by F. C. Yee
Kelsang didn’t look any happier than she did. “You don’t understand. After Kuruk died, the Earthen traditions around locating the Avatar fell apart. Imagine if the seasons suddenly refused to turn. It was chaos. After so many failures, the sages, Earthbenders especially, felt abandoned by the spirits and their ancestors alike.”
Kyoshi leaned back against a ladder and gripped the rungs tightly.
“There was talk of Kuruk being the last of the cycle, that the world was destined for an age of strife, to be torn apart by outlaws and warlords. Until Jianzhu labeled Yun as the next Avatar. But the way it happened had no precedent. Tell me this—with the two of you as close as you are, has Yun ever once told you the details?”
She shook her head. It was strange, now that Kelsang mentioned it.
“That’s because Jianzhu probably forbade him. The full story would cast the shadow of illegitimacy on him.” The monk rubbed his eyes; it was abhorrently dusty in here. “We were in Makapu, surveying the volcano. We’d honestly given up on finding the Avatar, like so many others. On the last day of our trip, we noticed a crowd growing in a corner of the town square.
“They were gathered around a child with a Pai Sho board. Yun. He was hustling tourists like us, and he’d made quite a bit of money at it too. To give his opponents confidence, he was running the blind bag gambit. It’s when your opponent plays normally, picking their tiles, but you dump yours into a sack and mix them up randomly. Whatever you draw each turn is what you have to play. An insurmountable disadvantage.”
Kyoshi could see it too easily. Yun’s silver tongue coaxing money out of people’s wallets. A stream of banter and flashing smiles. He could probably bankrupt someone and still leave them happy to have met him.
“What most people don’t know, and what Yun didn’t know, was that the blind bag is supposed to be a scam,” Kelsang said. “You’re meant to rig the tiles or the bag itself so you have a way to find the exact combinations you need. But Yun wasn’t cheating. He was actually drawing randomly and winning.”
“We might have passed it off as a kid enjoying a string of luck, but Jianzhu noticed he was drawing and playing Kuruk’s favorite strategies, turn by turn, down to the exact placement of the exact tile. Game after game he was doing this. He displayed tricks and traps that Kuruk explicitly kept secret from anyone but us.”
“It sounds like Kuruk took Pai Sho pretty seriously,” Kyoshi said.
Kelsang snorted and then sneezed, sending a little tornado spiraling toward the skylight. “It was one of the few things he did. And he was unequivocally one of the greatest players in history. Depending on what rules you’re using, you have as many as sixty tiles. There are over two hundred spots on the board where you can put them. To randomly draw and then brilliantly execute a precise line of play that only Kuruk was mad enough to win with in the annals of the game—the odds of it are unfathomable.”
Kyoshi didn’t have a taste for Pai Sho, but she knew that masters often talked about play styles being as individualistic and recognizable as a signature. An identity contained within the board.
“After what Jianzhu went through with Xu Ping An and the Yellow Necks, it was as if a mountain range had been lifted off his shoulders,” Kelsang said. “Any doubts he might have had completely vanished when we saw Yun earthbend. Granted, the kid can move rocks like no one else. If we identified the Avatar solely through a precision-bending contest, he’d be Kuruk’s reincarnation hands down.”
Kyoshi thought back to this morning and Yun’s incredible manipulation of the earth. In her mind only the Avatar could have done that.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “All of this is proof. Yun is the Avatar. Why would you tell me that I’m—that I’m—why would you do that to me!?”
Her anguish was absorbed, without an echo, by the masses of faded, crumbling paper that surrounded them.
“Can we get out of here?” Kelsang said, his eyes red.
They walked in silence down the corridors of the mansion. Kelsang’s presence justified taking the shortest route, where the visiting dignitaries might see them. They passed works of calligraphy mounted on the walls that were more precious than bricks of gold. Vases of translucent delicacy held the day’s flowers cut from the garden.
Kyoshi felt like a thief as they passed the casually displayed treasures, no better than an intruder who might slip past the guards and stuff each priceless item into a gunnysack. Even the servants’ dormitory, plain and poorly lit, seemed to whisper ingrate at her from its dark corners. Not all of the staff were able to live on-site. And she knew that a bed lifted off the floor and a wooden door that shut tight were better than what many other servants around the Earth Kingdom got.
She and Kelsang squeezed inside her room. It was cramped, the two of them being the same height, but as sizable people they had practice at minimizing themselves. Her quarters were small but still technically more space than she needed. Besides a few knickknacks from her street life, her only two possessions upon moving into Jianzhu’s house were a heavy locked trunk that she’d stowed in the corner, and on top, the leather-bound journal that explained what was in it. Her inheritance from the days before Yokoya.
“You still have those,” Kelsang said. “I know how valuable they are to you. I remember tracking you down to the little nest you made around the trunk underneath the blacksmith’s house. You hugged the book so tight to your chest and wouldn’t let me read it. You looked ready to defend it to the death.”
Her feelings about the items were more complicated than he understood. Kyoshi had never opened the lock, having thrown the key into the ocean one day in a fit of spite. And she’d nearly burned the journal several times over.
Down the hall someone was moving about, making the pine floorboards squeak, so they waited until the footsteps disappeared. Kelsang sat on the bed, bowing the planks in the middle. Kyoshi leaned against her door and braced her feet like an attacking army was trying to beat it down.
“So you think I’m the Avatar because of a stupid song I made up?” she said. Somewhere between the study and her room she’d found enough backbone to say it out loud.
“I think you might be the Avatar because you pulled from thin air the exact lines of a poem Kuruk wrote a long time ago,” Kelsang said.
A poem. A poem wasn’t proof. Not like the cold hard impossibility of what Yun did.
Kelsang could tell she needed a better explanation. “What I’m about to tell you, you should keep to yourself,” he said.
“I’m listening.”
“It was about twenty years ago. Kuruk’s companions were still very close, but without any real challenges, we drifted toward our separate lives. Jianzhu started working on his family’s holdings. Hei-Ran started teaching at the Royal Fire Academy and married Rangi’s father, Junsik, in the same year. It was the happiest I’d ever seen her. As for me, that was when Abbot Dorje was alive and I was still in his good graces, so I was being groomed to take over the Southern Air Temple.”
Assigning a past to the venerable benders was a strange mix of satisfying and unnervingly voyeuristic. She was spying on things she shouldn’t be privy to. “What was Kuruk doing?”
“Being Kuruk. Traveling the world. Breaking hearts and taking names. But one day he showed up on my doorstep out of the blue, trembling like a schoolboy. He wanted me to read over a declaration of eternal love he’d composed in a poem.”
Kelsang inhaled sharply through his nose. Kyoshi kept her room dust-free and spotless. “This happened two months after Hei-Ran’s wedding and three months before Jianzhu’s father got sick,” he said. “He used a more formal meter than a sailor’s ditty, and he didn’t sing it, but its contents were exactly what you produced in the spur of the moment.”
That only weakened the argument. “You seem to remember this in overly specific detail,” Kyoshi said.
The monk furrowed his brow. “That’s because he was going to give the poem to Hei-Ran.”
Oh no. She’d hea
rd stories of the Water Avatar’s lack of propriety, but that was going several levels too far. “What happened next?”
“I . . . meddled,” Kelsang said. Kyoshi couldn’t tell if he was regretful or proud of his decision. “I berated Kuruk for his stupidity and selfishness, for trying to ruin his friend’s happy relationship, and made him destroy the confession while I watched. To this day I don’t know if I did the right thing. Hei-Ran always did love Kuruk with some piece of her heart. Maybe everything would have turned out better if they had run off with each other.”
Kyoshi quickly did the math in her head—and, yes, if that had happened, Rangi wouldn’t have been born. “You did the right thing,” she said, with more ferocity than she intended to show.
“I’ll never find out. Not long after, Kuruk met Ummi. That tragedy unfolded so fast that my memory of it starts to blur.”
She didn’t know who Ummi was, and she had no intention of asking. Matters were complicated enough. And Kuruk . . . Kyoshi was no advanced student of Avatar lore, but she was developing a pretty dim view of the man.
“I wish I could be more certain,” Kelsang said. “But if there’s anything the last two decades have taught me, it’s that life does not work out in certain, guaranteed ways. I’m not supposed to talk about this, but Yun is having problems firebending. I fear Jianzhu is becoming . . . more extreme. He’s staked so much on creating his ideal replacement for Kuruk that anytime he faces a setback, his response is to dig in and push harder.”
Kyoshi was more shaken by the revelation that Yun couldn’t firebend than anything else she’d heard so far. The image he projected was of a boy who could do the impossible. Yes, Yun was her friend, but she still had the same faith in the Avatar as anyone else. Mastering fire should have been easy for someone as clever and talented as he was.
Kelsang seemed to pick up on her fear. “Kyoshi, Yun still has the strongest case for being the Avatar. That hasn’t changed.” He worried the end of his beard. “But if the criteria we’ve lowered ourselves to are ‘improbable things that Kuruk once did,’ then we have to consider you as well.”
The monk ruminated for a moment, fitting pieces together in his head. “To be honest though, I don’t know if I’m entirely upset by this new complication. You have Avatar-worthy merits that you won’t acknowledge.”
Kyoshi scoffed. “Such as?”
He thought it over more before deciding on one. “Selfless humility.”
“That’s not true! I’m not any more—” She caught Kelsang about to laugh at her and scowled.
He got up, and her bed boards groaned with relief. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I might have been able to answer this question years ago, had I the chance to meet your parents like I did with the other village children. More information could have made the difference.”
Kyoshi scrunched her face and kicked her heel back against the trunk, releasing the sudden burst of anger that ran through her. The wooden side made a drumlike thud. “I’m sure they would have loved having a child as valuable as the Avatar,” she snapped. “A once-in-a-generation prize.”
Kelsang smiled at her gently. “They would have been proud of their daughter no matter what,” he said. “I know I am.”
Normally Kyoshi would have felt comforted by the acknowledgment that she’d become as much of a fixture in Kelsang’s life as he had in hers. But if he walked out her door and told Jianzhu what happened, it could tear apart the little corner of the world the two of them had marked off for themselves. Didn’t Kelsang see that? Wasn’t he worried?
“Can we keep this a secret?” Kyoshi said. “Just for a while, until I can get my bearings? I don’t want to be rash. Maybe you’ll remember Kuruk’s poem differently in the morning. Or Yun will firebend.” Anything.
Kelsang didn’t answer. He’d been suddenly transfixed by her tiny shelf.
It held a gold-dyed tassel, a few beads, a coin she’d pilfered from a shrine donation box and felt too guilty to spend and too afraid to return. The clay turtle she couldn’t remember exactly how she’d gotten, other than that it was a present from him. He stared at the junk for a long time.
“Please,” Kyoshi said.
Kelsang looked back at her and sighed. “For a little while, perhaps,” he said. “But eventually we have to tell Jianzhu and the others. Whatever the truth is, we must find it together.”
After he left, Kyoshi didn’t sit down. She thought best on her feet, motionless. Her wooden cell of a room was good enough for that.
This was a nightmare. While she wasn’t an important political dignitary, she wasn’t an idiot either. She knew what kind of bedlam lay behind the precarious balance Jianzhu and Yun had set up, the mountain they’d suspended in the air.
From around corners she’d spied on the bouts of ecstatic sobbing, the sense of utter relief that many of the visiting sages went through when they first laid eyes on Yun. After more than a decade of doubt, he was a solid body, a sharp mind, a belatedly fulfilled promise. The inheritor of blessed Yangchen’s legacy. Avatar Yun was a beacon of light who gave people confidence the world could be saved.
“Avatar Kyoshi” would simply be dirt kicked over the fire.
Her eyes landed on the journal lying on the trunk. Her pulse quickened again. Would they have left her behind if they knew there was a chance, no matter how slim, that she held some worth?
A knock came from outside. Gifting duty. She’d forgotten.
She shoved the entire conversation with Kelsang to the back of her mind as she opened the door. She knew from experience there was no trouble so great that she couldn’t pack it away. Kelsang wasn’t certain, therefore she didn’t need to worry. What she needed to worry about was Rangi having her hide for—
“Hey,” Yun said. “I was looking for you.”
PROMISES
“You know, this is much harder when you’re around,” Kyoshi said to the Avatar.
She and Yun sat on the floor in one of the innumerable receiving rooms. The freestanding screen paintings had been folded up and pushed to the walls, and the potted plants had been set outside to make room for the giant piles of gifts that guests had brought for the Avatar.
Yun lay on his back, taking up valuable free space. He lazily waved a custom-forged, filigreed jian blade around in the air, stirring an imaginary upside-down pot with it.
“I have no idea how to use this,” he said. “I hate swords.”
“A boy who doesn’t like swords?” Kyoshi said with a mock gasp. “Put it in the armory pile, and we’ll get Rangi to teach you at some point.”
There were a lot of guesses around the village about what, exactly, Kyoshi did in the mansion. Given her orphaned, unwanted status, the farmers’ children assumed she handled the dirtiest, most impure jobs, dealing with refuse and carcasses and the like. The truth was somewhat different.
What she really did, as her primary role, was pick up after Yun. Tidy his messes. The Avatar was such a slob that he needed a full-time servant following in his wake, or else the chaos would overwhelm the entire complex. Soon after taking her on, the senior staff discovered Kyoshi’s strong, compulsive need to put things back in their rightful place, minimize clutter, and maintain order. So they put her on Avatar-containment duty.
This time, the pile they sat hip-deep in was not Yun’s fault. Wealthy visitors were constantly showering him with gifts in the hope of currying favor, or simply because they loved him. As big as the house was, there wasn’t enough room to give each item a display place of honor. On a regular basis Kyoshi had to sort and pack away the heirlooms and antiques and works of art that only seemed to get more lavish and numerous over time.
“Oh, look,” she said, holding up a lacquered circle set in a crisscross pattern with luminous gems. “Another Pai Sho board.”
Yun glanced over. “That one’s pretty.”
“This is, without exaggeration, the forty-fourth board you own now. You’re not keeping it.”
“Ugh, ruthless.”
&nbs
p; She ignored him. He might be the Avatar, but when it came to her officially assigned duties, she reigned above him.
And Kyoshi needed this right now. She needed this normalcy to bury what Kelsang had told her. Despite her best efforts, it kept rising from below, the notion that she was betraying Yun and swallowing up what belonged to him.
As he lounged on his elbows, Kyoshi noticed Yun wasn’t wearing his embroidered indoor slippers. “Are those new boots?” she said, pointing at his feet. The leather they were crafted from was a beautiful, soft gray tone with fur trim like powdery morning snow. Probably baby turtle-seal hide, she thought with revulsion.
Yun tensed up. “I found them in the pile earlier.”
“They don’t fit you. Give them over.”
“I’d rather not.” He scooched backward but was hedged in by more boxes.
She crawled over to peer at the boots from a closer angle. “What did you—did you stuff the extra space with bandages? They’re ridiculously too big for you! Take them off!” She got to her knees and grabbed his foot with both hands.
“Kyoshi, please!”
She paused and looked up at his face. It was filled with pure dread. And he rarely ever raised his voice at her.
It was the second time today a person important to her had acted strangely. She forced herself to acknowledge the two incidents weren’t related. So he’d suddenly developed an intense taste for footwear. She’d make a note of it.
Yun sat up and put his hands on Kyoshi’s shoulders, fixing her with his jade-green eyes. She’d long since become inured to his flirty smiles whenever he wanted a rise out of her, his puppy-dog pout when he wanted a favor, but his expression of earnest desire was a weapon he didn’t pull out often. The way his troubled thoughts softened the sharp edges of his face was heart piercing.
“Spill it,” she said. “What’s bothering you?”
“I want you to come on a journey with me,” he said quietly. “I need you by my side.”
