by F. C. Yee
“Look out!” Kyoshi screamed. She threw herself over Rangi, shielding the smaller girl with her body from the plummeting missile. They fell to the ground, entwined.
No impact came. No deadly shards of ceramic, or explosion of pickling liquid.
“Get off of me, you oaf,” Rangi muttered. She hammered her fists against Kyoshi’s protective embrace, a bird beating its wings against a cage. Kyoshi got to her knees and saw that her face and ears were nearly as red as her armor.
She helped Rangi to her feet. The jar floated next to them, waist-high above the ground. Under Aoma’s control it had wavered and trembled, following her natural patterns of breathing and involuntary motions. But now it was completely still in the air, as if it had been placed on a sturdy iron pedestal.
The pebbles in the dusty path trembled. They began to move and bounce in front of Kyoshi’s feet, directed by unseen power from below like they’d been scattered across the surface of a beating drum. They marched in seemingly random directions, little drunken soldiers, until they came to rest in a formation that spelled a message.
You’re welcome.
Kyoshi’s head jerked up and she squinted at the distant mansion. There was only one person she knew who could have managed this feat. The pebbles began their dance again, settling into words much faster this time.
This is Yun, by the way. You know, Avatar Yun.
As if it could have been anyone else. Kyoshi couldn’t spot where Yun was watching them, but she could imagine the playful, teasing smirk on his handsome face as he performed yet another astounding act of bending like it was no big deal, charming the rocks into complete submission.
She’d never heard of anyone using earth to communicate legibly at a distance. Yun was lucky he wasn’t an Air Nomad, or else the stunt would have gotten him tattooed in celebration for inventing a new technique.
What are my three favorite ladles doing today?
Kyoshi giggled. Okay, so not perfectly legible.
Sounds like fun. Wish I could join you.
“He knows we can’t reply, right?” Rangi said.
Dumplings, please. Any kind but leek.
“Enough!” Rangi shouted. “We’re distracting him from his training! And you’re late for work!” She swept away the pebbles with her foot, less concerned with blazing new trails in the world of earthbending and more with maintaining the daily schedule.
Kyoshi plucked the jar off the invisible platform and followed Rangi back to the mansion, stepping slowly through the grass so as not to outpace her. If household duties were all that mattered to the Firebender, then that would be the end of it, and nothing more would need to be said. Instead she could feel Rangi’s silence compacting into a denser form inside her slender frame.
They were halfway to the gate once it became too much to bear.
“It’s pathetic!” Rangi said without turning around. The only way she could manage her disgust with Kyoshi was by not looking at her. “The way they step on you. You serve the Avatar! Have some dignity!”
Kyoshi smiled. “I was trying to de-escalate the situation,” she murmured.
“You were going to let them hit you! I saw it! And don’t you dare try and claim you were doing neutral jing or whatever earthbending hooey!”
Right on cue, Rangi had transformed from professional Guardian of the Avatar, ready to scorch the bones of interlopers without flinching, into the teenaged girl no older than Kyoshi who easily lost her temper at her friends and was kind of a raging mother hen to boot.
“And speaking of your earthbending! You were shown up by a peasant! How have you not mastered the basics by now? I’ve seen children in Yu Dao bend rocks bigger than that jar!”
She and Rangi were friends, despite what it looked like. Back when the mansion was under construction—while Kyoshi was learning her duties inside the skeleton of the unfinished house—it had taken her weeks to figure out that the imperious girl who acted like she was still in the junior corps of the Fire Army only yelled at the people she let inside her shell. Everyone else was scum who didn’t warrant the effort.
“. . . So the most efficient course of action would be to surprise the leader—Aoma, was it?—alone somewhere and then destroy her so messily that it sends a message to the others not to bother you anymore. Are you listening to me?”
Kyoshi had missed the greater part of the battle plan. She’d been distracted by the collar of Rangi’s armor, which had been mussed in the fall and needed to be straightened so it covered the delicate skin of her nape once more. But her answer was the same regardless.
“Why resort to violence?” she said. She gently nudged the Firebender in the small of the back with the jar. “I have strong heroes like you to protect me.”
Rangi made a noise like she wanted to vomit.
THE BOY FROM MAKAPU
Yun couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was possible to read their body language at this distance. Judging from the way she gestured wildly in the air, Rangi was ticked off at Kyoshi. Again.
He smiled. The two of them were adorable together. He could have watched them all day, but alas. He rolled over onto his back and slid down the roof of the outer wall, using the edge of the gutter to arrest his fall. He let the impact turn his motion into a vault, front-flipped into the air, and landed on the balls of his feet in the marble courtyard.
Eye-to-eye with Hei-Ran.
Shoot.
“Impressive,” the former headmistress of the Royal Fire Academy for Girls said, her arms crossed behind her back. “When the spirits ask for a circus clown to intervene on their behalf, I’ll know our time together has paid off.”
Yun scrunched his face. His personal firebending tutor had a knack for finding his moments of pride and then crushing them.
“I finished my hot squat sets early,” he said. “Five hundred reps. Perfect form, the whole way.”
“And yet you chose to spend your spare time lounging on the roof instead of moving on to your next exercise or meditating until I returned. No wonder you can’t generate flame yet. You can train your body as much as you wish, but your mind remains weak.”
He noticed Hei-Ran never tore into him like this while her daughter was around. It was as if she didn’t want to diminish the Avatar’s stature in Rangi’s worshipful eyes. His image had to be carefully groomed and maintained, like the miniature trees that dotted the garden. The spirits forbid he appear human for a moment.
Yun dropped into the Fire Fist stance. He paused for corrections though it was unnecessary. Not even Hei-Ran could fault his body placement, his spinal posture, his breath control. The only thing missing was the flame.
She frowned at him, interpreting his perfection as an act of defiance, but gave him the signal to begin anyway. As he punched at the air, she walked slowly around him in a circle. Fire Fist sessions were also opportunities for lectures.
“What you do when no one is guiding you determines who you are,” Hei-Ran said. The motto was probably engraved over a door somewhere in the Fire Academy. “The results of your training are far less important than your attitude toward training.”
Yun didn’t think she truly believed that. Not for a second. She was simply picking on the parts of him that she couldn’t examine and adjust for immediate improvement. If he couldn’t firebend yet under her care, then his flaw resided deeper than in any of her previous students.
His punches became crisper, to the point where the sleeves of his cotton training uniform snapped like a whip with each motion. He was a pair of images in a scroll, two points in time repeating over and over again. Left fist. Right fist.
“Your situation isn’t unique,” Hei-Ran went on. “History is full of Avatars like you who tried to coast on their talents. You’re not the only one who wanted to take it easy.”
Yun slipped. An event rare enough to notice.
His motion took him too far outside his center of gravity, and he stumbled to his knees. Sweat stung his eyes, ran into the corner of h
is mouth.
Take it easy? Take it easy?
Was she ignoring the fact that he spent sleepless nights poring over scholarly analyses of Yangchen’s political decisions? That he’d exhaustively memorized the names of every Earth Kingdom noble, Fire Nation commander, and Water Tribe chieftain among the living and going back three generations among the dead? The forgotten texts he’d used to map the ancient sacred sites of the Air Nomads to such a degree that Kelsang was surprised about a few of them?
That’s who he was when no one was looking. Someone who dedicated his whole being to his Avatarhood. Yun wanted to make up for the lost time he’d squandered by being discovered so late. He wanted to express gratitude to Jianzhu and the entire world for giving him the greatest gift in existence. Taking it easy was the last thing on his mind.
She knows that, he thought. Hei-Ran was purposely goading him by calling him lazy. But an uncontrollable fury rose in his stomach anyway.
Yun’s fingers plowed into the smooth surface of the marble, crushing the stone into his fist as effortlessly as if it were chalk. He would never lash out against a teacher. The only way he could put up resistance against Hei-Ran was to disappoint her. To uphold her accusation that he was a wayward child.
His next punch produced a swirling dragon’s belch of “flame” worthy of the Fire Lord, each spout and flicker rendered lovingly, mockingly in white stone dust. He let it rage and dance like a real fire reacting to the eddies of the breeze, and then let the cloud of particles fall to the ground.
To cap it off, make the performance complete, he added the smirk that everyone always said reminded them of Kuruk’s. A clown needed his makeup, after all.
Hei-Ran stiffened. She looked like she was about to slap him across the face. The blast went nowhere near her, but it didn’t exactly fly away from her either.
“In the old days, masters used to maim their students for insubordination,” she said hoarsely.
Yun restrained himself from flinching. “What wonderful modern times we live in.”
A single clap pierced the air. They both looked over to see Jianzhu, watching from the sidelines.
Yun gritted his teeth hard enough to make them squeak. Normally he could sense his mentor’s footfalls through the ground and get his act together, but today . . . today was all kinds of off-balance.
Jianzhu waved Yun over like he hadn’t just caught the Avatar and his firebending master at each other’s throats. “Come,” he said to his ward. “Let’s take a break.”
The training grounds had alcoves in the walls for stashing weapons, water jars, and hollow discs made of pressed clay powder that would explode harmlessly on impact. Enough supplies to train an army of benders. Jianzhu and Yun took their tea in the largest of these storage areas, surrounded by straw target-practice dummies.
The floor was thick with dust. While Yun poured, Jianzhu plucked a twig that had snagged on a burlap sack and used it as a stylus, drawing a simplified version of a Pai Sho board on the ground between them.
Yun was confused. The two of them had played the game incessantly while first getting to know each other. But Pai Sho had been forbidden to him for a long time now. It was a distraction from mastering the elements.
Jianzhu contemplated the empty grid, his long face flickering in recollection of past sequences, lines of shining brilliance and outrageous risks unfolding in the tiles. The markers of age radiated outward from his eyes. The troubles that gave him severe crow’s feet and white temples had yet to reach the smooth flat line of his mouth.
“I have some news,” he said. “Our emissaries tell us that Tagaka has agreed to sign a new version of her great-grandfather’s treaty.”
Yun perked up. His master had been trying to pursue a diplomatic solution with the queen of the seaborne daofei for years. “What changed, Sifu?”
Jianzhu gestured at him. “You. She learned we finally found the Avatar and that he was one of the strongest benders of this generation.”
Yun knew that was true. For earth, at least. It might have been arrogant of him to think so, but it was hard to argue with the evidence left across the ground.
“The Fifth Nation fleet will cease raiding the coastlines along the Xishaan Mountains,” Jianzhu said. “They’ve promised not to raise a sail under her colors within sight of the Eastern Air Temple.”
“In exchange for what?”
“For official access to the timber on Yesso Island, though they’ve been unofficially logging there for the better part of a decade. The other sages are calling it a total diplomatic victory. So much gained, for so little.”
The leaves of Yun’s tea lost their grip on the surface of the liquid. Water was the last element he’d need to master. He’d always suspected he’d have a better time of it than fire.
“Except it’s not a victory, is it?” he said, rolling the cup between his fingers. “She’s promising to halt her operations in one sector, but a fleet of marauders isn’t going to lay down their arms and pick up the plow overnight. They’ll cause trouble in the other oceans, maybe go as far north as Chameleon Bay or the Fire Nation home islands. It’s just pushing the violence from one corner of the world to the other.”
“What would you do then?” Jianzhu said. “Reject Tagaka’s offer?”
Yun took a turn staring at the blank gameboard, especially at the sections where players usually laid their boat tiles. He shuddered at the images that came rushing into his head.
Contrary to what many of the locals thought, Jianzhu did not keep him locked up in the estate like a moon flower that would wither in too much sunlight. In between training, they regularly took trips around the world with Kelsang on his flying bison, Pengpeng, to meet important people from around the Four Nations. The goal was to make sure Yun had a cosmopolitan upbringing since the ideal Avatar was also a diplomat, never showing bias to one people or the other. He learned a lot by their side, exploring great cities and talking with their leaders. Sometimes he had fun.
The last outing was not one of those times.
When Jianzhu told him they were obligated to survey the extent of the damage inflicted by the largest coordinated pirate raid on the southeast coast of the Earth Kingdom mainlands in over a century, Yun had steeled himself for blood. Corpses amid smoldering ruins. A scene of total devastation.
But as they flew low over the shores on Pengpeng’s back, scanning the seaside villages for survivors, he was surprised to see the driftwood houses and straw huts intact. Nearly pristine. No sign of the inhabitants anywhere.
They had to touch down and investigate a few structures before things fell into place. Inside the homes, they’d found spears left on racks. Tables set with cooked food that hadn’t rotted yet. Fishing nets in the midst of being repaired. There had been no massacre.
By complete surprise, the villagers had been taken. Like they were livestock. Animals stolen from a herd.
Nothing else had been touched by Tagaka’s corsairs, except for a common thread of items that Yun noticed at the last minute. They’d stolen the bells. The drums and the gongs. The watchtowers of any village lucky enough to have one were picked clean.
Cast bronze was extremely valuable and nigh irreplaceable in that part of the country, Yun realized. So were the right quality hides for drumskins. The pirates had made it so that the village warning systems couldn’t be reused when they returned.
Nearly a thousand people were unaccounted for. Conducting a raid on this scale with such precision was not only a crime but a message. Tagaka was more dangerous than her father, her grandfather, and every other crude, bloody-minded pirate that ran the Eastern Sea.
Yun had spent the better part of that night screaming and raging at Jianzhu after his mentor calmly explained that the Earth King was likely not going to do anything to protect his subjects, not ones of so little marginal value. That they were largely on their own to deal with the problem.
The emptiness of the Pai Sho board taunted Yun as loudly as the missing, unrung bells
. Not if they returned, but when.
He put his tea down and leaned back on his hands. “We should take her offer and pretend we’re glad to do it. It’s our only chance of rescuing the surviving captives. It’ll buy time for the coastal areas to build up defenses. And if Tagaka is bold enough to sail northwest, there’s a chance she’ll grow overconfident and pick a fight with the Fire Navy. That’s an opponent ruthless enough to destroy her completely.”
His proposal spilled out of his lips naturally, despite the unease it created in his core. The idea of manipulating the nations he was supposed to keep balance over was frightening, solely because of how easy and effective it would be. He waited for a rebuke.
Instead he caught Jianzhu smiling at him openly. A rare occurrence.
“See?” Jianzhu said, gesturing at the game board out of habit. “This is why you are destined to be a great Avatar. You have the insight to think ahead, to see where people are weak and strong. You know which threads of the future to pull. There’s not going to be a solution to the Fifth Nation through powerful bending. But there will be a strategy, a line of play that minimizes the suffering they can inflict. And you’ve spotted it.
“You’re everything Kuruk was not,” Jianzhu continued. “And I couldn’t be prouder.”
That was meant to be a genuine compliment. Kuruk had been a genius of the highest caliber when it came to Pai Sho. Bending too. But according to Jianzhu, who’d known him best, the Water Avatar had been unable to translate his personal talents into effective leadership on the world stage. He’d squandered his time, pursuing pleasures around the Four Nations, and died early.
So I guess that means I’ll be unhappy and live forever, Yun thought. Wonderful.
He looked across the courtyard where Hei-Ran had taken a post, waiting for them to finish. The woman was a statue. Every piece of grief he got from her was made worse by the fact that she resembled her daughter Rangi so closely, with the same porcelain-doll face, pitch-black hair, and eyes tending toward darker bronze than the usual Fire Nation gold. Having a beautiful, adoring bodyguard close to his own age like Rangi was ruined when her spitting image beat the snot out of him on a regular basis.