Avatar The Last Airbender: The Shadow of Kyoshi Page 3

  THE INVITATION

  People who complained about how long it took to travel across Ba Sing Se were usually factoring in the congestion. That wasn’t a problem for Kyoshi. Crowds tended to part out of her way like grass before the breeze.

  She had another shortcut to exploit as well. It was possible to waterbend a makeshift raft upstream along the drainage canals running from the Upper Ring all the way out to the Agrarian Zone for irrigation. It was extremely fast, if you could stand the smell.

  She reached the Middle Ring by the evening. Despite the orderly layout and numbered addresses, she struggled to find her direction in the uniformity of the white-painted houses and green-tiled roofs. She took paths leading her over peaceful bridges that spanned gently flowing canals, and along tea shops redolent with jasmine blossoms and trees shedding their pale pink petals over the sidewalks. As a child living in the gutters of Yokoya, Kyoshi used to imagine a paradise much like the Middle Ring. Clean, quiet, and food at hand anywhere you looked.

  Store owners sweeping their floors would look up in surprise at her, but soon returned to their business. She passed a gaggle of dark-robed students that stared and elbowed each other to get a glimpse but didn’t flee her gaze. People who were comfortable with their station in life tended to have less fear. They couldn’t imagine danger in any form visiting their doorstep.

  Kyoshi slipped out of sight into a darkened side street. She opened an unmarked door with a key she kept in her sash. The hallway she entered was as full of twists and stairs as Loongkau, but much cleaner. It ended with a passageway into a plain second-story apartment, furnished only with a bed and a desk. This room was one of several properties around the Four Nations that Jianzhu had bequeathed her, and it served as a safe room where she could sleep overnight when she didn’t want to announce her official presence with the Earth King’s staff. She unbuckled her bracers and peeled them off, tossing them on the bed as she crossed the floor.

  She sank into the chair and dumped the pilfered headbands on the desk, the badges clattering over the surface like gambling winnings. She was more careful removing her headdress. A breeze rustled her freed hair, coming from the window that gave her an expansive sunset view of the Lower Ring in all its vastness and poverty, the brown shacks and shanties stretching over the land like leather drying in the sun.

  It was an unusual layout for the apartment. Many Middle Ring houses did not have views that faced the Lower Ring. The merchants and financiers who lived in this district paid so they didn’t have to look at unpleasantness.

  Her fingers moved on their own, organizing the badges into neat stacks. A dull ache of exhaustion settled into her head. Today had added another complication to the pile. She would need to plan another visit to Loongkau to make sure the residents were safe within their homes. And she’d have to follow up on Li’s information, or else the captain and his backers would know they could simply wait until the Avatar had passed like a cloud overhead for them to resume their corrupt activities.

  She knew it was a losing battle. In the grand scheme of things, singling out one dirty lawman in Ba Sing Se would have as much effect as pulling a raindrop out of the ocean. Unless . . .

  Unless she made an example of Li and whoever bribed him. She could hurt them so badly that word would spread about what happens when the Avatar catches you exploiting the defenseless for your own gain.

  It would be quick. It would be efficient. It would be brutal.

  Jianzhu would have approved.

  Kyoshi slammed her hands against the desk, toppling the badges. She’d slipped yet again into the mindset of her deceased “benefactor.” She’d heard his words in her own voice, the two of them speaking with as much unity as the Avatars were supposed to be able to do with their past lives.

  She opened a drawer and pulled out a hand towel that had been resting in a small bowl of special liniment. Kyoshi dragged the moistened cloth hard down the side of her face, trying to wipe away the deeper stains along with her makeup.

  A shudder of revulsion ran up Kyoshi’s back when she thought of how she’d smothered Li with the exact same technique Jianzhu had once used on her. She should have abhorred it, knowing exactly what it felt like to die slowly as your lungs caved in on themselves. In dealing with Li, she’d slipped as easily into Jianzhu’s skin as she had her clothes.

  The ones that had also been a gift from him.

  She slammed her fist on the desk again and heard part of the joinery crack. It felt like every step she took as the Avatar was in the wrong direction. Kelsang would never have entertained violence as policy. He would have worked to improve the fortunes of the Loongkau and Lower Ring residents so they could push back against Triad domination and Middle Ring exploitation. He would have acted as their voice.

  That was what Kyoshi had to do. In essence, it was what Kelsang had done for her, the abandoned child he found in Yokoya. It was the right course of action and would be the most effective in the long run.

  It would just take time. A very . . . very long time.

  A knock came from outside. “Come in,” she said.

  A young man wearing the billowing orange and yellow robes of an Air Nomad opened the door. “Are you all right, Avatar Kyoshi?” Monk Jinpa said. “I heard a loud noise and—aagh!”

  The stack of letters he was holding went flying into the air. Kyoshi whipped her hand around and around in a circle of air-bending, corralling the papers with a miniature tornado. Jinpa recovered from his surprise and caught the pile of letters from the bottom of the vortex up, re-creating the stack, but with the corners sticking out at all angles.

  “Apologies, Avatar,” he said when he’d secured her correspondence once more. “I was surprised by your, uh . . .” He gestured at his own face in lieu of pointing rudely at hers.

  She hadn’t finished wiping off the rest of her makeup. She probably looked like a doctor’s illustration of a skull with the skin halfway stripped. Kyoshi grabbed the towel to finish the job. “Don’t worry about it,” she said as she worked the cloth along the corner of her eye, taking care not to get the compound that would dissolve the paint into it.

  In defiance of her order, Jinpa still looked worried. “You’re also bleeding from your neck.”

  Yes. Right. With her free hand she opened a fan and aimed the leaf at the garrote wound around her throat. The shards of glass in her skin plucked themselves out under the force of her earthbending and balled into a floating clump that dropped to the floor when she switched her focus to a nearby pitcher.

  A tiny wriggle of water snaked out of the vessel and wrapped itself around Kyoshi’s neck. It was cool and soothing against the itch of the wound, and she could feel her skin knitting together. Jinpa watched her heal herself, both worried and horrified by the crudeness of her self-administered first aid.

  “Isn’t healing water supposed to glow?” he asked.

  “I’ve never managed it.” The mansion’s libraries in Yokoya were full of extensive tomes about the medical uses of water-bending, but Kyoshi lacked time and a proper teacher. She’d read through as many of the texts as she could anyway, and the wounds she’d been accumulating as the Avatar gave her plenty of opportunities to practice on herself.

  She’d made a vow. No matter how limited her knowledge was, or how flawed her technique, she would never again watch someone she cared about slip away in front of her while she did nothing.

  She tossed the water back in the pitcher and ran a finger over the marks left behind on her neck. At this rate I’m going to look like Auntie Mui’s latest patchwork quilt. She could hide the scar with more makeup or a higher collar. But the mottled, healed burns on her hands, courtesy of Xu Ping An, reminded her she was running out of body parts to injure and cover up. “What are the updates?”

  Jinpa took a seat and pulled out one of the many letters addressed to the Avatar that he’d already broken the seals on. He was allowed the privilege. During her first visit to the Southern Air Temple as the Avatar, he had helped her constantly with planning and communication, to the point where his elders shrugged and officially assigned him to Kyoshi as her secretary. Without his assistance, she would have been overwhelmed to the point of shutting down.

  “Governor Te humbly submits a report that Zigan Village has surpassed its former peak population and can now boast of a new school and herbal clinic, both of which are free of charge to the poorest townsfolk,” Jinpa read aloud. “Huh. The Te family’s not known for generosity. I wonder what’s gotten into young Sihung recently.”

  What indeed. Te Sihung had been the first official of the Earth Kingdom to learn Kyoshi was the Avatar, right after she’d decided not to assassinate him during a daofei raid on his house. After her public revealing, she’d made it clear to Te that the life debt he owed her still applied and she’d continue to watch him. Knowing his power didn’t make him immune to consequences seemed to have bolstered both his compassion and skill as governor.

  Good news was hard to come by these days. “What’s next?” she asked Jinpa, hoping for more.

  His lips pulled to the side. “The rest of the letters are audience requests from nobles you’ve already rejected or ignored.”

  “All of them?” She eyed the tall stack of papers and frowned. Jinpa shrugged. “You reject and ignore a lot of nobles. Earth Kingdom folk are nothing if not persistent.”

  Kyoshi fought the urge to set the whole pile of correspondence ablaze. She didn’t have to read every message to know each one was a demand for the Avatar’s favorable judgment on matters of business, politics, and money.

  She’d learned after the first few times. Kyoshi would accept an innocuous invitation to attend a banquet, preside over a spiritual ceremony, bless a new canal or a bridge. Inevitably, her host, the governor
or the largest landowner—oftentimes the same person—would corner her into a side conversation and beg for assistance in material affairs they would never have bothered Kuruk or Great Yangchen with. But Kyoshi was one of their own, wasn’t she? She understood how business was done in the Earth Kingdom.

  She did. It didn’t mean she liked it. Sages who’d vehemently denied her Avatarhood despite Jianzhu’s last will and testament, nobles who claimed trickery after watching her twirl water and earth above her head with their own eyes, suddenly became true believers when they thought she could aid them in biting off greater mouthfuls of wealth and power in the endless hierarchies of the Earth Kingdom. The Avatar could settle where a provincial border lay, and which governor got to claim taxes from a rich cropland. The Avatar could speed a trade fleet along its route safely, protecting the lives of the sailors, but ultimately ensuring a massive profit for its merchant backers. Couldn’t she?

  Kyoshi soon learned to ignore such requests and focus on what she could wreak with her own hands. “Those messages can wait,” she said. She secretly hoped the stack of correspondence would blow away into dust if she sounded cold and authoritative enough.

  Jinpa gave her a gentle but chiding look. “Avatar . . . if I may be permitted, you have to participate in high society to some extent. You can’t keep putting off the leadership of the Earth Kingdom forever.”

  The Earth Kingdom doesn’t have leadership, Kyoshi thought. I helped kill the closest thing to a leader it had.

  “The duties of your role extend beyond being a powerful bender,” he went on. “You’ve scrubbed the countryside of the largest bandit groups, and it’s impressive you were able to track down this Mok person and keep him from hurting more innocent people. But at this point you’re running yourself ragged simply so you can beat up the same bad men you’ve already beaten up in the past. Is scraping the bottom of the criminal barrel truly the most good you could do for the Four Nations? Not to mention the risks it poses to your personal safety.”

  “It’s what I know.” And it’s the only way I can be sure what I’m doing is right.

  They’d had this conversation before, many times, but Jinpa never grew tired of reminding her. Unlike the other Air Nomads she’d met, who prized detachment from the world, he was constantly pushing her to engage in a higher level of discourse with the very people who sought to exploit her. He wasn’t much older than Kyoshi, slightly on the other side of twenty years, so it was strange when he spoke like a political tutor trying to guide a wayward pupil.

  “At some point, you will have to stand upon a greater stage,” Jinpa said. “The Avatar creates ripples in the world, whether they mean to or not.”

  “Is that a saying among your mysterious friends whom you won’t tell me about?” she retorted.

  He merely shrugged at her clumsy attempt to change the subject. That was the other frustrating thing about Jinpa. He wouldn’t trade jabs with her like Kirima or Wong. He showed her too much respect, a problem her old companions never had, even after learning she was the Avatar.

  She wondered what would happen if the monk ever met the remaining members of the Flying Opera Company. She could imagine Jinpa offering them assistance in escaping the daofei lifestyle. They probably would have tried to steal his bison.

  There was only one thing that could get her to talk to the sages. “None of the letters mentioned—”

  “Master Yun? No, unfortunately. He has yet to turn up.”

  Kyoshi exhaled, a long hiss through her teeth. During the period where the world thought Yun was the Avatar, he had focused a great deal of effort on treating with the Earth Kingdom’s elite. Which meant they were the only people who knew his face. Without a lead from someone who recognized him, finding one man in the entirety of the Earth Kingdom was like looking for a single pebble in a gravel pit. “Let’s try bumping up the reward again.”

  “I don’t know if that’ll help,” Jinpa said. “The prominent figures of the Earth Kingdom lost a lot of face as a result of Master Yun’s misidentification. If I were them, I wouldn’t want him to resurface. I would want to pretend the whole episode never happened. I hear Lu Beifong forbids anyone in his household, guests included, to speak of Jianzhu or his disciple.”

  Jinpa had a strange amount of access to political gossip for a simple Air Nomad, but his observations were usually correct. That blasted pricklethorn Lu. As Jianzhu’s backer, the Beifong patriarch was just as guilty in Kyoshi’s eyes for the mistake in identifying the Avatar, and he continued to cast off any further responsibility in the matter.

  She’d begged Lu Beifong in person to help her find Yun, expecting the old man to have some semblance of grandfatherly attachment to him. Instead Lu coldly revealed that the letter Jianzhu had sent to sages across the Earth Kingdom proclaiming Kyoshi to be the Avatar also said Yun was dead. Between Jianzhu’s final words and Kyoshi’s confused testimony of the incident in Qinchao, Lu chose to believe what was most convenient for him. As far as he was concerned, the scandal had resolved itself. A victory for neutral jing.

  Jinpa gave her a smile out of sympathy. “No one’s asking you to give up your search for the false Avatar, but maybe—”

  “Don’t call him that!”

  Her rebuke echoed through the room. Thinking about how easily Yun had been abandoned, first by Jianzhu, then by Lu and the rest of the Earth Kingdom, had set her back on edge. Jinpa avoided her gaze, lowering his head. In the awkward silence he wiggled his foot nervously. She didn’t need bending to feel the tremors through the floor.

  “I’ll send word of Master Yun’s description to every major passport-checking waystation I can,” he said. “It’s the job of such officials to match names and appearances. They’ll be paying closer attention than your average bystander.”

  It was a good idea. Better than any she’d had so far. She felt doubly bad for losing her temper. She needed to apologize for her outburst, needed to stop having such outbursts if she and Jinpa were to ever shorten the distance between them.

  But she was fearful of what lay at the end of friendships. She had been a danger to every companion she ever had. And she still couldn’t shake the memories of an Air Nomad who gave her jokes and warmth and easy smiles.

  “Make it happen,” Kyoshi said curtly.

  Jinpa nodded. Then he paused, as if wondering how to frame his next statement. “I didn’t open all of today’s letters. One of them came by special courier.”

  “Half the letters we get are by ‘special courier,’” Kyoshi scoffed. Grandiose deliveries with envelopes stamped with Urgent and For the Avatar’s Eyes Only in loud green ink were common tricks the Earth Sages tried, in order to grab her attention.

  “This one is genuinely special.” Jinpa reached into his robe and pulled out a message tube he’d been safekeeping.

  It was red.

  The sturdy metal tube was end-capped with gilded flames. In the surroundings of the staid but clearly Earth Kingdom furnishings of the apartment, the scroll case looked like an ember in a forest, threatening to catch. An army of wax seals guarded the seams.

  Jinpa passed it to her with both hands like an object of reverence. “I believe this is from Fire Lord Zoryu himself.”

  Her first direct correspondence from a head of state. Kyoshi had never met the Fire Lord, nor had he ever written her before. The only contact she’d had with the Fire Nation government was the envoy who’d visited her in Yokoya soon after the news broke of her Avatarhood. The sharply dressed minister had watched her raise a modicum of all four elements, nodding to himself as each one was checked off in turn. He’d saluted Kyoshi, politely stayed for dinner, and then left for his homeland the next morning to report the new state of affairs. She remembered appreciating the lack of grief the foreign delegate gave her in comparison to her own countrymen.

  Breaking the seals and opening the case felt like damaging a historical artifact. Kyoshi kept as much of the wax’s original shape as she could and unfurled the scroll inside.

  The writing was direct and to the point, devoid of the flourishes Earth Kingdom officials thought were necessary to curry favor with her. Lord Zoryu needed the Avatar’s assistance on a matter of national importance. If she would come visit the royal palace as his honored guest to celebrate the upcoming Festival of Szeto, a significant holiday in the Fire Islands, he could explain further in person.