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The burn reached her skin. She didn’t pull away. Maybe she deserved to be punched straight through, a red-hot hole in her chest.
“Answer me!” Rangi screamed. “Answer me, you—you—”
Kyoshi closed her eyes, squeezing out tears, and readied herself for the blow.
It never came. Rangi stepped back, aghast, hands covering her mouth, realizing what she was doing, and then barreled past Kyoshi out the door.
The room swayed back and forth, threatening to force Kyoshi down on all fours. Yun stood up, navigating the thrashing floor with ease. He came closer, his lips parting slightly. She thought he was going to whisper something reassuring in her ear.
And then he sidestepped her. Slid right by, with a layer of empty space between them as impenetrable as steel.
She had one more stop to make.
Kelsang was waiting for her, propped up to a sitting position in his bed. There was a half-eaten bowl of seaweed soup on his bedside table, a remedy for blood loss. His skin was paler than the bandages swaddling his torso. Even the blue of his arrows seemed faded.
“We woke you up.” Kyoshi was surprised at how hard her voice was. She should have been relieved to pieces that he wasn’t dead, and instead she was on the verge of snarling at him. “You need to be resting.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had to tell them.”
“Did you?”
“What I said about Yun having the greater chance of being the Avatar isn’t true anymore. Not after what you accomplished on the iceberg.” Kelsang ran his hand over his shaved head, feeling for the ghost of his hair. “You were asleep for three days, Kyoshi. I thought your spirit had left your body. There was no more pretending.”
Something delicate inside her snapped at hearing “pretend.” The people closest to her were suddenly calling the years they’d spent together fake, imaginary. A made-up prelude to a different, more important reality.
“You mean you couldn’t wait any longer to make your move,” she said, unable to control her bile. “You wanted to teach an Avatar who depended on you more than Jianzhu, and you lost your chance with Yun. That’s what I am to you. A do-over.”
Kelsang looked away. He leaned back against his pillow.
“The time when any of us could have what we wanted passed years ago,” he said.
DESPERATE MEASURES
If she needed evidence things were different now, the food was enough.
On days when Kyoshi had time to eat breakfast, she usually helped herself to a bowl of jook from the communal pot bubbling away in the kitchen, garnished with whatever dried-out scraps from the upstairs tables Auntie Mui deemed fit to save from the previous night. Today, another servant surprised her outside her door and led her to one of the dining halls reserved for guests.
The room she sat in by herself was so big and empty that drinking her tea made an echo. The grand zitan table held such an array of boiled, salted, and fried delicacies that she thought the place setting for one had to be a mistake.
It was not. Without knowing which of the children under his roof was the Avatar, Jianzhu seemed to have decreed that Kyoshi was to be fed like a noble until he figured it out. She tried to accommodate his generosity, but a small bite of each artfully arranged dish was all she could manage with her rice. Including, she noted with chagrin, the spicy pickled kelp she’d carried to the house herself, now nestled in a lacquered saucer.
Her waiter checked back in. “Is Mistress finished?” she asked with a bowed head.
“Rin, I went to your birthday party,” Kyoshi said. “I chipped in for that comb you’re wearing.”
The girl shrugged. “You’re not to show up for work anymore. Master Jianzhu wants you by the training grounds in an hour.”
“But what am I supposed to do until then?”
“Whatever Mistress wishes.”
Kyoshi staggered out of the dining room like she’d taken a blow to the head. Leisure? What kind of animal was that?
She didn’t want anyone to see her up and about the house. Oh, there’s Kyoshi, taking in the flowers. There she goes now, pondering the new calligraphy from the Air Temple. The prospect of being on display horrified her. In lieu of a better option, she ran to the small library where she’d spoken to Kelsang and latched the door behind her. She hid there, alone with her dread, until the appointed time came.
Kyoshi was as unfamiliar with the flat stone expanse of the training ground as she would have been with the caldera of a Fire Nation volcano. Her duties never brought her here. Jianzhu waited in the middle of the courtyard for her, a scarecrow monitoring a field.
“Don’t bother with that anymore,” he said when she bowed deeply like a servant. “Come with me.”
