Huazo took Kyoshi by the elbow and led her ostensible captor off the dock. The two of them could have been a lady and her maid, out for a morning stroll. “Do you play Pai Sho, my dear?” she asked.
Kyoshi tensed so hard Huazo could feel it in her biceps. “I take that as a no,” Huazo said. “I thought as much. You see, my dear, one of the first lessons a player learns is never to interrupt your opponent when she’s in the middle of making a fatal mistake.”
By the time the three of them returned to the Coral Urchin, Jinpa had retrieved Yingyong and was perched on top of the bison’s neck, finishing preparations for their flight. The great beast filled most of the alley next to the building. Hei-Ran waited by the door. She’d removed some of the bandages from her neck but was still clearly feeling the effects of her wound.
Upon seeing her, Huazo burst out laughing. “Oh, this keeps getting more hilarious by the second!” Her grin turned cold and wicked. “You know what this means, Hei-Ran. The Avatar’s disgraced herself and you’ve thrown your lot in with her. When my clan finally triumphs, there will be no mercy for the Sei’naka.”
Hei-Ran spoke, the injury transforming her normally graceful voice into a terrible rattling whisper. “We have no need of mercy. Only justice.”
The dreadful sound coupled with the raw determination in her voice silenced Huazo for once. Kyoshi took the matriarch of the Saowon clan by the waist, eliciting a yelp, and lifted her into the grasp of Jinpa, who swung her up into the saddle. Huazo flumped into the corner like a bolt of cloth, her fine robes and layers of petticoats pooling around her.
Kyoshi faced Hei-Ran one last time. “What if she’s right?” she muttered. There was no way the Avatar’s reputation would emerge from this affair unscathed. “By doing this I’m ruining my own honor.”
“Only because you understand the true meaning and value of the word,” Hei-Ran rasped. “Honor cannot be coveted too dearly, young lady. Sometimes it must be laid down for the good of others.”
As if to quell Kyoshi’s doubts, Rangi walked around the corner, holding baskets of supplies. The plan had been to keep her away while the Avatar took off with Huazo, but she’d come back too soon, perhaps unable to find what she needed in markets of the declining town. She dropped her burden as soon as she saw their hostage, rolls of gauze and bundles of medicinal herbs scattering at her feet.
“What is going on here?” Rangi shouted as she ran up to Kyoshi. “Have you lost your mind?”
Kyoshi took one of her fans out. As gently as she could, she earthbent Rangi into the ground, halfway up to her shins.
“What in the name of—Kyoshi, is this you?” Rangi cl
awed at the ground around her legs, trying to uproot herself. “Stop it! Let me out!”
There are places my daughter will never go, Hei-Ran had once said. There were places Kyoshi would never take Rangi. Just, honorable, kind Rangi who believed in what the Avatar stood for. Kyoshi leaned over and kissed Rangi on the top of her head. “Please forgive me,” she whispered, before climbing into Yingyong’s saddle.
“Kyoshi!” Rangi screamed, trapped where she stood. Jinpa snapped the reins and Yingyong rose into the air. “Kyoshi!”
Kyoshi clenched her teeth and wished the bison could climb faster. She needed to be high in the sky where the air was thin and she could no longer hear Rangi crying her name.
THE COMPANION
“I’m hungry,” Huazo said.
If Kyoshi could keep only one lesson she’d learned in her seventeen or so years of life, it was that your choice of traveling companions was the most important decision you could ever make. Forget the Avatars roaming the world with their bending teachers. The Avatars roamed the world with the few select people they didn’t want to strangle with their bare hands mid-journey.
“For the last time, there’s parched grain in the sack you’ve been using as a pillow,” Kyoshi said.
“And nothing else?”
“And nothing else!”
Huazo made a noise with her teeth. She opened the bag and poured some toasted millet into her palm. Then she tossed it into her mouth, crunching the grain more noisily than Kyoshi expected from a refined noblewoman.
“Chaeryu and I used to fight like this when we traveled,” she said. “He loved the idea of being close to nature, so he always packed as little as possible on our trips. If he had his way, there would have been no guards at all in our procession. Just the two of us and what we could carry, tromping through the wilderness of the islands.”
The thought of Lady Huazo and the deceased Fire Lord camping outdoors, like the Flying Opera Company and their meals of elephant rat, was so incongruous that Kyoshi’s curiosity got the better of her. “You and he really used to rough it?”
Huazo shrugged. “You look so skeptical. Any pastime feels like the most glorious adventure when you’re young and in love. Fleeing into the mountains was how we escaped the pressures of the court.”
“What happened?”
Huazo knew Kyoshi was pushing it and answered anyway. “What happened was, we were young. And merely in love. What are those compared to the pressures of clan and country? Nothing. At some point, whether it was a suggestion planted in his head by his advisors or an idea he came up with on his lonesome, Lord Chaeryu became convinced he could do better than me.”
She picked a husk out of her teeth and flicked it to the side. “It could have been about power, politics. Fortunes rise and fall quicker here in the Fire Nation than in the stagnant Earth Kingdom, Avatar. In those days the Saowon were weak. And I wasn’t well-received in the capital as the Fire Lord’s mistress. There are certain ways members of the royal family are supposed to meet their future partners and falling in love as teenagers doesn’t count.”
Huazo lay back against the saddle edge and held out her hand. “Water.”