Upon hearing about the Avatar test, the families of the village had dressed their eligible children in their finest garments as if it were a festival day. But this child was wearing a threadbare coat with her elbows poking through the holes in the sleeves. Her oversized feet threatened to burst the straps of her too-small sandals. None of the local farmers were feeding or clothing her.
Kelsang, who despite his fearsome appearance was always better with children, joined them and stooped down. With a smile he transformed from an intimidating orange mountain into a giant-sized version of the stuffed toys behind him.
“Why, hello there,” he said, putting an extra layer of friendliness into his booming rumble. “What’s your name?”
The girl took a long, guarded moment, sizing them up.
“Kyoshi,” she whispered. Her eyebrows knotted as if revealing her name was a painful concession.
Kelsang took in her tattered state and avoided the subject of her parents for now. “Kyoshi, would you like a toy?”
“Are you sure she isn’t too old?” Jianzhu said. “She’s bigger than some of the teenagers.”
“Hush, you,” Kelsang said. He made a sweeping gesture at the hall festooned with relics, for Kyoshi’s benefit.
The unveiling of so many playthings at once had an entrancing effect on most of the children. But Kyoshi didn’t gasp, or smile, or move a muscle. Instead she maintained eye contact with Kelsang until he blinked.
As quick as a whip, she scampered by him, snagged an object off the floor, and ran back to where she was standing on the porch. She gauged Kelsang and Jianzhu for their response as intently as they watched her.
Kelsang glanced at Jianzhu and tilted his head at the clay turtle Kyoshi clutched to her chest. One of the four true relics. Not a single candidate had come anywhere near it today.
They should have been as excited for her as they’d been for evil little Suzu, but Jianzhu’s heart was clouded with doubt. It was hard to believe they’d be so lucky after that previous head-fake.
“Good choice,” Kelsang said. “But I’ve got a surprise for you. You can have three more! Four whole toys, to yourself! Wouldn’t you like that?”
Jianzhu sensed a shift in the girl’s stance, a tremor in her foundation that was obvious through the wooden floorboards.
Yes, she would like three more toys very much. What child wouldn’t? But in her mind, the promise of more was dangerous. A lie designed to hurt her. If she loosened her grip on the single prize she held right now, she would end up with nothing. Punished for believing in the kindness of this stranger.
Kyoshi shook her head. Her knuckles whitened around the clay turtle.
“It’s okay,” Kelsang said. “You don’t have to put that down. That’s the whole point; you can choose different . . . Hey!”
The girl took a step back, and then another, and then, before they could react, she was sprinting down the hill with the one-of-a-kind, centuries-old Avatar relic in her hands. Halfway along the street, she took a sharp turn like an experienced fugitive throwing off a pursuer and disappeared in the space between two houses.
Jianzhu closed his eyelids against the sun. The light came through them in scarlet blots. He could feel his own pulse. His mind was somewhere else right now.
Instead of Yokoya, he stood in the center of an unnamed village deep in the interior of the Earth Kingdom, newly “liberated” by Xu Ping An and the Yellow Necks. In this waking dream, the stench of rotting flesh soaked through his clothes and the cries of survivors haunted the wind. Next to him, an official messenger who’d been carried there by palanquin read from a scroll, spending minute after minute listing the Earth King’s honorifics only to end by telling Jianzhu that reinforcements from His Majesty’s army would not be coming to help.
He tried to shake free of the memory, but the past had set its jagged hooks into him. Now he sat at a negotiating table made of pure ice, and on the other side was Tulok, lord of the Fifth Nation pirates. The elderly corsair laughed his consumptive laugh at the notion he might honor his grandfather’s promise to leave the southern coastlines of the continent in peace. His convulsions spattered blood and phlegm over the accords drafted by Avatar Yangchen in her own holy hand, while his daughter-lieutenant watched by his side, her soulless gaze boring into Jianzhu like he was so much prey.
In these times, and in many others, he should have been at the right hand of the Avatar. The ultimate authority who could bend the world to their will. Instead he was alone. Facing down great beasts of land and sea, their jaws closing in, encasing the kingdom in darkness.
Kelsang yanked him back into the present with a bruising slap on the back.
“Come on,” he said. “With the way you look, people would think you just lost your nation’s most important cultural artifact.”
The Airbender’s good humor and ability to take setbacks in stride was normally a great comfort to Jianzhu, but right now he wanted to punch his friend in his stupid bearded face. He composed his own features.
“We need to go after her,” he said.
Kelsang pursed his lips. “Eh, it would feel bad to take the relic away from a child who has so little. She can hang on to it. I’ll go back to the temple and face Dorje’s wrath alone. There’s no need for you to implicate yourself.”
Jianzhu didn’t know what counted for wrath among Airbenders, but that wasn’t the issue here. “You’d ruin the Air Nomad test to make a child happy?” he said incredulously.
“It’ll find its way back to where it belongs.” Kelsang looked around and paused.
Then his smile faded, as if this little blot of a town were a harsh dose of reality that was only now taking effect.