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“Can we keep this a secret?” Kyoshi said. “Just for a while, until I can get my bearings? I don’t want to be rash. Maybe you’ll remember Kuruk’s poem differently in the morning. Or Yun will firebend.” Anything.
Kelsang didn’t answer. He’d been suddenly transfixed by her tiny shelf.
It held a gold-dyed tassel, a few beads, a coin she’d pilfered from a shrine donation box and felt too guilty to spend and too afraid to return. The clay turtle she couldn’t remember exactly how she’d gotten, other than that it was a present from him. He stared at the junk for a long time.
“Please,” Kyoshi said.
Kelsang looked back at her and sighed. “For a little while, perhaps,” he said. “But eventually we have to tell Jianzhu and the others. Whatever the truth is, we must find it together.”
After he left, Kyoshi didn’t sit down. She thought best on her feet, motionless. Her wooden cell of a room was good enough for that.
This was a nightmare. While she wasn’t an important political dignitary, she wasn’t an idiot either. She knew what kind of bedlam lay behind the precarious balance Jianzhu and Yun had set up, the mountain they’d suspended in the air.
From around corners she’d spied on the bouts of ecstatic sobbing, the sense of utter relief that many of the visiting sages went through when they first laid eyes on Yun. After more than a decade of doubt, he was a solid body, a sharp mind, a belatedly fulfilled promise. The inheritor of blessed Yangchen’s legacy. Avatar Yun was a beacon of light who gave people confidence the world could be saved.
“Avatar Kyoshi” would simply be dirt kicked over the fire.
Her eyes landed on the journal lying on the trunk. Her pulse quickened again. Would they have left her behind if they knew there was a chance, no matter how slim, that she held some worth?
A knock came from outside. Gifting duty. She’d forgotten.
She shoved the entire conversation with Kelsang to the back of her mind as she opened the door. She knew from experience there was no trouble so great that she couldn’t pack it away. Kelsang wasn’t certain, therefore she didn’t need to worry. What she needed to worry about was Rangi having her hide for—
“Hey,” Yun said. “I was looking for you.”
PROMISES
“You know, this is much harder when you’re around,” Kyoshi said to the Avatar.
She and Yun sat on the floor in one of the innumerable receiving rooms. The freestanding screen paintings had been folded up and pushed to the walls, and the potted plants had been set outside to make room for the giant piles of gifts that guests had brought for the Avatar.
Yun lay on his back, taking up valuable free space. He lazily waved a custom-forged, filigreed jian blade around in the air, stirring an imaginary upside-down pot with it.
“I have no idea how to use this,” he said. “I hate swords.”
“A boy who doesn’t like swords?” Kyoshi said with a mock gasp. “Put it in the armory pile, and we’ll get Rangi to teach you at some point.”
There were a lot of guesses around the village about what, exactly, Kyoshi did in the mansion. Given her orphaned, unwanted status, the farmers’ children assumed she handled the dirtiest, most impure jobs, dealing with refuse and carcasses and the like. The truth was somewhat different.
What she really did, as her primary role, was pick up after Yun. Tidy his messes. The Avatar was such a slob that he needed a full-time servant following in his wake, or else the chaos would overwhelm the entire complex. Soon after taking her on, the senior staff discovered Kyoshi’s strong, compulsive need to put things back in their rightful place, minimize clutter, and maintain order. So they put her on Avatar-containment duty.
This time, the pile they sat hip-deep in was not Yun’s fault. Wealthy visitors were constantly showering him with gifts in the hope of currying favor, or simply because they loved him. As big as the house was, there wasn’t enough room to give each item a display place of honor. On a regular basis Kyoshi had to sort and pack away the heirlooms and antiques and works of art that only seemed to get more lavish and numerous over time.
“Oh, look,” she said, holding up a lacquered circle set in a crisscross pattern with luminous gems. “Another Pai Sho board.”
Yun glanced over. “That one’s pretty.”
“This is, without exaggeration, the forty-fourth board you own now. You’re not keeping it.”
“Ugh, ruthless.”
&nbs
p; She ignored him. He might be the Avatar, but when it came to her officially assigned duties, she reigned above him.
And Kyoshi needed this right now. She needed this normalcy to bury what Kelsang had told her. Despite her best efforts, it kept rising from below, the notion that she was betraying Yun and swallowing up what belonged to him.
As he lounged on his elbows, Kyoshi noticed Yun wasn’t wearing his embroidered indoor slippers. “Are those new boots?” she said, pointing at his feet. The leather they were crafted from was a beautiful, soft gray tone with fur trim like powdery morning snow. Probably baby turtle-seal hide, she thought with revulsion.
