said.

"How bad?"

"Pretty bad."

"Okay," Zhao Peng said. He went back to his rice.

After another moment Wei Liang said: "Thank you. For all of it. Not just the message to Dren Voss. Everything."

"You don't have to keep—"

"I know I don't have to," Wei Liang said. "I'm going to anyway."

Zhao Peng looked up from his bowl. Something moved in his face that he did not fully manage to control. He looked back at his rice quickly. "Don't make it weird," he said.

Wei Liang almost laughed. Not quite — his ribs had strong opinions about laughing — but the almost of it was real, and the almost was the closest he had come to laughing in four days, and it felt like something important.His father came in while Wei Liang was on his second bowl.

He sat down at the table without saying anything. He poured himself tea. He looked at the strapped shoulder and the bandaged arm and the cut on Wei Liang's jaw. He looked at Zhao Peng with his bandage. He looked at Dou's kitchen table, which was not his own kitchen table, in a house that was not his own house.

Then he looked at Wei Liang.

"Your mother told me some things," he said. "About the Academy. About the tournament. About the techniques." He wrapped both hands around his tea cup. "I don't understand cultivation. I never have." He looked at his tea. "But I understand that forty-seven people came here. And one person sent them away."

"They all went back," Wei Liang said.

His father looked at him. "One person sent forty-seven away," he said again. Like he was making sure he had the fact right. "That is what I understand."

He drank his tea.

Then he said: "I owe you an apology."

Wei Liang looked at him.

"I told you that you would find a place," his father said. "At the Academy. That you would learn and find somewhere to belong." He set the cup down. "I said it because I needed to say something and I didn't know what else to say. Not because I believed it." He was quiet for a moment. "I thought the stone had decided things. I thought the stone was the truth about you."

He looked at Wei Liang.

"I was wrong," he said.

Wei Liang sat with that.

"You weren't wrong to send me," he said. "You were wrong about what it meant. That's different."

His father looked at him.

"I found a place," Wei Liang said. "It's just not the place anyone expected. Including me."

His father was quiet for a long moment. He picked up his tea cup and set it back down without drinking. Something was moving across his face — not emotion exactly, more the settling that happens after a large emotion, the way water settles after something has passed through it.

"Come home more," his father said finally. "That is all I am asking."

"I will," Wei Liang said.