Desperate Measures
If she needed evidence things were different now, the food was enough.
On days when Kyoshi had time to eat breakfast, she usually helped herself to a bowl of jook from the communal pot bubbling away in the kitchen, garnished with whatever dried-out scraps from the upstairs tables Auntie Mui deemed fit to save from the previous night. Today, another servant surprised her outside her door and led her to one of the dining halls reserved for guests.
The room she sat in by herself was so big and empty that drinking her tea made an echo. The grand zitan table held such an array of boiled, salted, and fried delicacies that she thought the place setting for one had to be a mistake.
It was not. Without knowing which of the children under his roof was the Avatar, Jianzhu seemed to have decreed that Kyoshi was to be fed like a noble until he figured it out. She tried to accommodate his generosity, but a small bite of each artfully arranged dish was all she could manage with her rice. Including, she noted with chagrin, the spicy pickled kelp she’d carried to the house herself, now nestled in a lacquered saucer.
Her waiter checked back in. “Is Mistress finished?” she asked with a bowed head.
“Rin, I went to your birthday party,” Kyoshi said. “I chipped in for that comb you’re wearing.”
The girl shrugged. “You’re not to show up for work anymore. Master Jianzhu wants you by the training grounds in an hour.”
“But what am I supposed to do until then?”
“Whatever Mistress wishes.”
Kyoshi staggered out of the dining room like she’d taken a blow to the head. Leisure? What kind of animal was that?
She didn’t want anyone to see her up and about the house. Oh, there’s Kyoshi, taking in the flowers. There she goes now, pondering the new calligraphy from the Air Temple. The prospect of being on display horrified her. In lieu of a better option, she ran to the small library where she’d spoken to Kelsang and latched the door behind her. She hid there, alone with her dread, until the appointed time came.
Kyoshi was as unfamiliar with the flat stone expanse of the training ground as she would have been with the caldera of a Fire Nation volcano. Her duties never brought her here. Jianzhu waited in the middle of the courtyard for her, a scarecrow monitoring a field.
“Don’t bother with that anymore,” he said when she bowed deeply like a servant. “Come with me.”
He led her into one of the side rooms, a supply closet that had been hastily emptied of its contents. Straw dummies and earthbending discs had been tossed without care outside, irking her sense of organization. Inside, Hei-Ran waited for them.
“Kyoshi,” she said with a warm smile. “Thank you for humoring us. I know it’s been a trying past couple of days for you.”
Kyoshi felt like there would be no end to the awkwardness. Despite her friendship with Rangi, she and the headmistress were more distant than she and Jianzhu. Hei-Ran was acting much friendlier than she’d expected. But Kyoshi looked down and noticed that the woman had been pacing trails in the dusty floor. Rangi often did that when she was upset.
“I’ll help in any way I can,” Kyoshi said, her throat feeling suddenly parched. Her tonsils stuck to the back of her tongue, causing her words to catch in her mouth.
“Sorry, that’s my doing,” Hei-Ran said with a gentle laugh. “I dried the air out in this room for an exercise. Please, sit.”
There were two silk cushions borrowed from the meditation chamber on the floor. Kyoshi was horrified at the finery thrown on the dirty ground, but she took a position across from Hei-Ran anyway. She was keenly aware of Jianzhu standing behind her, watching like a bird of prey.
“We perform this test on newborns in the Fire Nation to see if they’re capable of firebending,” Hei-Ran said. “We have to know about our children quick, as you can imagine, or else they risk burning the neighborhood down.”
It was a joke, but it made Kyoshi more nervous. “What do I have to do?”
“Very little.” Hei-Ran reached into a pouch and pulled out what appeared to be a ball of tinder. “This is shredded birch bark and cotton mixed with some special oils.” She fluffed the material with her fingers until it was wispy and cloudlike. “You just need to breathe and feel your inner heat. If the tinder lights, you’re a Firebender.”
And therefore the Avatar. “You’re certain this will work?”
Hei-Ran raised an eyebrow. “Newborns, Kyoshi. It’s essentially impossible for a true Firebender not to make some indication with this method. Now hush. I need to get a little closer to you.”
She held the tinder puff under Kyoshi’s nose as if she was trying to revive her with smelling salts. “Relax and breathe, Kyoshi. Don’t put effort into it. Your natural fire, your source of life, is enough. Breathe.”
Kyoshi tried to do as she was told. She could feel strands of cotton tickling her lips. She took in deep lungfuls of air, over and over.
“I’ll help you along,” Hei-Ran said after two minutes without results. The air around them grew hotter, much hotter. Trickles of sweat ran down Kyoshi’s face, drying out before they reached her chin. She was desperately thirsty again.
“Just a tiny spark.” Hei-Ran sounded like she was pleading now. “I’ve done most of the work. Let loose. The slightest push. That’s all I’m asking for. Your thumb on the scale.”
Kyoshi tried for ten more minutes straight before she collapsed forward, coughing and hacking. Hei-Ran crumpled the tinder in her fist. A puff of smoke drifted from between her fingers.
“It takes children, babies, a few seconds at most under these conditions,” she said to Jianzhu. Her voice was unreadable.
Kyoshi looked up at the two masters. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Didn’t Yun already pass this test?”
Jianzhu didn’t answer. He turned around and stormed out of the room, slamming his fist into the frame as he left. The earthbending discs stacked by the door exploded into dust.
Someone had seen Kyoshi coming and going from her new hiding place in the secondary library and ratted her out. There was no other way Yun would have found her, curled up beside a medicine chest that had over a hundred little drawers, each carved with the name of a different herb or tincture.
Yun sat down on the floor across from her, leaning his back against the wall. He scanned over the labels next to her head. “It feels like way too many of these are cures for baldness,” he said.
Despite herself, Kyoshi snorted.
Yun tugged on a strand of his own brown hair, perhaps thinking ahead to the day he’d have to join the Air Nomads for airbending training at the Northern or Southern Temple. They wouldn’t force him to shave it off, but Kyoshi knew he liked to honor other people’s traditions. And he’d still be good-looking anyway.
But then, maybe he would never get the chance, Kyoshi thought miserably. Maybe it would be stolen from him by a petty thief who’d burrowed into his house under the guise of being his friend.
He seemed to pick up on her swell of self-hatred. “Kyoshi, I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you never meant for this to happen.”
“Rangi doesn’t.” Saying it out loud made her feel ungrateful for his forgiveness. She could count on Yun’s easygoing nature and inability to hold a grudge. But if Rangi truly believed Kyoshi had wronged them, then there was no hope.
It was clear. Kyoshi needed both of them in order to feel whole. She wanted her paired set of friends put back into its original place, before the earthquake had knocked everything off the shelf. This state of not-knowing they were trapped in was a plane of spiritual punishment, separating them from their old lives like a sheet of ice over a lake.
“Rangi’ll come around,” Yun said. “She’s a person of faith, you know? A true believer. It’s hard for someone like her to deal with uncertainty. You have to be a little patient with her.” He caught himself and twisted his lips.
“What is it?” Kyoshi said.
“Nothing, I was just acting like Sifu for a second there.” The smile faded from his face. Yun plunked the back of his head against the wall at the thought of Jianzhu. “It’s him I’m really worried about.”
That seemed backward. The student anxious about the well-being of the teacher.
“I didn’t realize it when I first met Sifu, but determining who should train the Avatar and how is a cutthroat business,” Yun said. “You’d think the masters of the world are these benevolent, selfless old men and women. But it turns out that some of them simply want to use the Avatar’s power and reputation to profit themselves.”
Jianzhu had told her something similar in the infirmary, that whoever taught the Avatar held immense influence over the world. Kyoshi regretted what she’d said to Kelsang the day before. He might have had reasons for wanting her to be the Avatar, but material gain was certainly not one of them.
“It’s especially bad in the Earth Kingdom,” Yun went on. “We call the prominent elders ‘sages,’ but they’re not true spiritual leaders like in the Fire Nation. They’re more like powerful officials, with all the politicking they do.”
He held up his hands, comparing his clean one to the one stained with ink during the battle with Tagaka. The color still hadn’t faded from his skin.
“But that’s partly why Sifu and I have been working so hard,” he said. “The more good we do for the Four Nations, the less chance that another sage tries to take me away from him. I don’t think I could handle having a different master. They would never be as wise or as dedicated as Sifu.”
Kyoshi looked at his darkened hand and wondered if she couldn’t hold him down and scrub the ink off his skin. “What would happen to the work you’ve done if—if—” She couldn’t finish the thought out loud. If it wasn’t you? If it was me?
Yun took a deep, agonized breath. “I think nearly every treaty and peace agreement Sifu and I brokered would become null and void. I’ve made so many unwritten judgments too. If people found out that it wasn’t the Avatar who’d presided over their dispute, and only some street urchin from Makapu, they would never abide by the outcome.”
Superb, Kyoshi thought. She could be responsible for the breakdown of law and order around the world and the separation of Yun from his teacher.
That was the worst prospect of all. For as long as she’d known him, Yun had staunchly refused to talk about his blood relations. But the reverent way he looked at Jianzhu, despite any arguments or bouts of harsh discipline, made it very clear: He had no one else. Jianzhu was both his mentor and his family.
Kyoshi knew what it was like to founder alone in the dark, grasping for edges that were too far away, without a mother or father to extend a hand and pull you to safety. The pain of having no value to anyone, nothing to trade for food or warmth or a loving embrace. Maybe that was why she and Yun got along so well.
Where they differed, though, was how long they wallowed in sadness. Yun sniffed the air and his gaze wandered until it landed on a porcelain bowl resting on top of the chest. It was filled with dried flower petals and cedar shavings.
“Are those ... fire lilies?” he said, a wide, knowing grin spreading across his face.
Kyoshi flushed beet red. “Stop it,” she said.
“That’s right,” Yun said. “The Ember Island tourism minister brought a bunch when he visited two weeks ago. I can’t believe you simply shred the flowers once they dry out. I guess nothing goes to waste in this house.”
“Knock it off,” Kyoshi snapped. But it was too hard keeping the corners of her lips from curling upward.
“Knock what off?” he said, enjoying her reaction. “I’m just commenting on a fragrance I’ve come to particularly enjoy.”
It was an inside reference that only the two of them shared. Rangi didn’t know. She hadn’t been there in the gifting room eight months ago while Kyoshi arranged a vast quantity of fire lilies sent by an admiral in the Fire Navy, one of Hei-Ran’s friends.
Yun had spent the afternoon watching Kyoshi work. Against every scrap of her better judgment, she’d allowed him to lie down on the floor and rest his head in her lap while she plucked deformed leaves and trimmed stems to the right length. Had anyone caught the two of them like that, there would have been a scandal that not even the Avatar could have recovered from.
That day, entranced by Yun’s upside-down features dappled with the flower petals she’d teasingly sprinkled over his face, she’d almost leaned down and kissed him. And he knew it. Because he’d almost reached up and kissed her.
They never spoke of it afterward, the shared impulse that had nearly crashed both of their carriages. It was too ... well, they each had their duties was a good way to put it. That moment did not fit anywhere among their responsibilities.
But since then, whenever the two of them were in the presence of fire lilies, Yun’s eyes would dart toward the flowers repeatedly until he was sure Kyoshi noticed. She would try unsuccessfully to keep a straight face, the heat coloring her neck, and he’d sigh as if to mourn what could have been.
Today was no different. With a wistful blush on his own cheeks, Yun stared her down until her defenses broke and she let out a giggle through her nose.
“There’s that beautiful smile,” he said. He pressed his heels into the floor, sliding up against the wall, and straightened his rumpled shirt. “Kyoshi, trust me when I say this: If it turns out not to be me, I’ll be glad it’s you.”
He might have been the one person in the world who thought so. Kyoshi had to marvel at his forbearance. Her fears were unfounded—Yun could still look at her and see a friend instead of a usurper. She should have believed in him more.
“We’re late,” Yun said. “I was supposed to find you and bring you to Sifu. He said he has something fun planned for us this afternoon.”
“I can’t,” she said, out of ingrained habit. “I have work—”
He raised his brows at her. “No offense, Kyoshi, but I think you’ve pretty much been fired. Now get up off that maybe-Avatar rear of yours. We’re going on a trip.”