by F. C. Yee
“Not to mention too dangerous,” Lek said. He ran his fingers over his palm where a blotchy red line remained, the artifact of Kirima’s imperfect healing. “We’re still obligated to join the attack on Governor Te’s. If we bail, Mok would find us eventually. When he does, well . . . being killed by a shirshu would be kinder.”
“You’ll be safer the farther away you are from us,” Kirima said.
Kyoshi’s mind reeled. Were they protecting her? She’d been so certain that the first people who discovered her identity would take her hostage or rat her out to Jianzhu. The Avatar was a tool. The Avatar was leverage. The master of all four elements lay somewhere between a bargaining chip to get what you wanted and a blunt-force hammer to be swung at the many imperfections riddling the world.
No. You just thought that way because of how Jianzhu treated Yun.
“Kyoshi, they have a point,” Rangi said. “If you fall deeper into Mok’s clutches, it will taint you forever.”
That was true. If she cared at all about being the Avatar, about someday holding the office and performing its duties as Yun had already begun to do, then she had to part ways with the Flying Opera Company and their debts. Otherwise the association with criminals would mark her indelibly.
She’d be unclean.
The history of the Avatars contained rebels, enemies of tyrants, those who stood alone against the armies of the Four Nations when necessary. But as far as Kyoshi knew, none had been self-serving outlaws. Time had always proven her predecessors in the right and shown them as champions of justice.
Yun had told her that most daofei respected the Avatar. She looked at her parents’ gang and saw their swagger gone, their cloak of daring and confidence torn wide open. They’d laid themselves bare in the presence of the living bridge between mankind and spirits.
She couldn’t explain what was so familiar about this situation, nor why she felt so compelled. The Flying Opera Company was not a bunch of innocent victims like the hostages kidnapped by Tagaka, needing a higher power to reach down and change their futures. They should have been capable enough without her, just like—
Yun. They reminded her of Yun, when he needed Kyoshi beside him on the iceberg. They were her friends, and they were in a bind.
Kyoshi didn’t turn her back on her friends. She swallowed her own misgivings and made up her mind.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “I’m staying. And if I can help with the Autumn Bloom, I will. I haven’t gotten my end of the bargain yet.”
The gang perked up. Logically, her promise should have made no difference to them. She’d been deadweight since the beginning, only useful because of Pengpeng. But they glanced at her with wonder in their shifting eyes, the same nervousness she knew she felt when Kelsang had tracked her down for the first time and lifted her out of the dirt. You’d sully yourself with me?
“Kyoshi,” Rangi said. “Think about this to its end. The Avatar can’t be seen attacking the residence of an Earth Kingdom official.”
“As far as the abiders are concerned, I’m not the Avatar yet,” Kyoshi said. “I took the oaths of this group. I won’t abandon my sworn brothers and sisters.”
Her choice of words was not lost on them. Or Rangi. The Firebender was torn between being critical of Kyoshi’s judgment and being proud that she’d brought personal honor into the issue.
“You are not ready for anything resembling a real fight,” Rangi said. “Currently, you are this group’s biggest weakness. You’re too valuable to lose, and you don’t have the skills to defend yourself.”
“That’s a little harsh,” Lek said. Of all people.
“Hairpin’s right,” Kirima said to Kyoshi. “Currently. We have until the next full moon to link up with Mok’s forces for the assault. We can finally give you the training you were hoping for. That’s what we promised you, wasn’t it?”
“It takes years for the Avatar to master all four elements!” Rangi snapped. “And that’s with world-class teachers! I don’t get the impression that any of you have a bending lineage to speak of.”
Kirima grinned. “No, but I’ve always wanted to start one. I’m not going to pass up the chance to go down in history as the Avatar’s waterbending master.”
Kyoshi could practically hear Rangi’s blood boil. Through her mother’s side, her family belonged to an unbroken line of bending teachers who were considered some of the finest in the Fire Nation. They’d tutored members of the royal family. This plan required her to accept the shame they’d put off for so long. The most important bender in the world would have to bow to rabble.
The daofei watched the agony play out on Rangi’s face. They were highly amused. “Lighten up,” Lek said. “We’d be teaching Kyoshi to survive, not turning her into Yangchen. Consider the raid on Te’s a practical exam.”
Whatever worshipfulness Kyoshi detected earlier had completely vanished from their attitude. Kyoshi supposed she only had herself to blame, telling them to think of her as their sister instead of the Avatar.
“Speaking of Yangchen, we’re out of luck for airbending anyway,” Kirima added. “Either the two of you accept a few improvisations, or Kyoshi remains the way she is. Weak. Defenseless. A helpless, pitiable babe in the woods who can’t—”
Kyoshi aimed beyond Kirima’s shoulder and pulled a massive cube of stone out of the far side of the canyon. It went crashing down the cliff face, its corners shearing off, a die cast by a spirit the size of a city. The boulder hit the canyon floor and fractured into an army of slabs and shards that teetered on their ends before falling over flat.
Despite the noise, Kirima didn’t give the landslide a single glance. She stared at Kyoshi, impassive, unimpressed. “This is exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. “You need more than one trick in your bag.”
Kyoshi felt the evening wash by her like the wind passing through the branches of a tree. The gang was content to leave her be, for now. They chattered excitedly to themselves around the fire. The Avatar had volunteered to stay by their side. Their every move forward carried a tinge of spiritual righteousness.
Kyoshi gave it a day before the shine wore off.
Rangi was in a mood all her own. After camp chores were finished, she hopped to a different stone cutout entirely, to meditate. By herself, it was made pretty clear. They’d talked about the anguish of watching each other take risks, but neither of them had made any promises to stop.
They couldn’t. Not now.
Kyoshi watched the stars fade in and out of the sky, screened and unveiled in turn by the clouds that were as invisible in the darkness as black-clad stagehands moving the settings of a play. She was waiting for the others to fall asleep. She waited for a particular hour that belonged neither to this day nor the next, when time felt jellied and thick.
Kyoshi got up and moved to the next cubical platform of the quarry, and then the next. Without dust-stepping, it was slow going. She had to clamber up and down the height changes. She didn’t want to wake the others with noisy, orthodox earthbending.
The old man stood at the mouth of the marble seam with his back turned to her. Sometimes she wondered if Lao Ge wasn’t a shared hallucination. Or an imaginary friend exclusive to her. The others could have been humoring her, nodding and smiling every time she talked to a patch of empty space.
“I thought you would come to me in Hujiang,” he said. “I suppose you had other priorities on your mind.”
Kyoshi bowed, knowing he could tell if she did. “Apologies, Sifu.” But in her thoughts, the unease ballooned. If he had a problem with Rangi, then . . .
Lao Ge turned around. There was a smile in his eyes. “You don’t have to forsake love,” he said. “Killing’s not some holy art form that requires worldly abstinence. If anything, that’s lesson two.”
She swallowed around the block in her throat. She’d been full of bluster the first night she went to him in secret. But she’d been so used to false starts and stymied progress that continuing their con
versation felt like foreign territory. More doubt seeped into her cracks.
“Lesson two should scare you to the bone,” Lao Ge said. “You can take a life before the sun comes up, eat breakfast, and go about your day. How many people might you pass on the street who are capable of such callousness? Many more than you think.”
Jianzhu certainly was. He’d pulled her alone to safety, leaving Yun behind in the clutches of that unholy spirit. That was the moment he’d marked his once-prized pupil as having no further use, the way a dockworker might paint an X on a crate of cargo fouled by seawater. Total loss, not worth the recovery effort.
And then there was what he’d done to Kelsang.
“Fancy yourself different?” Lao Ge said, noticing her stillness.
She could still feel Jianzhu’s hands gripping her. “I won’t know until I try,” she said.
The old man laughed, a single bark that pierced the night. “I suppose you’ll get the chance soon. In the heat of battle, you can excuse the act away well enough. Fling an arrow here, hack away with a sword there. You and your victim are just two of many, acting in self-preservation. Is that how you want to deal with your man? With chaos as your shroud? Do you want to shut your eyes, hurl an overwhelming amount of death in his direction, and hope he’s disposed of when you open them?”
“No,” she said. Remembering what she’d been robbed of, what she’d never get back because of Jianzhu, brought a surge of conviction. “I want to look him in the eye as I end him.”
Lao Ge reacted as if she’d made a saucy quip, pursing his lips in amusement. “Well, then!” he said. “In that case, during the raid, you and I are going to split off from the others. We’ll head farther into the palace than anyone else. And we’re going to assassinate Governor Te.”
“Wait, what?” The certainty she had regarding Jianzhu caused her to mentally stumble at the mention of another target. It was as if she were the lei tai fighter throwing an all-or-nothing punch at Rangi, who’d deftly turned her momentum against her. “Why would we do that?”
“For you, it’s practice,” Lao Ge said. “For me, it’s because he’s my man. Listen. Governor Te is brutally incompetent and corrupt. His people go hungry, he skims from the Earth King’s taxes to enrich his own coffers, and in case you haven’t noticed, he doesn’t have a good policy for handling daofei.”
“Those aren’t excuses to murder him!”
“You’re right. They’re not excuses—they’re ample justifications. I guarantee you that many citizens have suffered immeasurably from his greed and negligence, and many more will die if he is allowed to keep breathing.”
Lao Ge spread his hands wide as if to embrace the world. “Te and his ilk are parasites leeching strength and vitality from the kingdom. Imagine yourself as the predator that keeps the land healthy by eliminating the sources of its weakness. It was said of Kuruk that he was the greatest hunter that ever walked the Four Nations, but from what I know, he never made man his quarry. I’m hoping you can be different.”
The idea of becoming a beast free of thought and culpability was supposed to help, but it made her shudder instead. “What gives you the right to decide?” she asked. “Are you part of another brotherhood? Are there more people like you? Is someone paying you?”
He shook his head, dodging her questions. “Doesn’t everyone have the right to decide?” he said. “Isn’t the Avatar a person like me? Someone who shapes the world with their choices?”
She was going to protest that no, the Avatar had the recognition of the spirits and Four Nations, but she found her tongue tied in the wake of his argument.
He gripped his forearms behind his back and gazed across the canyon. “I would declare the lowliest peasant is like the Avatar in this regard. All of our actions have an impact. Each decision we make ripples into the future. And we alter our landscapes according to our needs. To keep her crops alive, a farmer uproots the weeds that nature has placed in her fields, does she not?”
“People aren’t weeds,” Kyoshi said. It was the best she could manage.
He turned to face her. “I think it’s a bit late to claim the moral high ground, given what your aims are.”
She flushed hot in her cheeks. “Jianzhu murdered two of my friends with his own hands,” she spat. “He doesn’t deserve to get away with it. If you took him out for me, instead of targeting some random governor, I could reveal myself as the Avatar.” I would be safe.
Her resolve was wavering left and right. Not a minute ago she was yowling about doing the deed herself, feigning a hard soul, and now she was begging Grandfather to make the bad man go away.
Lao Ge smirked. “No one in this world is random. I don’t care to kill Jianzhu. He’s competent, and he surrounds himself with competent people. I wish the Earth Kingdom had a hundred Jianzhus. We’d enter a new golden age.”
“And yet you’re not trying to stop me from ending him.”
“For this case, I won’t intervene one way or the other. Besides, what kind of teacher would I be if I took my student’s examination for her?”
“A rich one,” Kyoshi muttered. Tutors swapping identities with the children of wealthy families so they could pass the government tests needed for prestigious administrative jobs was a common practice across the Earth Kingdom. Pulling off the con paid very well.
Lao Ge burst out laughing. “Oh, I do like our little chats. Here’s an assignment for you in the meantime.”
He jumped up to a higher level without the aid of bending and without much effort at all. The leap was higher than Kyoshi’s head.
“Many of Governor Te’s personal guard will die in Mok’s raid,” he said, disappearing past the edge of the stone, his voice already beginning to fade. “Soldiers who are simply doing their jobs. His servants will be caught in the violence as well. What will you do then, Avatar?”
Kyoshi hopped in place, her eye poking above the surface of the cube he’d landed on, trying to catch one last glimpse. It was empty. Lao Ge was already gone.
She slumped against the marble wall. The concept of collateral damage had lingered in the back of her mind, but Lao Ge had circled it in ink, made it ache, the same way Rangi pointed out flaws in her Horse stance. She had no idea how she was going to take part in this action, fulfill her promise to her newfound brotherhood, without getting her hands dirty.
The promise had been so easy to make at the time. She stared miserably at the opposite side of the mined-out gulf, sleep coming to her before a solution could.
She woke up, sprawled flat on the hard marble surface. She must have shifted during the night.
Four figures loomed over her, making an arc of their upside-down faces. “Oh, look,” Kirima said. “Our precious little student is trying to get away and shirk her training.”
Wong stomped the ground. The marble under Kyoshi tilted like a frying pan, dumping her to her feet. He proffered her fans, handles toward her. “I get you first,” he rumbled. “A warm-up before you start bending.”
“Topknot told us all about your little weakness,” Lek said, backing away with a look of superiority on his face. “That you can’t bend small pieces of earth.”
“I believe my words were ‘completely and utterly lacks precision,’” Rangi said, sniffing in contempt. She ignored Kyoshi’s glare.
“Don’t worry,” Lek said. “By the time we’re done with you, you’ll be able to bend the crud out of your own eye. Catch!”
He whipped the stone that appeared in his hand at Kyoshi’s face. Only the fact that Wong had her fans held out, right there, let her snatch one in time to protect herself. As the arms snapped open and she earthbent through the weapon, the stone stopped in midair. It reversed course at full speed and struck Lek in the forehead.
He doubled over. “Ow!” he screamed. “I was aiming above you!”
“Wait, so you can bend small things?” Kirima said, upset by the revelation. “Were you lying to us again? I have to tell you, I’m getting really fed up with the secre
ts.”
“I’m bleeding here! This is worse than Hujiang!”
“That’s not how you open the fan!” Wong roared indignantly. “You could have damaged the leaf!”
Amid the shouting, Rangi buried her face in her hands. She seemed to have a headache that rivaled Lek’s.
Kyoshi agreed with her. The official training of the Avatar was off to a great start.
PREPARATIONS
The journey to Te’s palace was a painful blur. Each moment spent on solid ground was devoted to training. The daofei adopted their new roles as her teachers with relish. Criminals liked their hierarchies, and the Flying Opera Company had just established a brand-new one, with Kyoshi at the bottom.
“No!” Wong shouted. “It’s fan open, fan closed, high block, dainty steps backward, big lunge forward, leg sweep! The fan is not a weapon! It’s an extension of your arm!”
The man had never been much for words before, but when it came to fighting with the fan, he transformed into a tyrannical stage director, with the ego and perfectionism to match. “I could remember the moves better if you didn’t make me sing the full works of Yuan Zhen while we do this!” Kyoshi said, huffing and puffing in the open field they’d landed in. The rest of the group sat in the shade of a persimmon tree overlooking an empty field, munching on the astringent fruit and enjoying the breeze while Kyoshi toiled under the sun.
Wong was highly offended. “The singing is breath control practice! Power and voice both come from the center! Again! With emotional content this time!”
No matter how difficult fan practice got, she toughed it out. The rewards were bounding leaps in progress with her earthbending. With her fans in hand, she could narrow her focus to kick rocks at targets and raise walls of stone like a normal Earthbender, albeit one with a sloppy, informal technique. Still, after all those years of fearing she’d destroy the countryside with the smallest act of bending, using her mother’s weapons was liberating. It was so effective, it felt like cheating.
