“You’re Earth Kingdom. So, if you’re who you say you are, then it shouldn’t be a problem for you to waterbend some refreshment over to that gaping mouth of yours.”
“Seems fair,” said the mine boss, grinning wickedly. She took a deliberately long and noisy sip from her own cup.
Though Gow had been angry with his employer moments earlier, he too found Yun’s stunned silence a great joke. “Come on, master of the elements!” he guffawed. “Aren’t you thirsty?”
There was a ringing in Yun’s ears. It was as if he’d lingered too close to a firecracker, spent too much time watching the lit string burn down to its ends, and now he was living in the aftermath of the explosion.
“You’re asking me to prove I’m the Avatar,” he whispered hoarsely. “For a drink of water.”
There was no more. There was no more left in Yun. There was no more he had to give. He raised a trembling finger. “I risked my life for you,” he said, pointing at Gow. “I risked my life to save yours. You wouldn’t be standing here right now if it wasn’t for me.”
Gow’s eyes went wide. He tried to protest, but something blocked the words from leaving his throat. The owner and the mine boss looked like they were going to mock him for being singled out, but Yun fixed them with stares. “And you two. You couldn’t just . . . you couldn’t just help me.”
“Hey now,” the woman said, suddenly finding a cliff on the other side of the door they’d opened. She scraped backward in her chair, jarring her table. Her cup tipped over, sloshing its contents to the floor. “You can—you can have mine. You can have what’s left.” She grasped clumsily at the pot she’d been drinking from but only managed to get the lid, not the handle. “Take it. Take it!”
It was too late for that. “I dedicated my life to people like you,” Yun said. He couldn’t tell if he was laughing, crying, croaking out bestial sounds of fury. The human speech was mixed in somewhere. “I wanted you to thrive. I wanted you to prosper. I tried so hard.”
There was a crash behind him. He saw the owner of the teahouse fleeing out the back of the shop. Yun swept his hand over the air and a string of filthy ceramic cups flicked out like a whip, flattening themselves into a knife’s edge. They slashed across the back of the big man’s legs, sending him to the floor with a gruesome thud.
Knocked out. Yun would have to wake him up at some point. He turned back to Gow and the mine boss, who trembled in place, stuck with fear. He watched their foundations sway, trying to figure out whether or not he enjoyed it.
He decided it didn’t matter. Yun reached over Gow’s shoulder, giving the man a conspiratorial smile, and closed the door curtain from the inside.
Yun drank the stagnant, sulfurous water from the thick-walled bucket. It sloshed down the front of his chest, puddling on the ground in front of the town well. It was the best drink he’d ever had.
He poured some out on the face of the well guard lying at his feet. Unlike some people, he shared his bounties. “How’s the governor’s water taste?” he asked. The liquid splashed against the corpse’s glassy, unblinking eyes and pooled in its open mouth.
Around him the town was silent. Everyone who could run, had. He would have to learn to control his energies at some point if he didn’t want people fleeing him on sight.
Yun drew another bucket and poured it over his head, repeating the process until his runoff no longer contained streaks of bloody crimson. He threw the wooden vessel to the side and listened to its hollow clank.
See Kyoshi? he thought. I can bathe without hot water, no problem.
His friend’s presence beckoned to him from across the world. Though he wasn’t certain on the details, he was convinced there was a permanent connection between the spirit that took him and the Avatar. Kyoshi was Kuruk. And he was . . . he was who he was.
“Well,” he said out loud to no one. “It looks like I’ve been fired.”
Perhaps it was for the best. He would need the free time, because he had a list of things to do. Lots of personal business to take care of. And at the top of the list was paying his respects to Jianzhu.
Filled with new purpose, Yun took off down the road, whistling as he went.
HOME AGAIN
Yokoya had never been wealthy. But now, without Jianzhu’s presence, its prospects seemed even grimmer than Kyoshi remembered as a child. The ghosts of the sages who had fallen here would take a long time to relinquish their hold on the moldering docks, the hardened, rocky fields, the sparse, weather-beaten houses.
A month had passed since Zoryu’s “victory.” Kyoshi walked slowly through town, wading through her own past. The queasiness in her stomach told her she’d b
een wrong back when she’d declared her ties severed with Yokoya after Kelsang’s death. She was and would always be from this village. Only home could make you feel this bad.
She passed one of the logs pounded into the earth in an attempt to please the spirits and shook her head. Perhaps the ones who inhabited this peninsula were gentle and satisfied by stakes in the ground. It wasn’t out of the question. The spirits, as she was learning, were subject to all the variations and complexities of human beings. There were the terrible ones, the irrational ones, the cruel ones, the harmless ones, the ones who would talk to you and the ones who would force you to guess their whims like a servant groveling before a silent, smirking master.
Motion caught her eye, children scampering from cover to cover. They poked their heads out from behind doorways and corners of houses, whispering to each other. She wasn’t wearing her makeup. They were just rude the way children were, peering at the stranger.
The adults gave her perfunctory nods as they continued their sweeping, the never-ending sweeping. Pushing dirt around from one place to the other was a burden and obligation shared by the lowly of every nation. She had no doubt that if she visited one of the poles at length, she would see the commonfolk doing the same with the snow, herding the drifts from one end of a village to another.
It was a small mercy that she didn’t see Aoma or anyone else from that crew. Then she remembered the reason. It was the middle of the workday. The villagers her age would be toiling in the fields, stooped among the furrows, or out at sea hauling in the day’s catch. She, the exalted Avatar, had stepped off a pleasure craft belonging to the royal family of the Fire Nation. There was no sense or structure to it, the way the world scattered lives into the wind like chaff to land so far apart.
She left the village and made her way deeper into the fallow sections of land. The path made a sharp turn around the hillside, and she braced herself for what she was about to see.