by F. C. Yee
A breeze in the night air puckered her skin. “You should go to sleep, girl,” Lao Ge said. “Because you’ve already learned lesson one.”
“So does that mean we’ll continue later”—she decided to test the waters—“Sifu?”
“If and when I believe the time is right.”
She bowed and left him to his meditations, backing away out of distrust as much as respect. Her footing was unsteady and threatened to roll her ankles. Right before she was about to turn, Lao Ge spoke up again.
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell the others about my independent ventures,” he said. “I don’t wish to complicate matters with our little merry band.”
The relationship between Lao Ge and the other daofei was not her problem. But if that was the only leverage she had in order to get him to teach her, she’d use it. “I wouldn’t dream of it, Sifu.”
Lao Ge smiled benignly. It reminded her of Jianzhu’s, only more genuine. It reached his eyes. He had no need to hide what he was from her.
“And in return, I’ll keep your secret,” he said. “Kyoshi.”
THE AGREEMENT
Kyoshi slept poorly, fretting during the night over what the old man had said. Her secret. First Tagaka and now Lao Ge. If every old person could look into her eyes and deduce she had unusual power, or was the Avatar, then she’d be in trouble. The only benders she’d be able to learn from would be infants like Lek.
A toe in her ribs woke her. She clawed at the hard surface under her, dirt filling her fingers instead of her sheets. She found herself blearily missing her bed.
“Get up,” Rangi said. The sun hadn’t risen yet, and the fire still had a few red embers glowing in it. Lao Ge was nowhere to be seen, and the others were engrossed in a three-way snoring contest. Gray predawn light made the dusty riverbank appear like it had been treated with lye, leached of color and vitality.
Kyoshi staggered to her feet. Having moved in the night, the good blanket fell off her onto the ground. “Wha-what?”
Rangi shoved her along the bank, in the opposite direction she’d taken last night. “You wanted training? Well, you’re getting training. Starting today. Now.”
They walked, Kyoshi feeling like a prisoner as Rangi prodded her sharply every so often for not moving fast enough. They put some distance between themselves and the camp, but much less than Kyoshi thought they would by the time Rangi ordered her to stop.
A series of grassy mounds shielded them from view of the others, but the small hills weren’t very high. “Let’s see your Horse stance,” Rangi said. “You don’t get a pass on the basics that earthbending has in common with firebending.”
“We’re firebending? Here?” Anyone who came searching for them would certainly check this place. They’d left Pengpeng alone with criminals who coveted her.
“We’re reviewing basics, not making flame,” Rangi said. “I doubt you need a lot of nuanced, high-level instruction at this point. Can you even hold a deep bending stance for ten minutes?”
“Ten minutes!?” Kyoshi had heard five was an admirable goal, one that she’d never reach.
There was a hint of a smirk on Rangi’s lips. “Horse stance. Now. I don’t say things to my students twice.”
Three minutes in, and Kyoshi knew what this was. Punishment. The burning in her thighs and back, the ache in her knees, was retribution for not telling Rangi everything.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she said.
Rangi rested her elbow in her other hand and examined her nails. “You’re allowed to talk once your hips get to parallel.”
Kyoshi swore and readjusted her bones. This had to be an exercise meant for short people. “I should have told you my mother was an Airbender. I didn’t think it was relevant.”
Rangi seemed satisfied with the apology. Or the amount of pain she was inflicting on Kyoshi. “It is relevant!” she said. “Air Nomads aren’t outlaws! This is like finding out you had a second head hidden under your robes the whole while.”
Maybe satisfying Rangi’s curiosity would get her out of Horse stance early. “My mother was a nun born in the Eastern Air Temple,” Kyoshi said. “I don’t know much about her early life other than she became a master at a young age and was highly regarded.”
Talking provided a useful distraction from the acid eating her muscles. “Then, on a journey through the Earth Kingdom, she met my father in a small town somewhere. He was the daofei. An Earthbender and small-time thief.”
“Ugh, I can already see where this is going,” Rangi said.
“Yes. He dragged her into a scheme, and she fell in love with both him and the life of an outlaw. She must have been born into the wrong existence as an Air Nomad, because she tattooed over her arrows with serpents and dove into the underworld with her whole being, seeking out more ‘adventure.’”
Rangi shook her head, still not able to get over an Airbender going rogue. “That’s just . . . so bizarre.”
“You heard the others talk about her. She became a relatively big figure among daofei, more so than my father. But her airbending suffered from a spiritual taint. Or so her journal says. Letting herself be absorbed by worldly concerns, and greedy ones at that, caused her power to dwindle. So she compensated.”
“With a set of fans,” Rangi said, snapping her fingers at a mystery solved. “For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why you had fans as an Earthbender. I didn’t ask because I thought it might have been a touchy subject.”
“It is.” The searing pain in her legs had been replaced by a duller, more manageable agony. “Why do you think I never told Kelsang? ‘Oh, by the way, I’m the product of one of the worst disgraces to your culture in recent memory?’ By the time I was old enough to consider bringing it up, there was no point. I had my job. I’d met you.”
“Five minutes,” Rangi said. “Not bad.”
Kyoshi pushed the hurt to the back of her mind. “I think I can keep going.”
Rangi took a lap around her, checking her posture from all angles. “It’s galling. A master Airbender abandoning her spirituality for a lowlife. No offense.”
“None taken. It doesn’t sit well with me either.”
Rangi poked her in the small of the back. “Promise me you’ll never throw your life away over a boy,” she said, her voice coated thickly with disdain.
Kyoshi laughed. “I won’t. Besides, who could possibly be worth—”
The full weight of what she was saying slammed down on her midsentence like a heavy gate. Her insides boiled with disgust at her own weakness.
She’d let herself laugh. She’d spoken Kelsang’s name out loud without cursing Jianzhu’s in the same breath. And worst of all, she’d forgotten Yun. It didn’t matter how long the lapse was. To release her grip on him, even for a second, was unforgivable.
Rangi knew it too. Her face crumpled, and she turned away. Kyoshi remembered what Lao Ge had said about her spirit making too much noise. Seeing Rangi stilled with grief in front of her drove the lesson home. The two of them held storms inside.
Kyoshi had to be stronger, in body and mind. Moments of happiness were like useful proofing, liquid testing the cracks in a jar. The less they occurred, the greater the chance she was on the right track for vengeance.
She was still in a low stance. She remembered the ineffectual Fire Fist she’d thrown in Jianzhu’s face. Perhaps if she’d embraced her firebending ability earlier, she could have ended him right then and there.
“Let me try producing flame,” Kyoshi said.
Rangi looked up and frowned.
Kyoshi’s rededication to her cause felt hot and bitter inside her, like steam in a plugged tea kettle. She was sure that if she let it out, she could firebend. “Fire Fists,” she said. “I think I can do them with real flame now. I feel like it’ll work.”
“No,” Rangi said.
“No?” Kyoshi was taken aback by her certainty. Firebending felt so real, so close. “What do you mean, no?”
“I mean no. You�
��re as tense as a rolled-up armadillo lion right now. You’re going to produce the wrong kind of flame and develop bad habits. Watch.”
Rangi stepped to the side. Without warning, she dropped into her stance and punched the air, snapping her sleeves with the force of her motion. Kyoshi could see her knuckles smolder like the tip of an incense stick.
“You need to work on relaxation and mental coordination first,” Rangi said. “Early lessons in firebending are all about suppressing flame and keeping it controlled. For a beginner, making visible fire means failure.”
Kyoshi scoffed to herself. Not producing flame had been the cause of her problems from the start. “Then let me try what you did.” She planted her feet in mimicry of Rangi and chambered her fists.
“Kyoshi, don’t.”
She imagined Jianzhu’s face, inhaled, and struck.
Her one experience at flamespitting had jiggled something loose, made it easy for her breath to spiral outward from her lungs and combust. Too easy. Energy raced down her arm and crashed into her fingers. It caused her nerves to light up with signals, as if she’d gripped a red-hot coal straight from the stove.
Instead of the crisp glow that Rangi produced, the heat that came out of Kyoshi’s fist was erratic, toggling, the popping of water added to hot oil. It went on for far too long and caused far too much pain. Kyoshi fell on her back and tried to get herself pointed away from any target. She managed to aim her hand at the sky in time. A tiny, contorted spout of black smoke belched upward from her fingers.
Kyoshi sat up. Rangi watched the pathetic yarnball of vapor climb into the air. Then she gave Kyoshi a stare that was hard enough to flatten iron.
They were saved from a difficult conversation by Lek. He crested the hill next to them and traced the path of the smoke with his finger.
“What kind of broke-down firebending was that?” he said with a snicker. He directed the question at Rangi, not having seen the source.
Rangi crossed her arms. “I had a momentary collapse of discipline,” she said, still glaring at Kyoshi. “It won’t happen again. Not if I ever want to firebend properly.”
Lek shrugged. “Lighten up; I was just asking. If the two of you are done collapsing, breakfast is ready.”
Breakfast was some manner of rodent, hunted, gutted, skinned, and burnt to the point of unrecognizability. Kyoshi and Rangi ate with big, angry bites as they sat with the daofei around the rebuilt fire, each trying to show the other how upset they were through aggressive gnawing.
Lek forgot his portion as he watched them, amazed. “I didn’t think an army princess and a servant girl from a fancy mansion would take to elephant rat.”
“Survival training at the academy,” Rangi said, breaking a bone with her fingers to get at the marrow. “We learned to accept whatever food we could find in the wild.”
“I used to eat garbage,” Kyoshi said.
That drew stares from the group.
“I thought Jesa and Hark left you in a farming village,” Kirima said.
“That doesn’t mean the farmers shared food with me.” Kyoshi worked her tongue around a stringy fiber of meat caught in her teeth. “They might not have known I was the child of outlaws, but I was still an outcast there. They treated me like I was unclean. And then I had to do things like this to survive, so you know. Self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“Reasons like that are why I can’t stand law-abiding, salt-of-the-earth folk,” Wong said. “It’s the holier-than-thou attitude. The hypocrisy.” He wiped his hands on a leaf. “If anything, they deserve to be knocked out and robbed on a regular basis.”
He noticed Kyoshi staring at him. “What?” he said. “I practice what I preach.”
“You must have hated their guts,” Kirima said.
“The villagers? Not really.” Kyoshi found she meant it. “Not as much as the people who left me with them.”
Lek threw the remnants of his meal into the fire and walked off, fuming silently. He disappeared behind the other side of Pengpeng, the only member of the party who seemed to make him happy.
“All right, what’s his problem?” Kyoshi snapped. “Every time I state a fact or an opinion about my parents he has a fit.”
“That’s because he idolized them,” Kirima said. “We picked him up in a town outside the Misty Palms Oasis. He’d just lost his brother, his last remaining family. Hark and Jesa took him in for a few days, and he proved useful on a job, so they taught him more and more of the trade until he grew into a stricter follower of the outlaw code than the rest of us. He worshiped the ground they walked on.”
Perhaps Kirima had meant to soothe the beast inside Kyoshi, but instead she’d smeared its nose with fresh blood.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kyoshi said, a lifetime’s worth of unused irony pouring forth. “I’ll remember to be nicer to the boy my mother and father decided to raise instead of me.”
Kirima made a gesture with her thumbs to indicate how little she cared about the issue. “What about you?” she said to Rangi. “What’s a sparky young noble like you doing with an Earth peasant?”
The mere reminder of her duty caused Rangi to sit up straighter. “I’m honor bound to follow and protect Kyoshi—”
“Nope!” Kirima said, regretting she’d asked. “Gonna cut you off right there. The last time I listened to a Firebender talk about ‘honor’ my ears nearly rotted off my skull. Had to kick him out of my bed with both feet.”
She and Wong got up. The two older daofei didn’t feel the need to reciprocate with their life stories. Wong pointed two fingers at the campfire and sunk it a few feet into the ground before covering it up. His size belied the dexterity of his earthbending. In fact, she’d confirmed last night that every member of her parents’ gang had finesse to spare. The exact quality she was lacking.
“We need to talk,” Kyoshi said, getting up as well. “Last night we were interrupted before I agreed to anything.”
“Oh, come on, really?” Kirima said. “After what we’ve been through, you want to take your bison and ditch us in the middle of nowhere?”
“We shared a meal,” Wong said, looking genuinely hurt. “We beat up lawmen together.”
“My demands haven’t changed,” Kyoshi said. “I want bending training, and the only benders around are you lot. You’ll teach me. Personally.”
“What are you lumping me in for, Earth girl?” Kirima said. “You want to learn waterbending forms to relax and improve your circulation?”
Kyoshi had prepared an answer overnight for this purpose. “‘Wisdom can be gleaned from every nation,’” she said, using a quote of Kelsang’s. “If learning about the other elements can make me stronger, then I’ll do it.”
“That desperate for revenge, huh?” Kirima said. “Who is this powerful man who’s wronged you? You never told us his name.”
“That’s because you don’t need to know.” Kyoshi didn’t want to talk about Jianzhu. He was too renowned throughout the Earth Kingdom. The same went for her identity as the Avatar. Information about their link could spread, giving him a trail to hunt her down before she was ready to fight him.
Every edge would count in this battle. Kyoshi recalled the way her parents’ gang had flown over the rooftops last night, unimpeded. They’d practically reached the same heights Jianzhu had with his stone bridges.
“I want to learn how to run across the sky,” she said. “Like you did in town.”
“Dust-stepping?” Wong said. His usually impassive face took on an edge of seriousness.
“It’s our group’s signature technique,” Kirima said. “Though for me it’s ‘mist-stepping.’ And it’s not something you get for free.”
The atmosphere had changed. Previously the daofei had treated Kyoshi’s demands as amusing, the barking of a puppy trying to look fierce. This was the first time they’d gotten truly cautious and guarded, as if they might be swindled in the trade.
Rangi noticed their reservations. “You’re acting pretty serious about a technique
I cribbed after seeing it once,” she said.
Kirima fixed her with a stare. “Other groups probably would have killed you for that,” she said without a hint of jest. “You don’t last long in our world by letting everyone see your advantages. Secrets are how we survive.”
She turned back to Kyoshi. “We teach you, that means you’re in. For real, and for life. You’d have to swear our oaths and follow our codes. In the eyes of those who abide by the law, you’d be a daofei.”
I’d be like Tagaka, Kyoshi thought. I’d be like my parents. She stilled the revulsion inside her and nodded. “I understand.”
“Kyoshi, think about what you’re doing!” Rangi yelled.
“Topknot’s right, for once,” Wong said. “You don’t take these vows lightly. It means accepting us as your brothers and sisters.” He raised his brows, showing the whites of his eyes. “Since we’ve met you’ve been looking down your nose at us. Can your honor take the hit, associating with such unclean folk?”
The big man was more incisive than he looked. Kyoshi knew what it was like, being on the receiving end of disdain.
Her answer was yes. As far as she was concerned, her personal honor and reputation had no value. Trading them for more power was an easy choice. She would do it. For Kelsang and Yun.
She could practically feel Rangi’s disappointment vibrating through the ground. “What are these oaths?” Kyoshi asked.
According to Kirima, the swearing-in ceremony was supposed to take place in a grand hall, with the initiate standing under an arch of swords and spears. They’d have to improvise. Kyoshi took a spot by the riverbank while Wong stood behind her and held a pocketknife over her head.
Kirima had Kyoshi make the same odd salute the gang had used the night before in the teahouse. The flattened left hand represented the square folk, the law-abiding community, while the right fist hammering it down represented followers of the outlaw code. Just in case Kyoshi forgot she was joining the forces of darkness.
Rangi stalked some ways off to the side, making sure to stay within their field of vision so everyone could see how angry and disapproving she was the whole time. Kirima ignored her while conducting the ceremony. According to the Waterbender, there were normally fifty-four oaths that had to be taken, recited from memory by the new member of the gang. She had decided to let Kyoshi off easy with just the most important three.
