by F. C. Yee
She remembered now being suddenly terrified that she’d catch blame for the destruction. She’d run away, but not before scuffing her footprints off the path she’d taken.
When Kyoshi regained her vision, she thought for a moment she’d been thrown back in time to that unreal, violated landscape. The trees were gone behind her, snapped at their trunks and torn by their roots to expose damp clumps of soil. Before her, it was as if some great hand had tried to sweep away the mountainside in a convulsion of fear and shame. Deep rips crisscrossed the stone like claws. The hilltops had been pushed over, the traces of landslides pouring down from their crests.
Kyoshi had the vague notion that she was too high up. And she couldn’t see Kelsang anywhere. She’d wiped away his existence.
There was an animal howl floating on the wind, the scream of rosin on warped strings. It came from her.
Kyoshi dropped to the ground and lay there, her face wet with tears. She pressed her forehead to the earth, and her useless cries echoed back in her face. Her fingers closed around the dust, sifting for what she’d lost.
It was her fault. It was all her fault. She’d pushed Kelsang away instead of listening to him, allowed cowardice to rule her thoughts and actions. And now the source of light in her life was gone.
She had nothing left. Not even the air in her lungs. The heaving sobs coursing through her body wouldn’t allow her to breathe. She felt like she was going to drown above water, a fate she would have accepted gladly. A just punishment for an unwanted girl who’d squandered her second chance: Kelsang, a miraculous, loving father conjured from thin air. And she’d cursed him with death and ruin.
There was a tremor in the distance. The rubble around a certain spot was sinking, parting. Someone had escaped the havoc she’d wreaked in the Avatar State by burrowing deep down in the earth. Now he was tunneling back to the surface, ready to claim his property.
Kyoshi scrambled to her feet in a blind, wild panic. She tried to run in the direction they’d come, stumbling past landmarks she prayed she remembered correctly. The baked ruins of the mining villages were so similar in their crumbling appearance that, for a second, she thought she was caught in a loop. But then, right as her legs were about to give out, she found Pengpeng waiting where they’d left her.
The bison took a whiff of Kyoshi and bellowed mournfully, rearing on her back four legs before crashing down hard enough to shake the dirt. Kyoshi understood. Maybe Pengpeng had felt her spiritual connection with Kelsang dissipate, or maybe Kyoshi simply smelled of his blood.
“He’s gone!” she cried. “He’s gone and he’s not coming back! We have to leave, now!”
Pengpeng stopped thrashing, though she looked no less upset. She allowed Kyoshi to climb on her back, using fistfuls of fur as a ladder, and soared into the air in the direction of home, without being told.
Yokoya, Kyoshi corrected herself. Not home. Never again home. Yokoya.
She stayed back in the passengers’ saddle. She was unwilling to straddle Pengpeng’s withers in Kelsang’s place, and the bison didn’t need guidance for the return journey. From high up in the sky, she could see dark, rain-filled clouds approaching over the ocean in the opposite direction. If they flew fast enough, they could reach Yokoya before meeting the storm.
“Hurry, please!” she shouted, hoping Pengpeng could understand her desperation. They’d managed to strand Jianzhu in the mountains, but the man’s presence felt so close behind. As if all he needed to do was reach his arm out for her to feel his hand clamping down on her shoulder.
That same year she’d caught sick and suffered through the fireworks, Kelsang had returned to the village. He looked askance at the farmer who swore that Kyoshi had been well taken care of with the money he’d left behind. The weight she’d lost and her pallid skin told a different story. Afterward, Kelsang promised Kyoshi that he’d never leave her for so long again.
But Kyoshi had long forgotten about any nights she’d spent ill without medicine. She’d been more concerned with the new kite-flying craze that had taken hold of the village children. For weeks, brightly colored paper diamonds and dragons and gull-wings had hypnotized her from the sky, dancing on the wind. Not surprisingly, she hadn’t the supplies or guidance to make one of her own.
Kelsang noticed her staring longingly at the kites dotting the sky while they shared a meal outside. He whispered an idea in her ear.
Together, they scavenged and spliced enough rope for him to tie one end around his waist. That afternoon, he took off soaring on his glider while Kyoshi held the other end from below. They laughed so loud they could hear each other across the great heights. For her, he was the biggest, fastest, best kite in the whole world.
She’d misjudged the weather. The first drops of rain pattered on her cheek, waking her from her slumber of exhaustion. She and Pengpeng still had some ways to go when it quickly became a torrent that blotted out the sun. They narrowly managed to get down to Yokoya in time to avoid the lightning spreading its fingers across the sky.
They arrived at the mansion. Kyoshi jumped off Pengpeng near the stables and landed ankle-deep in mud. She waded through the blinding rain to the house. The staff and the guests had been driven inside to their quarters.
The ride had given her time to think. And she’d concluded that every decision from here on out was easy. An inevitability she would follow into the darkness.
The only person who could have made her falter was waiting inside the servants’ entrance for her, under the archway of the wall. Rangi looked like she had confined herself to this area the entire day. She’d worn out a groove in the floor with her pacing back and forth.
“Kyoshi, where were you?” Rangi said, a scowl on her face from having been left in the dark for so long. “What happened? Where are the others?”
Kyoshi told her everything. About the powerful and terrible spirit that had identified Kyoshi as the Avatar. About the way Jianzhu had offered Yun up as a sacrifice and murdered Kelsang when he came to rescue them. She even included how she’d entered the Avatar State.
Rangi stumbled backward until she knocked her head against a support beam. “What?” she whispered. “That’s not—What!?”
“That’s what happened,” Kyoshi said. She dripped rainwater on the floor, each plip another precious second lost. “I have to go. I can’t stay here.”
Rangi started pacing again, running her fingers through the ends of her hair, which had fallen loose. “There’s got to be a misunderstanding. An explanation. You said there was a spirit? It must have played tricks on your mind—that’s been known to happen. Or maybe you simply got confused. Master Jianzhu can’t have . . . He wouldn’t . . .”
She watched Rangi attempt to will a different reality into existence. It was the same trap Kyoshi had fallen into the day Kelsang told her she might be the Avatar.
“We’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” Rangi said. “When Jianzhu gets home, we’ll make him explain himself. We’ll find out what really happened to Yun and Master Kelsang.”
“RANGI! THEY’RE DEAD! I HAVE TO GO!”
Throughout the journey back, Kyoshi had been thinking only about the shards of her life buried on that mountain. She’d forgotten there was still one more piece, and Rangi’s stunned silence let her know she’d lost that too. Kyoshi pushed past her without saying goodbye and headed to her room.
It was easy to fill a sack with her clothes. She barely had any. She was going to leave everything on her shelf behind, but the thought of Kelsang made her grab the clay turtle and throw that in. The item that gave her pause was the beautiful green battle outfit that she’d worn on the iceberg and was now hanging on her wall.
For some reason Jianzhu had let her keep it in her room. The thought of taking, of using, a gift from him made her insides clench. But she would need armor like that where she was going. A protective shell.
She took it down, hastily rolled it up, and stuffed it in the sack. The leather journal went on top. She was
truly grateful she’d never given in to her urge to destroy the book. In the past it may have been incriminating evidence, but now it was a war plan.
Tucking the bundle under one arm, she stooped down, grabbed the handle of her trunk with the other, and dragged it out into the hallway.
The corners of the trunk screeched as they gouged out a trail in the polished wooden floors. She supposed the reason that no one stopped her was that they were scared. She saw the hems of robes disappearing around corners, frightened whispers behind closed doors as she passed.
The guardsmen, she remembered, had been decimated on the iceberg. And there had always been an undercurrent of suspicion in the way the other servants looked at her. Now her aberrant behavior must have pushed it over the edge into fear. She looked like a swamp ghost dripping with the water she’d drowned in. She could only imagine what terrors her face held.
Each fork in the hallway brought another flash of raw, saw-bladed pain to her heart as if she were one of the target dummies in the courtyard, collecting jagged arrows with her body. The routes she’d taken in her daily life unfolded down the corridors of the mansion, leading inevitably, over and over again, to the dead.
The way to Yun’s room, the one area he never let her clean, flustering over his privacy. The path to the little nook where Kelsang would meditate when the weather was too harsh. The grass where the three of them had spat watermelon seeds, only to run away when Auntie Mui yelled at them for making a mess.
She would never tread these lines again. She would never arrive to see Yun and Kelsang’s smiling faces at the end of her steps.
By design, Kyoshi took the long way past the wood-chopping station. The splitting maul was there, the wedge buried in the block. Kyoshi placed her bag between her teeth and picked up the maul with her free hand. The entire block came with it, stuck to the blade, so she smashed the whole agglomeration against the wall until the heavy tool was freed from the wood.
She kept walking.
Outside, the rain had doubled. The interval between lightning and thunder was nonexistent. She dropped her bag and flung the heavy wooden trunk in front of her. It slid in the mud before coming to a stop.
The chest had been a focal point for her anger in the past, collecting the flows of her hatred like the water barrels positioned under the gutters of the house. It had been left behind in Yokoya, like her, by the people who’d relegated her to the life of a starving, desperate, unloved creature for so many years before Kelsang came into her life.
Her parents would have to take a lower place on the shelf for now. She had someone new to focus on.
Another lightning flash illuminated which side the iron lock was on. Raising the maul high above her head with both hands, she swung it down, aiming for the weakest point.
The wedge of the maul bounced off the metal. The trunk sank deeper into the mud. She struck it again. And again and again.
The thunder and rain drowned out her senses, leaving her with nothing but the painful vibrations rebounding up the haft of the maul into her hands. She struck again and felt a crunch.
Rather than the lock breaking, the trunk had splintered where the metal was fastened to the wood. But it was open. Kyoshi tossed the maul aside and raised the creaking lid.
Inside were two ornate metal war fans the color of gold alloyed with bronze. The weapons were packed in a softer wood frame that held them open while protecting them from rough treatment like the sort she’d just doled out.
A headdress made out of the same material rested in between them. It complemented the fans by mounting smaller versions of them on a band, forming a semicircular crest at the forehead.
Lastly, there was a plain leather pouch with a case that she knew contained makeup. A lot of makeup.
She snatched each item from its moorings. The headdress and fans were much sturdier than they appeared—they were meant to be worn and wielded in combat, after all. They and the pouch went inside her bag. The trunk served no further purpose and would be left in the mud.
With that, Kyoshi was finished. She was taken aback at how completely and utterly finished she was. How little she had put on display how much she’d lost, like the black night sky around the burst of a firework. She’d held on too hard to a treasure that might have been shaped like a home and a family, only to discover that her touch had dissolved it entirely. She wiped her eyes with her forearm and ran around the edge of the mansion, slipping and falling in the rain at least twice, and reached the stables.
There was a shock waiting for her.
Rangi was busy securing bedrolls, tents, and other bales of supplies to Pengpeng’s saddle. She looked up at Kyoshi from under the hood of her raincloak.
“Let me guess,” she shouted over the downpour, pointing at several waterproof baskets and sacks of grain. “You didn’t pack any food, did you?”
She reached down, grasped Kyoshi’s hand, and pulled her onto Pengpeng’s back. Then she hopped into the driver’s seat and took up the reins. “We’ll have to fly low and head southwest, out of the storm.”
Kyoshi’s throat was a solid lump. “Why are you doing this?”
“I have no idea what’s going on right now,” Rangi said over her shoulder. She flicked rain off her brow. Her face underneath looked like she was heading into combat. “But I’m not going to let you ride off on your own and die in this storm. You won’t last an hour without help.”
Kyoshi nodded, stricken dumb with gratitude to Rangi. For Rangi. She pleaded with the spirits that it wasn’t a final cruel trick, the form of her friend sitting before her. She maintained a safe distance so as not to dispel the precious vision.
The Firebender snapped Pengpeng’s reins with authority. “Up, girl!” Rangi shouted. “Yip yip!”
THE DECISION
The sunrise after the storm had no idea what Kyoshi had been through. It shined its warm hues of orange through the clouds like a loud boor of a friend insisting that everything would work out. The waves below flowed neatly under the steady breeze, making it appear that they were flying over the scaled skin of a giant fish.
Fighting the weather throughout the night had blasted them, body and mind. Pengpeng’s flight path was starting to ramble. But they were no longer in danger from wind and lightning. It was as good a time as any to address the other life-shattering piece of news.
Rangi rubbed at the dark shadows under her eyes. “You’re the Avatar,” she said. She spread her fingers and stared at the back of her hands, checking whether she was intoxicated. Or dreaming. “After all of this, it’s you. You really had no idea until now?”
Kyoshi shook her head. “I don’t know what went wrong with the search when we were younger, but from what Kelsang told me, it sounded like a complete mess. No one knew. Not even . . .” It was difficult to spit out his name. “Not even Jianzhu.”
“I’ve never heard of this happening before,” Rangi said. She closed and opened her fists to make sure they were still working. “At least not in Fire Nation history. When the Fire Sages reveal the Avatar, it’s a done deal.”
Kyoshi fought the urge to roll her eyes. Of course, in the Fire Nation the caravans arrived on time, and the identity of the most important person in the world was never in doubt.
“And then there’s a festival,” Rangi said, lost in thought. “According to tradition, there’s a celebration bigger than Twin Sun Day. We eat special foods like spiral-shaped noodles. School is canceled. Do you know how rare it is for school to be canceled in the Fire Nation?”
“Rangi, what does that have to do with anything?”
The Firebender stretched her elbows behind her back, her mind made up. “My point is that there are set ways this is supposed to pan out,” she said. “If you’re the Avatar, you need the trappings of the Avatar. We need to find masters who know what they’re doing to recognize your legitimacy and give you the right guidance.”
Rangi vaulted over the saddle edge onto Pengpeng’s neck and took up the reins. The bison dipped
lower over the shimmering water. Up ahead, a small crag jutted from the surface, a finger of rock poking through the ocean sheet. It was too steep for ships to use it as a dock, but there were a few level surfaces near the top, covered in soft green moss.
“I’m going to drop you off here, where you can camp safely,” Rangi said. “There’s a protocol in the event the compound came under attack and I had to flee with the Avatar. Those bags were prepacked; there’s everything you need for a week in them. Once I return to the village and figure the situation out, I’ll bring someone who can help.”
“No!”
She couldn’t go to another master, especially not a well-known one. Any earthbender in a position to aid her was more likely than not to be part of Jianzhu’s web. Looking back on her time at the house, she’d seen the evidence of his reach every day. The gifts, the ceremonious visits, and the dictated letters were simply tokens that marked the flow of power and control in the Earth Kingdom. And for as long as she’d known, it all filtered up to Jianzhu.
Kyoshi scrambled over to Rangi and yanked the reins out of her hands. Pengpeng swerved to the side and roared in complaint.
“Stop that!” Rangi shouted.
“Rangi, please! You’d only be sending me right back into his hands!” Kyoshi nearly bit through her tongue as she remembered the horror Jianzhu unleashed from deep within the mountain and his complete callousness while he did so. Rangi couldn’t have known the extent of her fear. Kyoshi was certain the man hadn’t shown that side of himself to anyone but her and Yun.
Rangi fought with her for the reins. “Let go! You’re being ridiculous!”
“Rangi, as your Avatar, I command you!”