“The operation succeeded, obviously,” Kirima said. “Once you’ve rescued one person from the bowels of a powerful Earth Kingdom official’s personal dungeon, you’ve rescued them all. You were right. Jianzhu didn’t seem to expect that you’d have us on your side. Made things a bit easier.”
“I may have helped myself to some valuables on the way out,” Wong said. His thick fingers were covered in new gold rings and jade seals, including one that allowed him direct, private correspondence with the Earth King.
Kyoshi saw no issue with that. But his knuckles were busted open and bloody. “Was there a struggle?” she asked.
“No one’s dead,” Wong said quickly. “But I had to get information the old-fashioned way from some mercenaries dressed in guards’ clothing. I may have gone a little overboard. I don’t regret it.”
He looked at Rangi in Kyoshi’s arms and gave a rare smile. “The Gravedigger took one of ours. I wasn’t going to let him take another.”
“Speaking of which, where is he?” Kirima said. “Is it . . . is it over?”
Jianzhu was dead. But Yun was alive, an uncontrollable strike of lightning. Kyoshi had no idea what had felled Rangi’s mother, nor what would happen to Yokoya in the future without its guiding sage.
And despite her best attempts to sully the position, her dedication to committing every possible outrage and act of disqualification, she was still the Avatar.
Was it over? Kyoshi found she had no answer to that question at all.
HAUNTINGS
The Southern Air Temple was unlike any place Kyoshi had ever seen. White towers extended past the tops of swirling strands of mist. Long paths wound like meditation mazes up the slopes to the earthbound entrances. Bison calves frolicked in the air, adorable, grunting little clouds of fur and horn. She didn’t understand how a people could wish to be nomads when they had a home so full of beauty and peace.
Kyoshi waited in a garden distinguished by its simplicity and open spaces rather than density and expensive details, like the mansions she was accustomed to. The breeze, unhindered by the grass and raked sand, was a crisp bite against her skin. The garden abutted a temple wall with large wooden doors. Each entrance was covered by metal tubing that spiraled into knots and terminated in a wide, open end that resembled a tsungi horn.
She was alone.
Her friends had gone their separate ways. Kirima and Wong wanted to take a break from smuggling and lie low for a while, living off the injection of loot they’d pilfered from Jianzhu’s mansion. They promised to keep in touch and show their faces once Kyoshi had established herself. They were the Avatar’s companions, after all. No doubt she could pardon them for whatever trouble they got up to.
Lao Ge declined to go with them, claiming he needed to rest his weary bones. In private, he told Kyoshi that as the Avatar and an important world leader, she was now on his watch list. He was only half joking. But she didn’t mind. She was pretty sure she could take the old man in a fight to the death now.
Hei-Ran had woken up. Rangi, fighting through each word, told Kyoshi that she needed to take her mother to the North Pole, where the best healers in the world lived. If there was a chance for her to recover fully, it would be found among the experts of the Water Tribe.
That meant saying goodbye for who knew how long. They could and would find each other again in the future. But as Lao Ge had foreboded, they wouldn’t be the same people when it happened. As much as Kyoshi wanted to stay with her, in a single, frozen pool of moments, the current carrying them forward was too strong.
Kyoshi had waited until her friends left before making her move, wanting to spare them of the chaos that would ensue after her unveiling. The Air Nomads often accepted pilgrims from the other nations, letting them stay at the monasteries and nunneries on a temporary basis. With Jianzhu no longer darkening her life, she simply joined a group of ragged travelers hiking up the mountain to the Southern Air Temple.
During the orientation for her fellow laypeople, she’d introduced herself by asking everyone to stand back. In front of the monks, she’d summoned a tornado of fire and air. The blazing, dual-element vortex proved her identity beyond a shadow of a doubt—though the fact that she’d nearly burned down a sacred tree reminded her it was still a good idea to rely on her fans for a bit longer.
As she’d expected, there was a commotion. Many of the senior abbots had known Jianzhu and met Yun. Her existence caused an overturning of the agreed-upon order. She was not the vaunted prodigy of the Earth Kingdom, the boy who’d publicly been credited with destroying the menace of the Fifth Nation pirates.
But there was a reason why she’d gone to the Airbenders instead of a sage from her homeland. The isolation and sanctity of the temple provided a measure of protection as the storm of her arrival howled outside its walls. Though she was a native Earthbender, the Air Nomads took her outrageous account of events as simple truth, told by the Avatar. They bore the anger and blustering of Earth sages who saw her as illegitimate, like she’d somehow usurped her position by being born, and relayed messages to her with calmness and grace.
The council of elders at the Southern Air Temple were not interested in profiting from her presence, nor in dictating what she should do next. They seemed content to listen to her and fulfill what requests they could.
Plus, Pengpeng enjoyed being back with a herd. Kyoshi owed the girl some time off with her own kind.
“Avatar Kyoshi!” someone shouted, br
eaking her reverie. She looked up.
High above her on a balcony, a tall young monk waved. She stepped back to give him space to land, and he vaulted over the railing. A gust of wind slowed his descent, billowing his orange-and-yellow robes. He touched down beside her as lightly as Kirima had in Madam Qiji’s, long ago.
“Apologies, Avatar,” Monk Jinpa said. “The tower stairs take forever.”
“I’ve used my fair share of architectural shortcuts,” Kyoshi said. She and Jinpa began to walk around the garden as they talked. “What’s the latest?”
Monk Jinpa had been assigned to her as a chamberlain of sorts. He was the leader of the temple’s administrative group, handling logistics and finance when the Air Nomads were forced to deal with the material world. Even monks needed someone to look after what little money ended up in their possession.
“The latest is . . . well, still a mess,” Jinpa said. “The tragedy at Yokoya is worse than we feared. Two score of the Earth Kingdom’s elite murdered by poison. And some of the household as well.”