Her feelings about the items were more complicated than he understood. Kyoshi had never opened the lock, having thrown the key into the ocean one day in a fit of spite. And she’d nearly burned the journal several times over.
Down the hall someone was moving about, making the pine floorboards squeak, so they waited until the footsteps disappeared. Kelsang sat on the bed, bowing the planks in the middle. Kyoshi leaned against her door and braced her feet like an attacking army was trying to beat it down.
“So you think I’m the Avatar because of a stupid song I made up?” she said. Somewhere between the study and her room she’d found enough backbone to say it out loud.
“I think you might be the Avatar because you pulled from thin air the exact lines of a poem Kuruk wrote a long time ago,” Kelsang said.
A poem. A poem wasn’t proof. Not like the cold hard impossibility of what Yun did.
Kelsang could tell she needed a better explanation. “What I’m about to tell you, you should keep to yourself,” he said.
“I’m listening.”
“It was about twenty years ago. Kuruk’s companions were still very close, but without any real challenges, we drifted toward our separate lives. Jianzhu started working on his family’s holdings. Hei-Ran started teaching at the Royal Fire Academy and married Rangi’s father, Junsik, in the same year. It was the happiest I’d ever seen her. As for me, that was when Abbot Dorje was alive and I was still in his good graces, so I was being groomed to take over the Southern Air Temple.”
Assigning a past to the venerable benders was a strange mix of satisfying and unnervingly voyeuristic. She was spying on things she shouldn’t be privy to. “What was Kuruk doing?”
“Being Kuruk. Traveling the world. Breaking hearts and taking names. But one day he showed up on my doorstep out of the blue, trembling like a schoolboy. He wanted me to read over a declaration of eternal love he’d composed in a poem.”
Kelsang inhaled sharply through his nose. Kyoshi kept her room dust-free and spotless. “This happened two months after Hei-Ran’s wedding and three months before Jianzhu’s father got sick,” he said. “He used a more formal meter than a sailor’s ditty, and he didn’t sing it, but its contents were exactly what you produced in the spur of the moment.”
That only weakened the argument. “You seem to remember this in overly specific detail,” Kyoshi said.
The monk furrowed his brow. “That’s because he was going to give the poem to Hei-Ran.”
Oh no. She’d hea
rd stories of the Water Avatar’s lack of propriety, but that was going several levels too far. “What happened next?”
“I . . . meddled,” Kelsang said. Kyoshi couldn’t tell if he was regretful or proud of his decision. “I berated Kuruk for his stupidity and selfishness, for trying to ruin his friend’s happy relationship, and made him destroy the confession while I watched. To this day I don’t know if I did the right thing. Hei-Ran always did love Kuruk with some piece of her heart. Maybe everything would have turned out better if they had run off with each other.”
Kyoshi quickly did the math in her head—and, yes, if that had happened, Rangi wouldn’t have been born. “You did the right thing,” she said, with more ferocity than she intended to show.
“I’ll never find out. Not long after, Kuruk met Ummi. That tragedy unfolded so fast that my memory of it starts to blur.”
She didn’t know who Ummi was, and she had no intention of asking. Matters were complicated enough. And Kuruk . . . Kyoshi was no advanced student of Avatar lore, but she was developing a pretty dim view of the man.
“I wish I could be more certain,” Kelsang said. “But if there’s anything the last two decades have taught me, it’s that life does not work out in certain, guaranteed ways. I’m not supposed to talk about this, but Yun is having problems firebending. I fear Jianzhu is becoming . . . more extreme. He’s staked so much on creating his ideal replacement for Kuruk that anytime he faces a setback, his response is to dig in and push harder.”
Kyoshi was more shaken by the revelation that Yun couldn’t firebend than anything else she’d heard so far. The image he projected was of a boy who could do the impossible. Yes, Yun was her friend, but she still had the same faith in the Avatar as anyone else. Mastering fire should have been easy for someone as clever and talented as he was.
Kelsang seemed to pick up on her fear. “Kyoshi, Yun still has the strongest case for being the Avatar. That hasn’t changed.” He worried the end of his beard. “But if the criteria we’ve lowered ourselves to are ‘improbable things that Kuruk once did,’ then we have to consider you as well.”
The monk ruminated for a moment, fitting pieces together in his head. “To be honest though, I don’t know if I’m entirely upset by this new complication. You have Avatar-worthy merits that you won’t acknowledge.”
Kyoshi scoffed. “Such as?”
He thought it over more before deciding on one. “Selfless humility.”
“That’s not true! I’m not any more—” She caught Kelsang about to laugh at her and scowled.
He got up, and her bed boards groaned with relief. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I might have been able to answer this question years ago, had I the chance to meet your parents like I did with the other village children. More information could have made the difference.”
Kyoshi scrunched her face and kicked her heel back against the trunk, releasing the sudden burst of anger that ran through her. The wooden side made a drumlike thud. “I’m sure they would have loved having a child as valuable as the Avatar,” she snapped. “A once-in-a-generation prize.”
Kelsang smiled at her gently. “They would have been proud of their daughter no matter what,” he said. “I know I am.”
Normally Kyoshi would have felt comforted by the acknowledgment that she’d become as much of a fixture in Kelsang’s life as he had in hers. But if he walked out her door and told Jianzhu what happened, it could tear apart the little corner of the world the two of them had marked off for themselves. Didn’t Kelsang see that? Wasn’t he worried?