by F. C. Yee
“It is cheating,” Lek said as they volleyed pebbles back and forth at each other in the mouth of a cave while the others set up camp. “Sure, some Earthbenders amplify their power with weapons like hammers and maces, but what are you going to do if you don’t have your fans? Ask for a rules change?”
“How is someone going to steal my fans?” Kyoshi said. The flight of the pebbles picked up speed, their arcs growing sharper. “I always have them with me.”
“It might not be theft,” Lek said. “You might voluntarily leave them behind. The first rule of smuggling is Don’t get caught with the goods. Your parents knew that. That’s probably why they stashed the fans with you in that hick abider town.”
Kyoshi’s temper flared. One, she found herself longing for Yokoya these days, much to her surprise. Not the people, but the harsh, wild landscape where the wooded mountains met the sea and salt air. The interior Earth Kingdom often felt like a brown monotone, a flat expanse that changed little from one landing site to the next. She decided she didn’t appreciate people looking down on the unique little part of it where she’d met Kelsang.
And two, she’d never gotten over the resentment she felt toward Lek, each moment her parents had spent with him instead of her. It didn’t matter if he was simply a gang member to them. They’d found him useful, decided he had a purpose. Her? Not so much.
She could have explained her feelings to him. Instead, she sliced at the flying pebbles with her fans, cracking them cleanly into hemispheres, and sent twice as many projectiles back at Lek. Can you do that, with or without a weapon?
He yelped and threw himself to the floor. The shot blast of stone zinged into the cave wall above him, showering him in dust. Playtime had gotten far too rough.
“I’m sorry!” Kyoshi cried out, covering her mouth in horror with the spread fan. She could have put out his eye, or worse.
He got up with a scowl on his face. But then he remembered something. His glower turned into a grin so smug it could have illuminated the rest of the cave.
“It’s fine,” he said, patting the dirt off his pants. “Though I’ll have to tell Rangi about your lapse in control.”
Whatever remorse Kyoshi felt vanished. “You snot-nosed little—”
He raised a finger patiently like an enlightened guru. “Bup-bup. That’s Sifu Snotnose to you.”
Kyoshi could firebend without her fans.
That one bad attempt after their escape from Chameleon Bay was a distant memory. Since then, some kind of blockage had cleared. The flame felt straightforward, a power that merely needed to be set free instead of prodded or manipulated like earth.
It made no sense to her how she had a critical weakness with her native element but could produce fire decently for a beginner. The reason could have been that Rangi was a great teacher, as might be expected from the scion of great teachers.
“No,” Rangi said. “It’s your emotional state.”
The little training area they’d built stood at the end of an isolated shepherd’s path leading away from a small town in a valley below. Rangi faced her on a long, narrow beam of earth that she’d ordered Kyoshi to raise from the ground. Balancing on it was hard enough, but then they’d started to run through firebending forms and light sparring. The linear exercise meant she’d need to concentrate on resisting and overcoming with positive jing instead of staying still or evading.
“Of all bending disciplines, fire is the most affected by inner turmoil,” Rangi said, punching a flame downward at Kyoshi’s front foot, forcing her to pull it back. “The fact that its coming easier to you now means you’re feeling more relaxed and natural.”
Kyoshi snap-kicked her new leading leg. A crescent of fire sliced upward, and Rangi had to reconsider how much pressure she wanted to apply. “Isn’t that a good thing?” Kyoshi asked.
“No! Why would it be? You feel loose and breezy when you’re surrounded by daofei, about to risk your life for them in what’s essentially an act of treason against the Earth Kingdom!?” Rangi spun on the balls of her feet, perfectly centered, with more dance-like beauty than Kyoshi could ever have mustered. A horizontal skirt of flame billowed out from her waist, exactly at a height too awkward for Kyoshi to jump over or duck easily.
Rangi hadn’t accounted for her opponent’s complete lack of shame. Kyoshi dropped to her belly like a worm, hugging the sides of the beam for stability, and let the wave of fire pass over her. She popped back up to see Rangi looking at her with disapproval in her eyes. And it was about more than her lowly escape.
“You’re firebending now,” Rangi said. “Dare I say, you might even be good at it. There’s no reason to continue on this path. We could go to the sages and prove you’re the Avatar.”
Kyoshi thought this matter had been settled, but apparently not. “Which ones, exactly?” she said. “Because the only sages I know are the names from Jianzhu’s guest lists! Should we try Lu Beifong? The man who thinks of Jianzhu like his own son? Or maybe someone at the court of Omashu! Omashu is practically his summer home!”
“We could go to my mother,” Rangi said, her voice barely audible.
Kyoshi dropped her fighting stance. If she caught a fireball to the face, she deserved it. She’d essentially separated Rangi from her only family. It was a nagging guilt that Kyoshi had been able to ignore, solely because of her friend’s strength. This was the first time Rangi had cracked along that plane.
“Do you really think she’d take our side over his?” Kyoshi asked. She didn’t mean for the question to be defiant. The friendship between the Avatar’s companions in eras past was the stuff of legend. It was said that two of Yangchen’s close friends and bending teachers had died protecting her from her enemies. The prospect of Hei-Ran choosing Jianzhu over her own daughter had to be considered.
Rangi’s face wilted further. “I don’t know,” she said after a while. Her shoulders were heavy with dejection. “I couldn’t be certain. I guess if we can’t trust my own mother, then we can’t trust anyone.”
It did not feel good to win this argument. Kyoshi stepped along the beam carefully until she could put her arms around Rangi. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve taken so much from you. I don’t know how to make it right.”
Rangi wiped her nose and pushed Kyoshi away. “You can start by promising me you’ll be a great Avatar. A leader who’s virtuous and just.”
The comment knocked Kyoshi off-balance better than a kick to her knee. She couldn’t reconcile her friend’s righteous desires with the dark conclusions of Lao Ge. Entertaining the wisdom of an assassin was already a betrayal of Rangi’s trust. What would happen if Kyoshi took the old man’s test and passed?
Rangi lined up a big attack to knock her off the beam, purposely exaggerating her own motions and openings to let her student counter-hit her. But Kyoshi couldn’t capitalize on them. She backed away until she ran out of space, forlornly waving her hands in a mockery of firebending, heat sputtering from her fingers.
Luck intervened before she humiliated herself further. “You two have been here all morning,” Kirima called out as she approached along the trail. “It’s my turn with Kyoshi.”
“Buzz off!” Rangi yelled. She took the fire she’d been winding between her hands and redirected it high above Kirima’s head.
Since the night they spent in the marble quarry, Rangi’s personal attitude toward Kirima had gone steeply downhill. Kyoshi had no idea why. They were both talented benders who married intelligence with precision. She’d trust either of their judgments in a pinch.
Kirima didn’t flinch from the fire blast. The waves of heat fluttered her hair and illuminated her sharp face in golden hues, an effect that was rather pretty. “You’re not setting a very good example for the baby Avatar, Topknot. Too much rage will stunt her growth.”
“Stop calling me that!” Rangi fumed.
Maybe that was it, the constant teasing. Kyoshi wondered how Rangi put up with the nickname for so long. In the Fire Nation, hair was h
eavily linked with honor. She’d heard that sometimes the losers of an important Agni Kai would shave parts of their head bald, laying patches of their scalp bare to symbolize an extra level of humility from their defeat, but the topknot was always sacred. It was never touched except in circumstances akin to death.
Kirima bowed in mockery. “As you wish, my good Hotwoman. I’m coming back in five minutes.”
After she disappeared, Kyoshi put her hand on Rangi’s shoulder. “Did something happen between the two of you?”
Rangi responded with her new favorite way of avoiding the subject. “Stance training,” she said.
“We already did stance training!”
“Lek said you went berserk in the cave. We’re moving to two a day. Horse. Now.”
Kyoshi groaned and pressed her feet together. She shuffled them to the sides, alternating between heels and toes, until they were wider than her shoulders. She kept quiet as she lowered her waist, or else Rangi would make her hold a log or some other heavy object they could find lying around.
Rangi circled her, looking for any weakness where she could strike. “Do not move,” she said, right before stepping carefully onto Kyoshi’s bent knee.
“I hate you so much!” Kyoshi yelled as Rangi draped her bodyweight over her shoulders.
“The exercise is to maintain composure in the face of distraction! Now maintain!”
Kyoshi put up with the asymmetrical agony until Rangi dropped back down to the ground. “I don’t want her teaching you waterbending,” Rangi said as she moved threateningly into Kyoshi’s blind spot.
“Why?” Kyoshi felt Rangi leap onto her back, clinging to her like a rucksack. “Agh! Why!”
“There’s a proper order to training the Avatar,” Rangi said. “The cycle of the seasons. Earth, fire, air, water. It’s not good to deviate from that pattern. You have to master the other elements before water.”
“Again, why?” There were only four airbending temples in the world. If she tried to seek out a master there, Jianzhu would find her more easily than anywhere else.
“Because!” Rangi snapped. “They say bad things happen when an Avatar tries to defy the natural order of bending. Ill fortune befalls them.”
Kyoshi had never known Rangi to lean on superstition. Tradition, however, was another matter. She could tell that each time they ignored an established practice regarding the Avatar, the knife twisted in Rangi’s heart a little bit more.
But Kyoshi owed it to her not to make a promise she couldn’t keep. “I’m going to use every weapon I have at my disposal,” she said. That was the truth.
Rangi let go of her. “I know. I can’t stop you from training with Kirima. It’s just that as soon as you start waterbending in earnest, our chance to do things the right way dies. Forever. It can’t be brought back.”
Hearing it phrased that way made Kyoshi glummer than she’d expected. She stared at the ground in front of her. Rangi’s feet came into view.
“Come on,” she said. “Cheer up. I didn’t mean to send you into a spiral.”
“I can’t cheer up. I’m in Horse stance.”
“I like your focus,” Rangi said. “But see if you can withstand this.”
She slid between Kyoshi’s arms and gave her a head-tilting, knee-buckling kiss, as powerful and deep as the ocean after a storm.
Kyoshi’s eyes went wide before they shut forever. She sank into heavenly darkness. Her backbone turned to liquid. “Maintain,” Rangi murmured, her lips like a feather on Kyoshi’s before she attacked again, with added ferocity this time.
Kyoshi never wanted the torment to end. Rangi pressed into her like metal glowing on an anvil, scorching her where their skin met. Fingers ran through Kyoshi’s hair, twisting and pulling to remind her how delightfully at the Firebender’s mercy she was.
After a hundred years had passed, Rangi broke contact, gently and deliberately breathing a wisp of steam down Kyoshi’s neck, a parting gift of heat that drifted underneath her clothes.
She leaned in for one last seductive whisper. “You still have seven minutes left to go,” Rangi said.
Kyoshi kept her complaints to herself. It was a decent trade, all things considered.
“Your water and air chakras are overflowing,” Lao Ge said.
He sounded like it was an embarrassment, as if Kyoshi had wandered outside her home without being fully dressed. She’d braved coming to him while the others were still awake, bedded down by the embers of the campfire. Rangi was probably staring at the sky, vigilant to her last moments of consciousness.
Lao Ge lay on his side in the grass, his head propped upon his hand so he could watch a pair of fireflies circle each other, tracing erratic patterns through the air. Kyoshi had long since gathered that the man had very little need to ever look at her.
“I don’t know what chakras are,” she said.
“What they are is either open or closed. For the sake of predictability, I prefer working with people who have all seven of them open or all seven of them closed. An accomplice with only some of their chakras unblocked can be easily swayed by their strongest, most gnarled-up emotion.”
Kyoshi assumed the term had something to do with energy movement within the body. Not much of a stretch, since controlling internal qi was the basis of all bending.
“Your feelings of pleasure and love are butting up against a wall of grief,” he said. “And guilt. Grief I can work with, but guilt makes for a poor killer. Have you second thoughts about your man?”
“No,” she said. “Never.” Lao Ge rolled over to his other side. She waited, letting him examine her to see she wasn’t bluffing. Jianzhu was part of her blood by now. He was the back of her hands.
But this Te person was not. “I don’t know if I can help you kill the governor,” she said. “Helping Mok free a prisoner is one thing, but an assassination in cold blood is another.” Kyoshi wondered why she didn’t reject Lao Ge immediately the other night. Speaking the action out loud made it ludicrous. “There’s no reason for me to help you.”
The old man blew his nose on his sleeve. “Have you ever heard of Guru Shoken?” he asked. Kyoshi shook her head.
“He was an ancient philosopher, a contemporary of Laghima’s. Not as popular though. He had a proverb: ‘If you meet the spirit of enlightenment on the road, slay it!’”
She wrinkled her brow. “I can see why he’s not popular.”
“Yes, he was considered heretical by some. But wise by others. One interpretation of that particular saying is that you cannot be bound by petty concerns on your personal journey. You must walk with a singular purpose. The judgment of others, no matter how horrific or criminal they label your actions, must hold no meaning to you.”
“I can’t do that,” Kyoshi said. “I care what she thinks of me. I don’t know if I could handle disappointing her.”
Lao Ge knew whom Kyoshi was talking about. “Your hesitation seems to be less about your own morals than hers. In fact, without your Firebender tethering you to this world, you might feel no compunction at all. Perhaps that’s why you feel guilt. You’re only one step away from Guru Shoken’s ideal, and it disturbs you.”
This was the sorry state of Kyoshi’s Avatarhood. Heartlessness the new enlightenment. Murder the means to self-discovery. If she ever resurfaced in the legitimate world, she would create a stain as dark as loam in the history books.
“Don’t look so compromised,” Lao Ge said. “Yangchen was a devoted reader of Shoken.”
Kyoshi glanced up at him.
“She studied his opponents as well,” he said. “But I don’t feel like giving you their philosophical arguments. It doesn’t serve my purposes.”
She remembered the notes in her mother’s journal, about the rumored longevity of Tieguai the Immortal. “Are you him?” she said. “Are you Shoken?” If her wild accusation was right, it would have made the man before her older than the Four Nations themselves.
Lao Ge snorted and rolled on his back, closing his e
yes. “Of course not.” He settled in to sleep. “I was always much better looking than that fool.”
CONCLUSIONS
Jianzhu had learned his lesson. No caravans. No roads. As soon as he received the message from the shirshu tracker team, delivered by hawk, he’d gone through the enormous, preposterous expense of buying rare eel hounds. The fastest cross-country mounts besides a flying bison. A whole herd of them.
In the annals of the Earth Kingdom, ancient nomadic barbarians had traveled great distances, surprising footslogging armies with such tactics. A single rider would bring multiple mounts on a journey, switching between them on the fly to keep the animals as fresh and speedy as possible. From the ranks of his newly replenished guardsmen, he’d chosen two on the basis of their riding ability and set out with eight eel hounds between them. They’d been told as little as possible, but from his urgency it was easy to guess that their quest was important.
They reached the mountains of Ba Sing Se in astonishing time, with barely a witness to mark their passing. Early on, one mount had broken its leg in a singing groundhog’s hole and needed to be put down. Another died from exhaustion on the far shore of West Lake.
But other than that, the constant, mindless riding, the wind in his hair, had been good for Jianzhu’s spirit. As much as he missed Hei-Ran’s company, he needed the occasional freedom from her watchful gaze. The party had brought more messenger hawks with their baggage, carefully caged and hooded. Jianzhu had promised to send word to her as soon as possible.
The location where he was set to meet the trackers was a small trailhead leading into the foothills of the southern Taihua range. The gentle slope of grassy green knolls was punctured by rows of red-stone crags jutting upward, uniformly following the same angle and grain. The rocks were as tall and numerous as the trees in a forest.
Jianzhu saw a lone figure in the middle of the stones waving them over and frowned. The message that had brought him here in such a hurry had explained, with overflowing apologies, that the shirshu had followed the scent trail to these mountains. Right before they’d lost control of the animal. It had escaped and run up the peaks in pursuit of its prey. For all he knew, it might have eaten the Avatar.