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avoiding eye contact, and ran after the Airbender.
She found Kelsang a dozen paces away, alone, sitting on a stool that had presumably been abandoned by one of Tagaka’s guards. The legs had sunk deep into the snow under his weight. He shivered, but not from the cold.
“You know, after Kuruk died, I thought my failure to set him on the right path was my last and greatest mistake,” he said quietly to the icy ground in front of his toes. “It turned out I wasn’t finished disgracing myself.”
Kyoshi knew, in an academic sense, that Air Nomads held all life sacred. They were utmost pacifists who considered no one their enemy, no criminal beyond forgiveness and redemption. But surely exceptional circumstances allowed for those convictions to be put on hold. Surely Kelsang could be forgiven for saving entire towns along the coasts of the western seas.
The strain in his voice said otherwise.
“I never told you how far I fell within the Southern Air Temple as a result of that day.” Kelsang tried to force a smile through his pain, but it slipped out of his control, turning into a fractured, tearful mess. “I violated my beliefs as an Airbender. I let my teachers down. I let my entire people down.”
Kyoshi was suddenly furious on his behalf, though she didn’t know at whom. At the whole world, perhaps, for allowing its darkness to infect such a good man and make him hate himself. She threw her arms around Kelsang and hugged him as tightly as she could.
“You’ve never let me down,” she said in a gruff bark. “Do you hear me? Never.”
Kelsang put up with her attempt to crush his shoulder blades through the force of sheer affection and rocked slightly in her embrace, patting at her clasped hands. Kyoshi only let go when the sound of a plate shattering pierced the stillness of the night.
Their gazes snapped toward the crash. It had come from the tent. Yun and Jianzhu were still inside.
Kelsang stood up, his own troubles forgotten. He looked worried. “Best if you head back to camp,” he said to Kyoshi. The muffled sound of arguing grew louder through the felt walls.
“Are they all right?”
“I’ll check. But please, go. Now.” Kelsang hurried to the tent and ducked through the curtain. She could hear the commotion stop as soon as he re-entered, but the silence was more ominous than the noise.
Kyoshi paused there, wondering what to do, before deciding she’d better obey Kelsang. She didn’t want to overhear Yun and Jianzhu have it out.
As she fled, the moonlight cast long, flickering shadows, making Kyoshi feel like a puppeteer on a blank white stage. Her hurried exit took her too far in the wrong direction, and she found herself among the outskirts of the pirate camp, near the ice cliff.
She slammed against the frozen wall, trying to flatten herself out of sight. Tagaka’s crew was in the midst of retiring for the night, kicking snow over dying campfires and fastening their tents closed from the inside. They had guardsmen posted at regular intervals looking in different directions. Kyoshi had no idea how she’d come so close without being noticed.
She edged as quietly as she could back the way she came, around the corner, and bumped into the missing sentry. He was one of the two pirates who’d accompanied Tagaka to greet them. The man with the mustache. He peered up at her face like he was trying to get the best view of her nostrils.
“Say,” he said, a rank cloud of alcohol fumes wafting out of his mouth. “Do I know you?”
She shook her head and made to keep going, but he stuck his arm out, blocking her path as he leaned against the ice.
“It’s just that you look very familiar,” he said with a leer.
Kyoshi shuddered. There was always a certain kind of man who thought her particular dimensions made her a public good, an oddity they were free to gawk at, prod, or worse. Often they assumed she should be grateful for the attention. That they were special and powerful for giving it to her.
“I used to be a landlubber,” the man said, launching into a bout of drunken self-absorption. “Did business with a group called the Flying . . . Something Society. The Flying Something or others. The leader was a woman who looked a lot like you. Pretty face, just like yours. Legs . . . nearly as long. She could have been your sister. You ever been to Chameleon Bay, sweet thing? Stay under Madam Qiji’s roof?”
The man pulled the cork from a gourd and took a few more swigs of wine. “I had it bad for that girl,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “She had the most fascinating serpent tattoos going around her arms, but she never let me see how far they went. What about you, honey tree? Got any ink on your body that you want to show meeeaggh!”
Kyoshi picked him up by the neck with one hand and slammed him into the cliffside.
His feet dangled off the ground. She squeezed until she saw his eyes bulge in different directions.
“You are mistaken,” she said without raising her voice. “Do you hear me? You are mistaken, and you have never seen me, or anyone else who looks like me before. Tell me so.”
She let him have enough air to speak. “You crazy piece of—I’ll kill—aaagh!”
Kyoshi pressed him harder into the wall. The ice cracked behind his skull. “That’s not what I asked you.”
Her fingers stifled his cry, preventing him from alerting the others. “I made a mistake!” he gasped. “I was wrong!”
She dropped him on the ground. The back of his coat snagged and tore on the ice. He keeled over to his side, trying to force air back into his lungs.
