Memories
They brought her back to Zigan. The other details were less clear.
At first Kyoshi had tried to refuse the medication thrust upon her while she writhed on a wooden bed in some dark building. She remembered the heady sweet state that Jianzhu had put her in before summoning a horror from the deep, before murdering Yun, and she resisted any attempts to cloud her awareness.
But then her hands betrayed her by sending waves of blanketing, enveloping agony into the rest of her body. Her resolve broke, and she gulped bitter concoctions from wooden bowls without questioning their source. The medicine split her mind from the pain like she’d cut off Te’s palace from the daofei. The injury was still there, gnashing its teeth, but she could watch it from a distance.
The images after that came in the acts of a play. Wong fussing over the sunlight and furniture in her room, unable to do anything else. Rangi curled up into a miserable ball. Many times there was an old Earth Kingdom woman Kyoshi didn’t recognize, her wrinkled head floating atop a cloud of voluminous skirts. She guided Kirima in her amateurish water healing by referring to medical charts, pointing out where over Kyoshi’s scorched hands the cooling water should be directed. The lack of confidence, the worry in Kirima’s face, during these sessions was endearing.
After some time had passed, she felt the most recent dose of medicine fade away without feeling the screaming need for more. Clarity infiltrated her skull again. Her thoughts were able to focus on the only person in the room now, the rest of the group taking a rest shift. The wheel had spun and landed on Lek.
“You’re here?” she said. Her tongue was fuzzy in her mouth.
“Good to see you too, you giant jerk.” He sat in a nice chair that didn’t belong. By her best guess, this room was in the abandoned part of town and had been set up as a makeshift hospital. An herbalist’s cabinet with many small drawers had been lugged in, drawing tracks of dust on the floor.
“How long as it been?”
“Only three days or so.” Lek flipped through a textbook of acupuncture points. Kyoshi had the suspicion he was looking for anatomical illustrations. “You’re recovering fast. We got lucky. Mistress Song is one of the best burn doctors in the Earth Kingdom. She lives down the street a couple of blocks.”
That must have been the old woman who popped in and out of Kyoshi’s waking dreams. “Then what’s she doing in a place like Zigan?” Skilled doctors were in high demand, more likely to be held inside the walls of manors like Te’s.
It seemed like Kyoshi would never be able to get more than a handful of sentences out without making Lek angry. “Trying to make a home,” he said, misinterpreting her surprise as disdain. “Getting caught in place while her village changes and decays around her.” He got up in a huff. “I’ll go get Rangi. You can have someone worth talking to.”
“Lek, wait.” They’d gone on too long as misguided rivals. She’d decided not to let her parents have any more hold over her life, and that started by being civil with the boy they’d chosen to spend their last years with instead of her.
He actually listened this time, crossing his arms and waiting.
Wasn’t expecting that. Kyoshi found herself at a loss for words. They had nothing to formally apologize to each other over. She ran through a list of things to say.
“You’re ... really good at throwing rocks,” she blurted out.
How articulate. If her hands weren’t mittened in bandages, she would have bit her nails. She had no choice but to invest further. “What I mean is, you saved me back at Te’s palace, and I never had the chance to thank you. You were incredible back then. How did you learn to shoot like that?”
She hoped the flattery, which was completely genuine and deserved as far as she was concerned, would make him smile. Instead his face grew old before her eyes. He tossed the book aside.
“Do you know what a gibbet is?” he said after a hefty pause.
Kyoshi shook her head.
“It’s a form of punishment the lawmen use over by the Si Wong Desert,” he said. “They hang you in a cage, high up on display as a warning to other criminals. During the dry season, it’s a death sentence. You can’t last more than a couple of days until thirst takes you.”
“Lek, I didn’t mean to dig up—”
“No,” he said gently, raising his hand. For once he wasn’t angry with her. “You should know.”
He sank back into the chair, throwing his legs over the arm-rest, and stared out the window. “I was living in the streets of Date Grove, a settlement near the Misty Palms Oasis. My brother—he wasn’t my family by blood. He was my friend. We’d sworn to each other. We were copying the tough guys and swordsmen who came in and out of town looking for work. A regular gang of two, we were, ruling our patch of gutter.”
No wonder she and Lek didn’t get along. They’d shared too much, had the same stink. “What was his name?” she asked.
“Chen,” Lek said. He bounced his foot, the chair squeaking with the motion. “One day Chen got caught stealing some rotting lychee nuts. We’d done it hundreds of times before. Sometimes in broad daylight. The townsfolk never cared. Until one day they did. Enough to put Chen in a gibbet.”
The shaking of his foot grew faster. “It might have been a new governor trying to throw his weight around. Or maybe the villagers got sick of us. They clapped him in those bars before he knew what was happening.”
“Lek,” Kyoshi said. She couldn’t offer him anything but the sound of his own name.
“I held out hope though!” he said with a little hiccup. “You see, the gibbet was old and rusty. It had a weak hinge, or so I spotted. I gathered every rock I could find, and I threw them as hard as I could at that weak point, trying to bring the cage down.
“The villagers, the abiders, they laughed at me the whole time. Especially when I missed. I could have knocked a few of their teeth out, but it never occurred to me. I couldn’t waste a single stone. After a few days, Jesa and Hark found me passed out under that gibbet. Chen must have died before they got there, because I woke up on Longyan’s back as we flew away. I couldn’t use my arm for two weeks afterward, my shoulder and elbow were so swollen.”
Lek swung his legs off the chair, unable to stay in the same position lest the memory catch up to him. “The funny thing is, Date Grove doesn’t exist anymore. It was running out of water, on its last legs while I was there. It’s been swallowed by the desert. The people of the town killed my brother to uphold the law, and it meant nothing in the end. If the law was there to protect the village, and the village didn’t survive, then what did they gain?
“I always wondered if those people felt satisfied about condemning that one boy, that one time, while they fled the sandstorm that buried their houses,” Lek said. “I always hoped Chen’s death was worth it to someone.”
Kyoshi bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.
“So anyway, Jesa and Hark saved me, I learned how to earthbend, and I swore an oath that I’d never miss a target again,” Lek said. “That’s how I’m so good at throwing rocks.”
There wasn’t a right response. The right response was undoing, going back, reweaving fate to arrive at a different outcome than him and her in this room.
Lek smiled halfheartedly at her silence. “Did you ever consider that your parents might have left you where they did so you wouldn’t have to live that kind of life?” he asked. “That maybe they were protecting you?”
The notion had crossed her mind, but she’d never given it credence until now. “The way I figure it, Jesa and Hark assumed the abiders could treat you better than they could,” Lek said as he wiped his nose. “You were their blood. Priceless. Me, I was useful. As good as the next kid with fast hands, and just as replaceable. I sufficed.”
“Lek.” She thought about what truth she could tell him in return. “I believe, as usual, you’re wrong.”
Kyoshi spotted the twitch in the corner of his mouth. “And I’m glad that if my parents couldn’t be with me, they were with you,” she added.
A long time passed before Lek sighed and got to his feet. “I’ll tell Rangi you’re up and coherent.” He paused by the door. His expression turned hesitant. “Do you think ... once things settle down, I might have a chance with her?”
Kyoshi stared at him in astonishment.
Lek held her gaze as long as he could. Then he burst into laughter.
“Your face!” he cackled. “You should see your—Oh, that has to be the face you make in your Avatar portrait! Bug-eyed and furious!”
And to think they’d shared a moment. “Go soak your head, Lek,” she snapped.
“Sure thing, sister. Or else you’ll do it for me?” He waved his hands in mockery of waterbending and made a drowning noise as he left the room.
Kyoshi’s cheeks heated in frustration. And then, like a glacier cracking, they slowly melted into a grin. She noticed what he’d called her for the first time.