The Shadow of Kyoshi (Avatar, The Last Airbender)

“Lieutenant,” Hei-Ran said. “Control yourself.”

“No, Mother, I won’t.” Her choice of words was a retort to Hei-Ran’s use of rank. “I’m not going to sit here calmly and listen to you entertain Kyoshi’s wild guesses about spirits instead of coming up with a defensive plan for your own safety. I know you both feel terrible for what happened to Yun. I do too. But after what we all saw, it would be utterly foolish to treat him like anything but the danger he is.”

There was only a limited amount of room on the balcony for Rangi to pace back and forth, but she made do. “I mean, he shouldn’t have been capable of half the things he did last night. He infiltrated the capital, murdered Lu, and single-handedly foiled the entire security force of the royal palace. It doesn’t make sense. Yun is a diplomat and a talented Earthbender, not some kind of trained killer.”

“He is,” Hei-Ran said. “He is a trained killer.”

Rangi was caught in the middle of launching the next volley of her tirade, her finger crooked to the sky. “What?”

As methodically as if she were donning armor before a battle, Hei-Ran readied herself. She took several deep, controlled breaths. And then she told Kyoshi and Rangi a story about Yun they had never heard before.

Immediately after finding Yun in Makapu, Jianzhu started to fret. Daofei and corrupt politicians alike had profited greatly from the absence of the Avatar. Kuruk’s early death showed how disastrous it could be for the world if the cycle were “renewed” at the wrong time. Yun needed to be able to defend himself from attempts on his life.

His physical safety wasn’t Jianzhu’s only concern. The new Avatar’s legitimacy would be attacked with every underhanded trick in the book. Yun and his allies would inevitably suffer from slander, extortion, theft of secrets. He would have to maintain constant vigilance against attempts to destabilize his era of Avatarhood.

Yun’s enemies would come after him as spies, sowers of chaos, and assassins. And in Jianzhu’s eyes, there was no better protection than to make sure Yun possessed those same skills himself.

That had been Master Amak’s role in Yokoya, Hei-Ran explained. The mysterious Waterbender had perfected his craft in the dark corridors of Ba Sing Se, where smiling princes attended feasts together by day and waged hidden wars of secrets and daggers against each other by night. Master Amak had not only trained Yun to resist poison, but also taught him how to use it. Atuat’s brother had instructed him how to eliminate enemies with knife and bare hand. The lessons had been limited to theory. But like in every subject save firebending, Yun had shown to be a talented student.

Kyoshi tried to reconcile what she was hearing with the boy she knew. Yun had abhorred Jianzhu’s butchering of the Yellow Necks, but he’d also mentioned how much he enjoyed learning from Master Amak. Jianzhu must have been slowly working on moving Yun from the abstract to the practical. He wanted another Gravedigger and was willing to be patient to get it.

“I turned a blind eye because I thought it would be best for the Avatar’s protection in the long run,” Hei-Ran said. I am so sorry for what I allowed him to do to Yun, she’d told Kyoshi. She hadn’t been referring to bending training.

Rangi was quiet. And she was cold. No heat emanated from her body. Her face was like ice covering a river, frozen to a thickness that masked what flowed underneath.

She despised assassins. When pushed to the brink, Rangi had allowed the Avatar to work with outlaws, but there was no world where she compromised her morals and her honor like her mother had.

“A spirit didn’t turn Yun into a monster,” she whispered to Hei-Ran. “You did.”

“I’m sorry—”

Rangi grabbed the table by its corners. She rose to her feet, her back muscles flexing as she lifted the heavy piece of furniture, dishes and cups sliding over the lacquered surface, and hurled the entire setting over the edge of the balcony.

The morning air was heavy before the crash. By the time the table hit the ground below, and the sounds of wood groaning and porcelain splashing like raindrops reached them, Rangi was already leaving. Hei-Ran made no move to stop her daughter. She sat across from Kyoshi as if this were a normal occurrence, a standard outburst.

With nothing between their chairs to occupy the space, Kyoshi felt overexposed. “Is anyone hurt?” Hei-Ran asked calmly. Kyoshi glanced over the railing and shook her head.

Hei-Ran pointed her chin at the door Rangi had vanished through. “You should go talk to her. You might be the only person who can right now.”

“I need you to confirm something first.”

Hei-Ran read the tightness in the Avatar’s frown. “Kelsang didn’t know. We took great pains to conceal such matters from him. He would have confronted the rest of us earlier had he found out.”

Kyoshi was grateful to hear it. But in no mood to forgive. “And then maybe the rest of you would have killed him sooner too.”

She didn’t bother looking for a reaction in the older woman’s eyes, to see if she’d successfully wounded the last living member of Avatar Kuruk’s companions. She got up to go look for Rangi.

Kyoshi ran into Jinpa first. He already knew a delicate situation was afoot.

“Mistress Rangi is in the stables,” he said. “I was grooming Yingyong when she came in and offered to assist. She, uh, seemed like she needed solitude, so I let her take over.”

“She told you to get lost, didn’t she?”

Jinpa shrugged. “I negative jinged it out of there before my robes started smoking. Just make sure she doesn’t yank my bison’s fur out by brushing too hard.”

Kyoshi followed his directions down the halls of the palace until she came to another garden-facing exit. It revealed a freestanding longhouse that smelled of fresh-cut hay. A gaggle of stablehands idled at a distance from the building, looking confused about what to do with their hands. Kyoshi knew they’d been ordered away. Where they stood marked the edge of Rangi’s blast radius.

She went to the largest pen and saw Yingyong, his fluffy bulk taking up most of the room inside. His saddle hung off his back at an angle and only one side of his fur lay smooth and flat. He grunted at Kyoshi as if to ask, Is someone going to finish the job?