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“I know everyone in the Four Nations who could possibly help you!” Jianzhu said. “I put out the message, and every lawman, every sage, every official will be tripping over their own feet to hunt you down on my behalf! Being the Avatar will not protect her from me!”
“Kyoshi, run!” Kelsang shouted. He pushed her away and leaped at Jianzhu, bringing his staff down to create a gale of wind. Jianzhu brought earth up to meet him.
But they weren’t fighting the same fight. Kelsang meant to blast his friend away, to knock the madness out of him, to overwhelm him with the least amount of harm done, in the way of all Air Nomads.
Jianzhu shaved off a razor of flint no longer than an inch, sharp and thin enough to pass through the wind without resistance and slice at where his victim was exposed and vulnerable.
A spurt of blood came from the side of Kelsang’s neck, from a finger-length cut so clean and precise it was almost elegant.
Jianzhu’s expression flickered with a sadness that was deeper and truer than what he’d given to Yun, as he watched his friend fall.
Kelsang collapsed to the ground, his head bouncing lifelessly off the hard-packed earth.
Those were the last things Kyoshi saw before the white glow behind her eyes took over her entire being.
THE INHERITANCE
One time, when she was ten or thereabouts, a traveling fireworks vendor came to Yokoya. The village elders, in an unusual fit of decadence, paid him to put on a show celebrating the end of the first harvest. Families packed the square, gazing up at the booming, crackling explosions racing across the night sky.
Kyoshi did not see the display. She lay on the floor of someone’s toolshed, twisted by fever.
The morning after, the heat in her skull forced her awake at dawn. She staggered around the outskirts of town, seeking cool air, and found the field where the vendor set his explosives the night before. The ground was scorched and pitted, utterly ravaged by a fiend born of no natural element. It was covered in a layer of ash and upturned rocks. Water creeping in slow, black rivulets. The wind smelling like rotten eggs and urine.
She remembered now being suddenly terrified that she’d catch blame for the destruction. She’d run away, but not before scuffing her footprints off the path she’d taken.
When Kyoshi regained her vision, she thought for a moment she’d been thrown back in time to that unreal, violated landscape. The trees were gone behind her, snapped at their trunks and torn by their roots to expose damp clumps of soil. Before her, it was as if some great hand had tried to sweep away the mountainside in a convulsion of fear and shame. Deep rips crisscrossed the stone like claws. The hilltops had been pushed over, the traces of landslides pouring down from their crests.
Kyoshi had the vague notion that she was too high up. And she couldn’t see Kelsang anywhere. She’d wiped away his existence.
There was an animal howl floating on the wind, the scream of rosin on warped strings. It came from her.
Kyoshi dropped to the ground and lay there, her face wet with tears. She pressed her forehead to the earth, and her useless cries echoed back in her face. Her fingers closed around the dust, sifting for what she’d lost.
It was her fault. It was all her fault. She’d pushed Kelsang away instead of listening to him, allowed cowardice to rule her thoughts and actions. And now the source of light in her life was gone.
She had nothing left. Not even the air in her lungs. The heaving sobs coursing through her body wouldn’t allow her to breathe. She felt like she was going to drown above water, a fate she would have accepted gladly. A just punishment for an unwanted girl who’d squandered her second chance: Kelsang, a miraculous, loving father conjured from thin air. And she’d cursed him with death and ruin.
There was a tremor in the distance. The rubble around a certain spot was sinking, parting. Someone had escaped the havoc she’d wreaked in the Avatar State by burrowing deep down in the earth. Now he was tunneling back to the surface, ready to claim his property.
Kyoshi scrambled to her feet in a blind, wild panic. She tried to run in the direction they’d come, stumbling past landmarks she prayed she remembered correctly. The baked ruins of the mining villages were so similar in their crumbling appearance that, for a second, she thought she was caught in a loop. But then, right as her legs were about to give out, she found Pengpeng waiting where they’d left her.
The bison took a whiff of Kyoshi and bellowed mournfully, rearing on her back four legs before crashing down hard enough to shake the dirt. Kyoshi understood. Maybe Pengpeng had felt her spiritual connection with Kelsang dissipate, or maybe Kyoshi simply smelled of his blood.
“He’s gone!” she cried. “He’s gone and he’s not coming back! We have to leave, now!”
Pengpeng stopped thrashing, though she looked no less upset. She allowed Kyoshi to climb on her back, using fistfuls of fur as a ladder, and soared into the air in the direction of home, without being told.
Yokoya, Kyoshi corrected herself. Not home. Never again home. Yokoya.
She stayed back in the passengers’ saddle. She was unwilling to straddle Pengpeng’s withers in Kelsang’s place, and the bison didn’t need guidance for the return journey. From high up in the sky, she could see dark, rain-filled clouds approaching over the ocean in the opposite direction. If they flew fast enough, they could reach Yokoya before meeting the storm.
“Hurry, please!” she shouted, hoping Pengpeng could understand her desperation. They’d managed to strand Jianzhu in the mountains, but the man’s presence felt so close behind. As if all he needed to do was reach his arm out for her to feel his hand clamping down on her shoulder.
That same year she’d caught sick and suffered through the fireworks, Kelsang had returned to the village. He looked askance at the farmer who swore that Kyoshi had been well taken care of with the money he’d left behind. The weight she’d lost and her pallid skin told a different story. Afterward, Kelsang promised Kyoshi that he’d never leave her for so long again.
But Kyoshi had long forgotten about any nights she’d spent ill without medicine. She’d been more concerned with the new kite-flying craze that had taken hold of the village children. For weeks, brightly colored paper diamonds and dragons and gull-wings had hypnotized her from the sky, dancing on the wind. Not surprisingly, she hadn’t the supplies or guidance to make one of her own.
Kelsang noticed her staring longingly at the kites dotting the sky while they shared a meal outside. He whispered an idea in her ear.
