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 circumstance, 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.
Just Rangi.
Kyoshi tried to shout and scream, but the poison had its strongest grip on her neck, where it had first entered her body. Her lungs forced air out, but her voicebox added no sound. She could see Lek. His face turned red and puffy. He clutched at his swelling throat. He was having some kind of reaction. He couldn’t breathe.
Tears streamed down Kyoshi’s face as she lay inches away, helpless, unable to save another boy from Jianzhu’s venoms. The dust turned muddy under her eyes.
It was nearly half an hour before she could crawl over to Lek and check for a heartbeat that wasn’t there.
She arrived at their building at the same time as Lao Ge, Wong, and Kirima. They saw Lek’s body in her arms and reeled like they’d been struck. Wong crumpled to the ground and began to sob, his low moans shaking the earth. Lao Ge closed his eyes and whispered a blessing over and over without stopping.
Kirima was as pale as the moon. She held something out to Kyoshi, her hand trembling uncontrollably.
“This was stuck on a post in the town square,” she said, her voice raw and bleeding.
It was a note. Avatar. Come find me in Qinchao Village, alone.
Pinned to the paper it was written on was a silky black topknot of hair, crudely severed from its owner’s head.