Kyoshi shambled down the halls of the palace. It felt like she was decaying with each step, flakes of her peeling away to reveal hollowness underneath. She was a layer of dried paint surrounding nothing.
She heard an excited titter. A young noble couple rushed past them, paying no heed to the Avatar, the woman holding her skirt so it wouldn’t drag, her escort trying to plaster over his grin with solemnness. The briefest whisper passed between them: “. . . he’s done for . . .”
They appeared to be headin
g in the same direction as Kyoshi. As she rounded the corner, the hall filled with more members of the court, murmuring to each other. She filed in behind them, carried along by the tide, until she reached a large room they hadn’t been to before, a theater with a stage running along one wall. It must have been built so the royal family could take in plays without having to rub shoulders with the residents of Caldera City, or worse, Harbor City.
It was standing room only. Kyoshi lingered near the back. Like with any performance, there was an agonizing wait until the first actor emerged. The crowd hushed when Zoryu walked out onstage, looking haggard and resigned. A wispy mustache had formed over his upper lip like mold on bread.
“My friends,” he said. “It has been a difficult time for our great nation. Instead of peace and abundance, this year’s Festival of Szeto has brought a horrendous attack upon the sanctity of the palace, the bodies of our court, and the Fire Nation’s history itself. The ruination of the Fire Avatar gallery is a grievous wound to my heart. It will never heal.”
Zoryu was much better at speaking alone, from an elevated position, than he was at mingling in a crowd where he could be overshadowed by his political foes. The slouch in his shoulders was less pronounced, and there was a flinty look in his eye.
“I told myself that if I couldn’t avenge this slight upon our honor, I had no right to call myself Fire Lord,” he said. “That much still holds true.”
His audience ruffled like stalks of wheat in the breeze. This was no mere update.
About a quarter of the nobles packed into this room were Saowon. They smirked in delight at their victory. The men and women Kyoshi could identify as Keohso numbered fewer than half the Saowon. Rage warped their faces to the point she thought their noses would start bleeding. There was no need for flower symbols to tell who belonged to which clan.
The nobles who weren’t part of one faction or the other in this rivalry were already darting their eyes around, wondering if they’d sufficiently hedged their bets in favor of the Saowon. Little rings of space began forming around the furious Keohso as people sought more distance from them.
Zoryu held his hand up. “Let it be known that the spirits of the islands have been watching my reign since its inception, judging my fitness to be Fire Lord. With the attack upon the palace, they put me to the final test.” He swept his gaze over the room. “And I have passed it. I have found the perpetrator. Bring him out please.”
The declaration was so sudden that Kyoshi chuckled. The perpetrator was Yun. Which meant Zoryu found Yun.
Zoryu had found Yun?
Her laughter iced over in her throat, solidifying into barbs and cutting edges. Two palace guards brought out their blindfolded captive, hunched over from the weight of his iron shackles. Kyoshi could only see the top of his tousled brown hair as he was made to kneel next to Zoryu.
It was happening too fast. The stage felt disjointed in time from the audience and Kyoshi, as if she were stuck in the same trance as her session with Nyahitha on the mountain. She raised her arm toward Yun and opened her mouth to shout, but Zoryu, working on a faster rhythm, launched into the next stage of his speech.
“This man has confessed to crimes against the Fire Nation, for which he will be executed,” he said. Kyoshi shouldn’t have been so shocked to hear him mention capital punishment. But in a prolonged fit of naïvety, she hadn’t considered at all that finding Yun would mean delivering him to a death sentence.
Zoryu grabbed Yun by the head and tilted his face toward the light in the room. It was a meaningful gesture intended to give the audience a better look, both at the captive and Zoryu’s dominance over him. “Have you anything to say in your defense, you despicable beast?”
“No.” Yun’s features were smudged heavily with dirt. He wore the same robes he’d appeared in at the party. “I infiltrated the palace. I assaulted the members of the court. I vandalized the royal gallery. I killed Chancellor Dairin.”
Yun took a deep breath. “And I did it at all the behest of the Saowon clan!”
A rumble of shock passed through the crowd. He had to shout to be heard over the din. “I was paid by Huazo of the Saowon to humiliate Fire Lord Zoryu! I blasphemed by faking signs from the spirits of the islands! I committed foul deeds here and in North Chung-Ling to instigate a war that might put the usurper Chaejin on the throne!”
It was a confession to everything Kyoshi thought the Saowon had conspired to. The exact results she’d been hoping to achieve.
The tromping of boots could be heard coming down the hall. Nobles began to shout and shove each other in the crowded room. “Treason!” Zoryu shouted, stoking the fires of confusion and panic instead of calming his subjects. “You have heard testimony of treason against the Fire Nation itself! All citizens who remain true to our country, regardless of your clan! Seize the Saowon criminals, here and now!”
The Keohso were the first to act, barely needing a reason. They leaped upon their enemies and dragged them to the ground, a ridiculous-looking scuffle of polished men and silken ladies flailing away like a drunken rage had suddenly possessed them. This was the brawl of North Chung-Ling writ smaller and better dressed, the grudge of a lowly peasant town continuing in the rarified air of the royal palace. Human beings could drape themselves in titles and etiquette, but at their hearts they were all the same animal.
The unaffiliated nobles had a dilemma thrust upon them. Until now the tides of power had clearly been flowing in one direction. The suddenness of Zoryu’s declaration asked them to reverse course, to leap from their doomed boats and start swimming upstream.
Kyoshi saw the flashes of calculation run through the rest of the clans, faster than lightning. It was gang math. The Saowon really had overstepped their bounds recently, hadn’t they? They were the largest family, but their numbers paled in comparison to the rest of the Fire Nation, unified.
Fire Nation folk were a decisive people. The rest of the clans found no more upside to being allied with the Saowon. They turned on their neighbors with even greater violence than the Keohso, pummeling anyone wearing stone camellias into submission with demonstrative zeal, needing to make up for lost ground. Palace guards, presumably loyal to Zoryu, were flooding into the room. No one wanted to be caught sympathizing with the traitors.
Zoryu and his prisoner were hustled out the back by guards as soon as the violence started. Kyoshi fought her way to the stage, slipping by men with bloody faces, nearly stepping on a woman crawling along the floor. She hoisted herself onto the empty platform and followed down the dark passage.
Immediately she crashed into a sharp turn. The stage exit was less a tunnel and more a catacomb, twisting left and right and forking into multiple paths. She lit her way through the maze of wooden walls with fire cradled in her hand and chose her route by listening to the sound of chains rattling. Alone, she was faster than two men dragging a third.
She entered a wide, straight corridor where an ambush waited. Half a dozen new guards barred her path, already in fighting stances. Yun’s captors made haste for another passage at the end of the hall.