by F. C. Yee
The staff was aflutter. They hadn’t had any warning that guests were coming. The dire nature of their short notice was made more apparent by Jianzhu entering the kitchen and personally overseeing the preparations. Nay, helping with them.
“Everyone, calm down,” he said reassuringly as he hoisted a massive kettle onto the stove himself. “You don’t have to pull out your finest work. It’s not your fault; there simply isn’t time.”
“But, Master, so many of your peers at once?” Auntie Mui said, near tears. “It’d be shameful to give lesser service! We have to—we have to line up a midday meal, and dinner, and, oh, there’s not nearly enough firewood!”
Jianzhu opened the kettle lid and peered inside to check the water level before turning around and laying his hands on the woman’s shoulders. “My dear,” he said, looking into her eye. “They’re here on business. I doubt you’ll have to feed many, or any of them. Concentrate on getting the tea ready. That’s all.”
Mui turned redder. “Of-of course, Master,” she stuttered. “It would be impossible to discuss important matters without tea.”
She bustled off to yell at the servants in charge of the tea selection. Jianzhu dusted his hands off carefully and gave a weary sigh.
Jianzhu entered the grand reception hall to a trying sight. The sages had seated themselves across three sides of the room, behind the rows of long tables, and Hui was in the middle where the master of the house would normally be. He was sitting in Jianzhu’s chair.
Hei-Ran was off to his left. She traded a wide-eyed glance with him. What are you going to do?
What Jianzhu was going to do was sit down, alone, behind the remaining table, and wait. He felt stares burning into him from all directions.
“Master Jianzhu,” Hui said. “Could you ask Master Kelsang and the Avatar to join us?”
The servants opened the door and entered with steaming trays of tea. Jianzhu milked the moment for all it was worth, waiting to answer until each sage had a cup placed before them. He made motions of thanks to the maid who gave him his, and took a sip, praising Auntie Mui’s choice of the blended oolong.
Only once the staff had left did he speak. “You know as well as I do I cannot. Master Kelsang and the Avatar are still on their spiritual journey.”
Hui smiled tightly, a motion that pulled his blocky face to the side. “Yes, their journey. The abbots of the Air Temples haven’t seen them once since you made that claim. Is it not strange that Master Kelsang hasn’t taken the boy to any of the temples, whether to visit the sacred sites or simply to resupply?”
“I don’t wish to speak ill of my friend, but he does have a rocky relationship with some of the more orthodox Air Temple leaders. And places holy to the Air Nomads exist around the world. They’re nomads.”
“And what holy places are in Taihua?” Hui snapped. “Perhaps the previously unknown settlement of daofei there?”
Jianzhu stayed calm. “Chamberlain, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that the Avatar’s last known whereabouts happened to be in a nest of criminals, traitors, and outlaws, and that he hasn’t been seen since! I’m saying that we have to assume the worst! That he and his companion are in mortal danger, if not dead already!”
There was the clank of a single dropped cup. Hei-Ran knew he’d tracked the Avatar to Taihua but not that the mountains had been crawling with danger. Nor had any of the letters he’d read last night mentioned a firebending girl. The fate of her daughter was unknown.
Hei-Ran looked at him like he’d stabbed her in the heart. That was the one gaze he couldn’t meet. He concentrated on Hui instead, on this usurping little badgerfrog who’d fancied himself a player of games. Strictly speaking, Hui didn’t have evidence in hand. But he could get it at his leisure. There was no hiding an entire town, nor the secret tunnels that supplied it.
“You have demonstrated unforgivable negligence at best and cost the Earth Kingdom its portion of the Avatar cycle at worst!” Hui said. And the people I’ve bribed to appear today will attest to that. “You are no longer fit to serve as the Avatar’s master!”
He’d chosen to use those words. Jianzhu snapped.
“And you are?” he shouted at Hui, leaping to his feet. “You who want that power and status for no reason other than it’s there!?”
Hui took the time to smell and sip his tea, knowing he’d won. “This gathering has not yet decided whom the Avatar, if still alive, should learn from,” he said smugly.
Jianzhu felt queasy. His forehead grew damp. “This gathering,” he sneered, swaying on his feet. “This isn’t a proper conclave of sages. You’ve identified my enemies among the leadership of the Earth Kingdom and brought them to my doorstep like a bandit gang!
“What has he promised you, huh?” he yelled at the assembled faces, nearly spinning in place. “Money? Power? For centuries men like Hui have carved up this nation and offered slices to anyone who’ll pay! I’m the one trying to make it stronger!”
They blinked slowly, coughed hard, didn’t respond.
Hui sniffed, his nose starting to run. “We meet the minimum number required to strip you of your duties. If you’re . . . if you’re done grandstanding, we’ll take the vote.”
Jianzhu retched. His insides heaved in and out and his vision went blurry. “What is going on?” he shouted at Hui. “What did you do to me?”
“What do you mean?” Hui tried to stand but collapsed back in his chair. He put his hand to his nose in astonishment. It was covered in blood.
“What’s happening?” someone shouted. Sounds of vomiting filled the hall. A servant opened the door behind Jianzhu to see what the commotion was and screamed.
Jianzhu collapsed forward, his upper body slamming against the table. He couldn’t see Hei-Ran. But like the needle of a compass, his hand reached toward her as he blacked out.
FAREWELLS
Kyoshi gave a start when Lao Ge walked into the room, alone. She immediately took a defensive posture in her bed on the chance he’d belatedly come to exact a toll for denying him his victim. He didn’t help matters by brandishing a small blade as he entered.
“Time to get the bandages off,” he said.
“Why are you the one doing it?”
“I can be convincing when I need to be.” He sat down next to her bed and gently applied the knife to the cotton wrappings on her left arm.
There was a rasp of the sharp edge on the cloth, of fibers giving way, that made her shiver. “You looked lost in thought when I came in,” Lao Ge said. “Are you regretting killing Xu?”
He pierced the first layer and she contemplated screaming for help. “No,” she said. “I feel bad about letting Te live.”
Lao Ge gave her an exasperated look and wagged the knife. “You know, we can rectify that pretty easily.”
“That’s not what I mean. I told you I accepted the responsibility of saving him, and I’m not turning back on my choice.” She rolled her lips between her teeth. “It’s more like I feel . . . inconsistent. Unfair. Like I should have either killed them both or let them both live.”
Lao Ge started rolling the severed end of the bandage into a round bale. “A general sends some troops to die in a siege and holds others back in reserve. A king taxes half his lands to support the other. A mother has one dose of medicine and two sick children. I wouldn’t call your situation a particularly exalted one.”
Her mentor had a way of cutting her down to size. “People of all walks, high and low, choose to hurt some and help others,” he said. “I can tell you it’ll only get worse the more you embrace your Avatarhood.”
“Worse?” she said. “Shouldn’t it become easier over time?”
“Oh no, my dear girl. It’ll never get easier. If you had a strict rule, maybe, to always show mercy or always punish, you could use it as a shield to protect your spirit. But that would be distancing yourself from your duty. Determining the fates of others on a case-by-case basis, considering the infinite combinations of cir
cumstance, will wear on you like rain on the mountain. Give it enough time, and you’ll bear the scars.”
He spoke out of kindness and sorrow, perhaps not as immutable as he claimed to be. “You will never be perfectly fair, and you will never be truly correct,” Lao Ge said. “This is your burden.”
To keep deciding, over and over again. Kyoshi didn’t know if she could take the strain.
Lao Ge started on her other arm. “What I’m curious about is what you’ll do next,” he said. “Do you feel strong enough to take your man now?”
Kyoshi was distracted by the smell coming from her unwashed hand. “What?”
The old man tut-tutted. “Some seeker of vengeance you are. Your quest. Your ultimate goal. You defeated the same enemy Jianzhu did. Do you feel strong enough to take him down now?”
Kyoshi hadn’t thought about her fight with Xu in those terms, that the leader of the Yellow Necks might be a yardstick to measure herself against Jianzhu by. It seemed like an oversimplification.
And yet.
She didn’t give him an answer. Lao Ge finished unwinding her second arm. She flexed her pale and wrinkled fingers. The pain was gone, but her hands were mottled and shiny, missing their lines and prints in some areas.
“Go,” Lao Ge said. “See your friends. I have some business to take care of on my own.”
“Don’t kill Te,” Kyoshi said. She was pretty sure the boy had ridden to safety, out of the reach of Tieguai the Immortal, but it was worth mentioning anyway. “Not after I went through the trouble.”
Lao Ge made an innocent face and pocketed the knife he’d been using.
“I mean it!” she yelled.
Kyoshi washed her hands in a basin and went to the next room. The Flying Opera Company had been sleeping there, the bedrolls laid out on the empty floor. Rangi and Lek were the only two members present, playing a game of Pai Sho that Lek scrutinized with intense concentration and Rangi looked bored with. Judging from the layout of the pieces, she’d been toying with him, making blunders on purpose.
She glanced up and gave Kyoshi a smile that could melt the poles. “You’re on your feet again.”
“I’ve been off them too long,” Kyoshi said. She’d inherited the group’s need for safety in motion. “I don’t feel right staying in the same town for so many days straight.”
“The rest of us agreed we weren’t going anywhere until you were a hundred percent better,” Lek said. “Kyoshi, you took a lot of . . . lightning bolts? Honestly, I don’t know how you’re alive.”
He turned to Rangi like it was her fault for not knowing what Xu was. “I mean, I’ve never met a Firebender other than you. Is that some kind of dirty trick you people pull out to win Angi Kois or whatever?”
“No!” Rangi protested. “Bending lightning is a skill so rare that there are barely any living witnesses who can confirm it exists! And the reports don’t mention Xu was from the Fire Nation at all! Do you think I’d let Kyoshi walk into a fight without telling her everything I knew about her opponent?”
Kyoshi watched them argue over Xu’s secret technique. She hadn’t noticed his eye color, but then, not every Firebender had blatantly gold irises. If there was anything she’d learned recently, it was that daofei brotherhood didn’t require blood ties. Mok and Wai could have sworn to Xu without being related to him.
A Firebender had ended up the leader of a gang of Earth Kingdom outlaws. It was no different than a disgraced Air Nomad doing the same. Perhaps her mixed parentage made her understand such outcomes were less rare than people assumed.
“Oh, Kyoshi,” Rangi cried with sudden dismay. “Your hands.”
They’d been the first injuries she’d noticed after the duel as well. Kyoshi held them up to show they’d healed. “They feel fine.”
“But the scars.” Rangi entwined her fingers with Kyoshi’s and brought them to her cheek. Kyoshi was glad she’d washed thoroughly.
“You had such beautiful hands,” Rangi said, nuzzling at her palm. “Your skin was so smooth and—”
Lek coughed loudly. “I have an idea for that. Come on, love-birds. Let’s go shopping.”
Zigan hadn’t been particularly friendly to strangers the first time they’d entered to buy food. Now in the light of a new day . . . it was worse.
The townsfolk stared at her with fear and hostility rather than the plain rudeness of before. Doors and shutters slammed closed as they walked by. Residents who couldn’t afford such nice entrances vigorously shook their hanging rugs and curtains for emphasis.
“Do I still have paint on my face?” Kyoshi said. “Why are they looking at us like that?”
“Well, for starters, a lot of Zigan saw flashes of lightning and a pillar of wind and fire from your duel with Xu,” Lek said. “And then some of the daofei passed through town as they fled, telling stories of a giant with eyes of blood who drank the soul of their leader. These idiots haven’t necessarily put together that you’re the Avatar. I heard one shopkeeper say you were a dragon in human form, which explained why you could fly and breathe fire.”
“But I saved them from the Yellow Necks!”
Lek laughed. “Kyoshi, by a strict interpretation of the Code, you are now the leader of the Yellow Necks. Dr. Song’s no dummy, and it took a lot of begging to get her to think about helping you. She saw a daofei girl who’d challenged her elder brother for control of their gang and won. Face it, sister. You are dangerous.”
Kyoshi was surprised at how much it irked her. The first heroic, selfless feat she’d performed as the Avatar, and it was tainted. The context had already crumbled away, leaving her no better than Tagaka the pirate queen.
But then, hadn’t she understood this from the very beginning? Her legacy was part of the cost she’d been willing to pay to bring Jianzhu to justice. It always had been. It was simply . . . a higher price than she’d anticipated.
That was the story she repeated to herself as Lek led them inside a cramped shop. A brush of a hand against her face made her squeak. It was a glove, dangling limply from a hook on the ceiling.
An old man as dried and stretched as the skins he sold sat on the floor. He nodded at each of them, without the fear or disdain of the other villagers.
Kyoshi thought she knew why. Leatherworkers and tanners, peasants who made their living by crafting products from animals, were considered unclean in many portions of the Earth Kingdom. It was part of the hypocrisy that Kyoshi hated so much. People from all rungs of society depended on and clamored for such goods but despised their neighbors who made them. She remembered the fine boots Yun had worn that day back in the manor, and her heart ached for him.
“We’re looking for a pair of gloves for my friend,” Lek said. “They’ll have to be big, of course.”
The shopkeeper gestured at one wall where the largest examples hung. Kyoshi pressed her hand against the glove at the very end of the row and shook her head.
“I got one or two more, bigger, in the back,” the old man said unhurriedly. “But they’d be no good for regular wear. Not unless you figure on fighting a battle every day.”
“I think . . .” Kyoshi said, “we should give them a shot.”
He shuffled around, staying seated, and rummaged in a pile. “The back” of the shop was simply whatever was behind him. He produced a cracked hide bag and pulled apart the drawstring. “Made these for a colonel on the rise in the army a long time ago,” he said. “Poor fellow died before he could pick them up.”
The gloves were more like gauntlets. The thick, supple leather fastened to gleaming metal bracers that protected the wrists. Kyoshi pulled them on and buckled the straps. The fingers were snug, a second skin, and the armored portions heavy and reassuring.
There was no way these gloves would be acceptable in polite company. Their very appearance was aggressive, a declaration of war.
“They’re perfect,” Kyoshi said. “What do we owe you?”
“Take ’em,” the shopkeeper said. “Consider it a gift for what
you did.”
He elaborated no further. Kyoshi bowed deeply before they left the shop, grateful to the core.
There was at least one person who saw the truth.
They walked down the street in high spirits. Kyoshi pulled one of her fans out and levitated a pebble. She could bend perfectly with her new gloves.
“If only it were this easy to find shoes that fit,” she grumbled.
“It’s better than being short and skinny,” Lek said morosely. “If I was your size, I’d be ruling my own nation by now.”
Rangi laughed and squeezed his arm. “Aw, cheer up, Lek,” she said. She prodded his bicep, working her way higher. “You’ll fill out soon. You have good bone structure.”
Lek turned a deeper red than the face paint they wore on the raid. “Cut it out,” he said. “It’s not funny when—agh!”
Rangi had suddenly yanked him downward by the arm. Her knees dragged in the dirt. It was as if her entire body had gone limp. “Wha—” she mumbled, her eyelids beating like insect wings.
Lek yelped again and swatted at the small of his back. As he spun in place, Kyoshi saw a tuft of down sticking out of him. The fletching of a dart. She instinctively brought her hands in front of her face and heard sharp metal plinks bouncing off her bracers. But the back of her neck was uncovered, and a stinging burn landed on her skin there.
The sensation of liquid spread over her body. Poison, her mind screamed as her muscles went slack. Lek tried to ready a stone to hurl at their attackers, but it fell out of his hands and rolled on the ground. He and Kyoshi collapsed on their faces like the daofei who’d been lashed by the shirshu.
It was different from the incense Jianzhu had drugged her with. She could still see and think. But the poison was having different reactions in her friends. Rangi seemed barely conscious. And Lek began to gag and choke.
Feet ran over to them. Pairs of hands quickly grabbed Rangi and dragged her away.