The Shadow of Kyoshi (Avatar, The Last Airbender)

Jinpa gave her a gentle but chiding look. “Avatar . . . if I may be permitted, you have to participate in high society to some extent. You can’t keep putting off the leadership of the Earth Kingdom forever.”

The Earth Kingdom doesn’t have leadership, Kyoshi thought. I helped kill the closest thing to a leader it had.

“The duties of your role extend beyond being a powerful bender,” he went on. “You’ve scrubbed the countryside of the largest bandit groups, and it’s impressive you were able to track down this Mok person and keep him from hurting more innocent people. But at this point you’re running yourself ragged simply so you can beat up the same bad men you’ve already beaten up in the past. Is scraping the bottom of the criminal barrel truly the most good you could do for the Four Nations? Not to mention the risks it poses to your personal safety.”

“It’s what I know.” And it’s the only way I can be sure what I’m doing is right.

They’d had this conversation before, many times, but Jinpa never grew tired of reminding her. Unlike the other Air Nomads she’d met, who prized detachment from the world, he was constantly pushing her to engage in a higher level of discourse with the very people who sought to exploit her. He wasn’t much older than Kyoshi, slightly on the other side of twenty years, so it was strange when he spoke like a political tutor trying to guide a wayward pupil.

“At some point, you will have to stand upon a greater stage,” Jinpa said. “The Avatar creates ripples in the world, whether they mean to or not.”

“Is that a saying among your mysterious friends whom you won’t tell me about?” she retorted.

He merely shrugged at her clumsy attempt to change the subject. That was the other frustrating thing about Jinpa. He wouldn’t trade jabs with her like Kirima or Wong. He showed her too much respect, a problem her old companions never had, even after learning she was the Avatar.

She wondered what would happen if the monk ever met the remaining members of the Flying Opera Company. She could imagine Jinpa offering them assistance in escaping the daofei lifestyle. They probably would have tried to steal his bison.

There was only one thing that could get her to talk to the sages. “None of the letters mentioned—”

“Master Yun? No, unfortunately. He has yet to turn up.”

Kyoshi exhaled, a long hiss through her teeth. During the period where the world thought Yun was the Avatar, he had focused a great deal of effort on treating with the Earth Kingdom’s elite. Which meant they were the only people who knew his face. Without a lead from someone who recognized him, finding one man in the entirety of the Earth Kingdom was like looking for a single pebble in a gravel pit. “Let’s try bumping up the reward again.”

“I don’t know if that’ll help,” Jinpa said. “The prominent figures of the Earth Kingdom lost a lot of face as a result of Master Yun’s misidentification. If I were them, I wouldn’t want him to resurface. I would want to pretend the whole episode never happened. I hear Lu Beifong forbids anyone in his household, guests included, to speak of Jianzhu or his disciple.”

Jinpa had a strange amount of access to political gossip for a simple Air Nomad, but his observations were usually correct. That blasted pricklethorn Lu. As Jianzhu’s backer, the Beifong patriarch was just as guilty in Kyoshi’s eyes for the mistake in identifying the Avatar, and he continued to cast off any further responsibility in the matter.

She’d begged Lu Beifong in person to help her find Yun, expecting the old man to have some semblance of grandfatherly attachment to him. Instead Lu coldly revealed that the letter Jianzhu had sent to sages across the Earth Kingdom proclaiming Kyoshi to be the Avatar also said Yun was dead. Between Jianzhu’s final words and Kyoshi’s confused testimony of the incident in Qinchao, Lu chose to believe what was most convenient for him. As far as he was concerned, the scandal had resolved itself. A victory for neutral jing.

Jinpa gave her a smile out of sympathy. “No one’s asking you to give up your search for the false Avatar, but maybe—”

“Don’t call him that!”

Her rebuke echoed through the room. Thinking about how easily Yun had been abandoned, first by Jianzhu, then by Lu and the rest of the Earth Kingdom, had set her back on edge. Jinpa avoided her gaze, lowering his head. In the awkward silence he wiggled his foot nervously. She didn’t need bending to feel the tremors through the floor.

“I’ll send word of Master Yun’s description to every major passport-checking waystation I can,” he said. “It’s the job of such officials to match names and appearances. They’ll be paying closer attention than your average bystander.”

It was a good idea. Better than any she’d had so far. She felt doubly bad for losing her temper. She needed to apologize for her outburst, needed to stop having such outbursts if she and Jinpa were to ever shorten the distance between them.

But she was fearful of what lay at the end of friendships. She had been a danger to every companion she ever had. And she still couldn’t shake the memories of an Air Nomad who gave her jokes and warmth and easy smi

les.

“Make it happen,” Kyoshi said curtly.

Jinpa nodded. Then he paused, as if wondering how to frame his next statement. “I didn’t open all of today’s letters. One of them came by special courier.”

“Half the letters we get are by ‘special courier,’” Kyoshi scoffed. Grandiose deliveries with envelopes stamped with Urgent and For the Avatar’s Eyes Only in loud green ink were common tricks the Earth Sages tried, in order to grab her attention.

“This one is genuinely special.” Jinpa reached into his robe and pulled out a message tube he’d been safekeeping.

It was red.

The sturdy metal tube was end-capped with gilded flames. In the surroundings of the staid but clearly Earth Kingdom furnishings of the apartment, the scroll case looked like an ember in a forest, threatening to catch. An army of wax seals guarded the seams.

Jinpa passed it to her with both hands like an object of reverence. “I believe this is from Fire Lord Zoryu himself.”

Her first direct correspondence from a head of state. Kyoshi had never met the Fire Lord, nor had he ever written her before. The only contact she’d had with the Fire Nation government was the envoy who’d visited her in Yokoya soon after the news broke of her Avatarhood. The sharply dressed minister had watched her raise a modicum of all four elements, nodding to himself as each one was checked off in turn. He’d saluted Kyoshi, politely stayed for dinner, and then left for his homeland the next morning to report the new state of affairs. She remembered appreciating the lack of grief the foreign delegate gave her in comparison to her own countrymen.