The Shadow of Kyoshi (Avatar, The Last Airbender)

Kyoshi slammed her hands against the desk, toppling the badges. She’d slipped yet again into the mindset of her deceased “benefactor.” She’d heard his words in her own voice, the two of them speaking with as much unity as the Avatars were supposed to be able to do with their past lives.

She opened a drawer and pulled out a hand towel that had been resting in a small bowl of special liniment. Kyoshi dragged the moistened cloth hard down the side of her face, trying to wipe away the deeper stains along with her makeup.

A shudder of revulsion ran up Kyoshi’s back when she thought of how she’d smothered Li with the exact same technique Jianzhu had once used on her. She should have abhorred it, knowing exactly what it felt like to die slowly as your lungs caved in on themselves. In dealing with Li, she’d slipped as easily into Jianzhu’s skin as she had her clothes.

The ones that had also been a gift from him.

She slammed her fist on the desk again and heard part of the joinery crack. It felt like every step she took as the Avatar was in the wrong direction. Kelsang would never have entertained violence as policy. He would have worked to improve the fortunes of the Loongkau and Lower Ring residents so they could push back against Triad domination and Middle Ring exploitation. He would have acted as their voice.

That was what Kyoshi had to do. In essence, it was what Kelsang had done for her, the abandoned child he found in Yokoya. It was the right course of action and would be the most effective in the long run.

It would just take time. A very . . . very long time.

A knock came from outside. “Come in,” she said.

A young man wearing the billowing orange and yellow robes of an Air Nomad opened the door. “Are you all right, Avatar Kyoshi?” Monk Jinpa said. “I heard a loud noise and—aagh!”

The stack of letters he was holding went flying into the air. Kyoshi whipped her hand around and around in a circle of air-bending, corralling the papers with a miniature tornado. Jinpa recovered from his surprise and caught the pile of letters from the bottom of the vortex up, re-creating the stack, but with the corners sticking out at all angles.

“Apologies, Avatar,” he said when he’d secured her correspondence once more. “I was surprised by your, uh . . .” He gestured at his own face in lieu of pointing rudely at hers.

She hadn’t finished wiping off the rest of her makeup. She probably looked like a doctor’s illustration of a skull with the skin halfway stripped. Kyoshi grabbed the towel to finish the job. “Don’t worry about it,” she said as she worked the cloth along the corner of her eye, taking care not to get the compound that would dissolve the paint into it.

In defiance of her order, Jinpa still looked worried. “You’re also bleeding from your neck.”

Yes. Right. With her free hand she opened a fan and aimed the leaf at the garrote wound around her throat. The shards of glass in her skin plucked themselves out under the force of her earthbending and balled into a floating clump that dropped to the floor when she switched her focus to a nearby pitcher.

A tiny wriggle of water snaked out of the vessel and wrapped itself around Kyoshi’s neck. It was cool and soothing against the itch of the wound, and she could feel her skin knitting together. Jinpa watched her heal herself, both worried and horrified by the crudeness of her self-administered first aid.

“Isn’t healing water supposed to glow?” he asked.

“I’ve never managed it.” The mansion’s libraries in Yokoya were full of extensive tomes about the medical uses of water-bending, but Kyoshi lacked time and a proper teacher. She’d read through as many of the texts as she could anyway, and the wounds she’d been accumulating as the Avatar gave her plenty of opportunities to practice on herself.

She’d made a vow. No matter how limited her knowledge was, or how flawed her technique, she would never again watch someone she cared about slip away in front of her while she did nothing.

She tossed the water back in the pitcher and ran a finger over the marks left behind on her neck. At this rate I’m going to look like Auntie Mui’s latest patchwork quilt. She could hide the scar with more makeup or a higher collar. But the mottled, healed burns on her hands, courtesy of Xu Ping An, reminded her she was running out of body parts to injure and cover up. “What are the updates?”

Jinpa took a seat and pulled out one of the many letters addressed to the Avatar that he’d already broken the seals on. He was allowed the privilege. During her first visit to the Southern Air Temple as the Avatar, he had

helped her constantly with planning and communication, to the point where his elders shrugged and officially assigned him to Kyoshi as her secretary. Without his assistance, she would have been overwhelmed to the point of shutting down.

“Governor Te humbly submits a report that Zigan Village has surpassed its former peak population and can now boast of a new school and herbal clinic, both of which are free of charge to the poorest townsfolk,” Jinpa read aloud. “Huh. The Te family’s not known for generosity. I wonder what’s gotten into young Sihung recently.”

What indeed. Te Sihung had been the first official of the Earth Kingdom to learn Kyoshi was the Avatar, right after she’d decided not to assassinate him during a daofei raid on his house. After her public revealing, she’d made it clear to Te that the life debt he owed her still applied and she’d continue to watch him. Knowing his power didn’t make him immune to consequences seemed to have bolstered both his compassion and skill as governor.

Good news was hard to come by these days. “What’s next?” she asked Jinpa, hoping for more.

His lips pulled to the side. “The rest of the letters are audience requests from nobles you’ve already rejected or ignored.”

“All of them?” She eyed the tall stack of papers and frowned. Jinpa shrugged. “You reject and ignore a lot of nobles. Earth Kingdom folk are nothing if not persistent.”

Kyoshi fought the urge to set the whole pile of correspondence ablaze. She didn’t have to read every message to know each one was a demand for the Avatar’s favorable judgment on matters of business, politics, and money.

She’d learned after the first few times. Kyoshi would accept an innocuous invitation to attend a banquet, preside over a spiritual ceremony, bless a new canal or a bridge. Inevitably, her host, the governor or the largest landowner—oftentimes the same person—would corner her into a side conversation and beg for assistance in material affairs they would never have bothered Kuruk or Great Yangchen with. But Kyoshi was one of their own, wasn’t she? She understood how business was done in the Earth Kingdom.

She did. It didn’t mean she liked it. Sages who’d vehemently denied her Avatarhood despite Jianzhu’s last will and testament, nobles who claimed trickery after watching her twirl water and earth above her head with their own eyes, suddenly became true believers when they thought she could aid them in biting off greater mouthfuls of wealth and power in the endless hierarchies of the Earth Kingdom. The Avatar could settle where a provincial border lay, and which governor got to claim taxes from a rich cropland. The Avatar could speed a trade fleet along its route safely, protecting the lives of the sailors, but ultimately ensuring a massive profit for its merchant backers. Couldn’t she?

Kyoshi soon learned to ignore such requests and focus on what she could wreak with her own hands. “Those messages can wait,” she said. She secretly hoped the stack of correspondence would blow away into dust if she sounded cold and authoritative enough.