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“I want every single man, woman, and child back,” Yun said. “If you’ve sold them to other pirate crews, I want your dedicated assistance in finding them. If any have died under your care, I want their remains so their families can give them a proper burial. We can talk about the compensation you’ll pay later.”
The masters, save for Kelsang, looked displeased. To them, these were the actions of a petulant child who didn’t understand how the world worked.
But Kyoshi had never loved her Avatar more. This was what Yun had wanted her to see when he’d begged her to come along. Her friend, standing up for what was right. Her heart was ready to burst.
Tagaka leaned back on her ice stool. “Sure.”
Yun blinked, his moment of glory and defiance yanked out from under him prematurely. “You agree?”
“I agree,” Tagaka said. “You can have all of the captives back. They’re free. Every single one.”
A sob rang out in the air. It was the Earth Kingdom woman. Her stoic resolve broke, and she collapsed to her hands and knees, weeping loudly and openly. Neither Tagaka nor her men reprimanded her.
Yun didn’t look at the woman, out of fear he might ruin her salvation with the wrong move. He waited for Tagaka to make a demand in return. He wasn’t going to raise the price on her behalf.
“The captives are useless to me anyway,” she said. She stared out to sea at the smaller icebergs surroundi
ng them. Despite her earlier patience, she sounded incredibly bored all of a sudden. “Out of a thousand people or more, not one was a passable carpenter. I should have known better. I needed to go after people who live among tall trees, not driftwood.”
Yun frowned. “You want . . . carpenters?” he said cautiously.
She glanced at him, as if she were surprised he was still there. “Boy, let me teach you a little fact about the pirate trade. Our power is measured in ships. We need timber and craftsmen who know how to work it. Building a proper navy is a generational effort. My peaceable cousins in the South Pole have a few heirloom sailing cutters but otherwise have to make do with seal-skin canoes. They’ll never create a large, long-range war fleet because they simply don’t have the trees.”
Tagaka turned and loomed over the table. “So, yes,” she said, fixing him with her gaze. “I want carpenters and trees and a port of my own to dock in so I can increase the size of my forces. And I know just where to get those things.”
“Yokoya!” Yun shouted, a realization and an alert to the others, in a single word.
Tagaka raised her hand and made the slightest chopping motion with her fingers. Kyoshi heard a wet crunch and a gurgle of surprise. She looked around for the source of the strange noise.
It was Master Amak. He was bent backward over a stalagmite of ice, the bloody tip sprouting from his chest like a hideous stalk of grain. He stared at it, astonished, and slumped to the side.
“Come now,” Tagaka said. “You think I can’t recognize kinfolk under a disguise?”
The moments seemed to slowly stack up on each other like a tower of raw stones, each event in sequence piling higher and higher with no mortar to hold them together. A structure that was unstable, dreadful, headed toward a total and imminent collapse.
The sudden movement of Tagaka’s two escorts drew everyone’s attention. But the two men only grabbed the Earth Kingdom woman by the arms and jumped back down the slope the way they’d come, dodging the blast of fire that Rangi managed to get off. They were the distraction.
Pairs of hands burst from the surface of the ice, clutching at the ankles of everyone on Yun’s side. Waterbenders had been lying in wait below them the whole time. Rangi, Jianzhu, and Hei-Ran were dragged under the ice like they’d fallen through the crust of a frozen lake during the spring melt.
Kyoshi’s arms shot out, and she managed to arrest herself chest-high on the surface. Her would-be captor hadn’t made her tunnel large enough. Kelsang leaped into the air, avoiding the clutches of his underground assailant with an Airbender’s reflexes, and deployed the wings of his glider-staff.
Tagaka drew her jian and swung it on the downstroke at Yun’s neck. But the Avatar didn’t flinch. Almost too fast for Kyoshi to see, he slammed his fist into the only source of earth near them, the stone inkslab. It shattered into fragments and reformed as a glove around his hand. He caught Tagaka’s blade as it made contact with his skin.
Kyoshi stamped down hard with her boot and felt a sickening crunch. Her foot stuck there as the bender whose face she’d broken refroze the water, imprisoning her lower half. Above the ice, Kyoshi had the perfect view of the Avatar and the pirate queen locked together in mortal knot.
They both looked happy that the charade was over. A trickle of Yun’s blood dripped off the edge of the blade.
“Another thing you should know,” Tagaka said as she traded grins with Yun, their muscles trembling with exertion. “I’m really not the Waterbender my father was.”
With her free hand she made a series of motions so fluid and complex that Kyoshi thought her fingers had telescoped to twice their length. A series of earsplitting cracks echoed around them.
There was a roar of ice and snow rushing into the sea. The smaller icebergs split and calved, revealing massive hollow spaces inside. As the chunks of ice drifted apart at Tagaka’s command, the prows of Fifth Nation warships began to poke out, like the beaks of monstrous birds hatching from their eggshells.
Yun lost his balance at the sight and fell to the ground onto his back. Tagaka quickly blanketed him in ice, taking care to cover his stone-gloved hand. “What is this?” he yelled up at her.
She wiped his blood off her sword with the crook of her elbow and resheathed it. “A backup plan? A head start on our way to Yokoya? A chance to show off? I’ve been pretending to be a weak bender for so long, I couldn’t resist being a little overdramatic.”
Waterbenders aboard the ships were already stilling the waves caused by the ice avalanches and driving their vessels forward. Other crew members scrambled among the masts like insects, unfurling sails. They were pointed westward, toward home, where they would drive into fresh territories of the Earth Kingdom like a knife into an unprotected belly.
