Eye-to-eye with Hei-Ran.
Shoot.
“Impressive,” the former headmistress of the Royal Fire Academy for Girls said, her arms crossed behind her back. “When the spirits ask for a circus clown to intervene on their behalf, I’ll know our time together has paid off.”
Yun scrunched his face. His personal firebending tutor had a knack for finding his moments of pride and then crushing them.
“I finished my hot squat sets early,” he said. “Five hundred reps. Perfect form, the whole way.”
“And yet you chose to spend your spare time lounging on the roof instead of moving on to your next exercise or meditating until I returned. No wonder you can’t generate flame yet. You can train your body as much as you wish, but your mind remains weak.”
He noticed Hei-Ran never tore into him like this while her daughter was around. It was as if she didn’t want to diminish the Avatar’s stature in Rangi’s worshipful eyes. His image had to be carefully groomed and maintained, like the miniature trees that dotted the garden. The spirits forbid he appear human for a moment.
Yun dropped into the Fire Fist stance. He paused for corrections though it was unnecessary. Not even Hei-Ran could fault his body placement, his spinal posture, his breath control. The only thing missing was the flame.
She frowned at him, interpreting his perfection as an act of defiance, but gave him the signal to begin anyway. As he punched at the air, she walked slowly around him in a circle. Fire Fist sessions were also opportunities for lectures.
“What you do when no one is guiding you determines who you are,” Hei-Ran said. The motto was probably engraved over a door somewhere in the Fire Academy. “The results of your training are far less important than your attitude toward training.”
Yun didn’t think she truly believed that. Not for a second. She was simply picking on the parts of him that she couldn’t examine and adjust for immediate improvement. If he couldn’t firebend yet under her care, then his flaw resided deeper than in any of her previous students.
His punches became crisper, to the point where the sleeves of his cotton training uniform snapped like a whip with each motion. He was a pair of images in a scroll, two points in time repeating over and over again. Left fist. Right fist.
“Your situation isn’t unique,” Hei-Ran went on. “History is full of Avatars like you who tried to coast on their talents. You’re not the only one who wanted to take it easy.”
Yun slipped. An event rare enough to notice.
His motion took him too far outside his center of gravity, and he stumbled to his knees. Sweat stung his eyes, ran into the corner of h
is mouth.
Take it easy? Take it easy?
Was she ignoring the fact that he spent sleepless nights poring over scholarly analyses of Yangchen’s political decisions? That he’d exhaustively memorized the names of every Earth Kingdom noble, Fire Nation commander, and Water Tribe chieftain among the living and going back three generations among the dead? The forgotten texts he’d used to map the ancient sacred sites of the Air Nomads to such a degree that Kelsang was surprised about a few of them?
That’s who he was when no one was looking. Someone who dedicated his whole being to his Avatarhood. Yun wanted to make up for the lost time he’d squandered by being discovered so late. He wanted to express gratitude to Jianzhu and the entire world for giving him the greatest gift in existence. Taking it easy was the last thing on his mind.
She knows that, he thought. Hei-Ran was purposely goading him by calling him lazy. But an uncontrollable fury rose in his stomach anyway.
Yun’s fingers plowed into the smooth surface of the marble, crushing the stone into his fist as effortlessly as if it were chalk. He would never lash out against a teacher. The only way he could put up resistance against Hei-Ran was to disappoint her. To uphold her accusation that he was a wayward child.
His next punch produced a swirling dragon’s belch of “flame” worthy of the Fire Lord, each spout and flicker rendered lovingly, mockingly in white stone dust. He let it rage and dance like a real fire reacting to the eddies of the breeze, and then let the cloud of particles fall to the ground.
To cap it off, make the performance complete, he added the smirk that everyone always said reminded them of Kuruk’s. A clown needed his makeup, after all.
Hei-Ran stiffened. She looked like she was about to slap him across the face. The blast went nowhere near her, but it didn’t exactly fly away from her either.
“In the old days, masters used to maim their students for insubordination,” she said hoarsely.
Yun restrained himself from flinching. “What wonderful modern times we live in.”
A single clap pierced the air. They both looked over to see Jianzhu, watching from the sidelines.
Yun gritted his teeth hard enough to make them squeak. Normally he could sense his mentor’s footfalls through the ground and get his act together, but today . . . today was all kinds of off-balance.
Jianzhu waved Yun over like he hadn’t just caught the Avatar and his firebending master at each other’s throats. “Come,” he said to his ward. “Let’s take a break.”
The training grounds had alcoves in the walls for stashing weapons, water jars, and hollow discs made of pressed clay powder that would explode harmlessly on impact. Enough supplies to train an army of benders. Jianzhu and Yun took their tea in the largest of these storage areas, surrounded by straw target-practice dummies.