AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Kyoshi instinctively obeyed Rangi’s voice and flattened herself out. She heard and felt the scorch of a fire blast travel over her, knocking Tagaka away.
With a mighty roar, Pengpeng strafed the iceberg, Rangi and Hei-Ran blasting flame from the bison’s left and right, scattering the pirates as they attempted to regroup. Jianzhu handled Pengpeng’s reins with the skill of an Air Nomad, spinning her around for perfectly aimed tail shots of wind that drove away clouds of arrows and thrown spears. Kyoshi had no idea how they’d escaped the ice, but if any three people had the power and resourcefulness to pull it off, it was them.
The fight wasn’t over. Some of Tagaka’s fleet had made it past Kyoshi’s obstacles. And from the nearby sinking ships, a few Waterbenders declined to panic like their fellows. They dove into the water instead, generating high-speed waves that carried them toward Tagaka. Her elite guard, coming to rescue her.
Rangi and Hei-Ran jumped down and barraged the pirate queen with flame that she was forced to block with sheets of water. Rangi’s face was covered in blood and her mother had only one good arm, but they fought in perfect coordination, leaving Tagaka no gaps to mount an offense.
“We’ll handle the Waterbenders!” Hei-Ran shouted over her shoulder. “Stop the ships!”
Jianzhu took a look at the stone monoliths that Kyoshi had raised from the seafloor, and then at her. In the heat of battle, he chose to pause. He stared hard at Kyoshi, almost as if he were doing sums in his head.
“Jianzhu!” Hei-Ran screamed.
He snapped out of his haze and took Pengpeng back up. They flew toward the nearest formation of stone. Without warning, Jianzhu let go of the reins and jumped off the bison in midair.
Kyoshi thought he’d gone mad. He proved her wrong.
She’d never seen Jianzhu earthbend before, had only heard Yun and the staff describe his personal style as “different.” Unusual. More like a lion dance at the New Year, Auntie Mui once said, fanning herself, with a dreamy smile on her face. Stable below and wild on top.
He hadn’t been able to earthbend on the iceberg, but now Kyoshi had provided him with all of his element that he needed. As Jianzhu fell, flat panes of stone peeled off the crag and flew up to meet him. They arranged themselves into a manic, architectural construction with broad daylight showing through the triangular gaps, a steep ramp that he landed on without losing his momentum.
He sprinted toward the escaping ships, in a direction he had no room to go. But as he ran, his arms coiled and whipped around him like they had minds of their own. He flicked his fists using minute twists of his waist, and countless sheets of rock fastened themselves into a bridge under his feet. Jianzhu never broke stride as he traveled on thin air, suspended by his on-the-fly earthworks.
Fire blasts and waterspouts shot up from the benders manning the ships. Jianzhu nimbly leaped and slid over them. The ones aimed at the stone itself did surprisingly little damage, as the structure was composed of chaotic, redundant braces.
He raced ahead of the lead ship, crossing its path with his bridge. Right as Kyoshi thought he’d extended too far, that he’d run out of stone and thinned his support beyond what it could hold, he leaped to safety, landing on top of a nearby ice floe.
The precarious, unnatural assembly began to crumble without Jianzhu’s bending to keep it up. First the individual pieces began to flake off. Chunks of falling rock bombarded the lead ship from high above, sending the crew members diving for cover as the wooden deck punctured like leather before an awl.
But their suffering had only begun. The base of the bridge simply let itself go, bringing the entire line of stone down across the prow. The ship’s aft was levered out of the waterline, exposing the rudder and barnacled keel.
The rest of the squadron didn’t have time to turn. One follower angled away from the disaster. It managed to avoid crashing its hull, but the change of direction caused the vessel to tilt sharply to the side. The tip of its rigging caught on the wreckage, and then the ship was beheaded of its masts and sails, the wooden pillars snapped off, a child’s toy breaking at its weakest points.
The last remaining warship bringing up the rear might have made it out, assuming some dazzling feat of heroic seamanship. Instead it wisely decided to drop anchor and call it quits. If Tagaka’s power was in her fleet, then the Avatar’s companions had destroyed it. Now they just had to live long enough to claim their victory.
“You did good, kid,” said a man with a husky voice and an accent like Master Amak’s. “They’ll be telling stories about this for a long time.”
Kyoshi spun around, afraid a pirate had gotten the drop on her, but there was no one there. The motion made her dizzy. Too dizzy. She sank to her knees, a drawn-out, lengthy process, and slumped onto the ice.
THE FRACTURE
It was warm. So warm that when Kyoshi woke up in the mansion’s infirmary, she thought it would be Rangi sitting in the chair by the bed. She hoped it was.
Instead it was Jianzhu.
Kyoshi clutched her blankets tighter and then realized she was being silly. Jianzhu was her boss and her benefactor. He’d given Kelsang the money to take care of her. And while she’d never crossed the courteous distance that lay between them, there was no reason to feel uncomfortable around the earth sage.
That was what she told herself.
Her throat burned with thirst. Jianzhu had a gourd of water at the ready, anticipating her need, and handed it over. She tried to gulp it as decorously as she could but spilled some on her sheets, causing him to chuckle.
“I always had the hunch you were hiding something from me,” he said.
She nearly choked.
“I remember the day you and Kelsang told me about your problem with earthbending,” Jianzhu said with a smile that stayed firmly on the lower half of his face. “You said that you couldn’t manipulate small things. That you could only move good-sized boulders of a regular shape. Like a person whose fingers were too thick and clumsy to pick up a grain of sand.”
That was true. Most schools of earthbending didn’t know how to deal with a weakness like Kyoshi’s. Students started out bending the smallest pebbles, and as their strength and technique grew, they moved to bigger and heavier chunks of earth.
