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Together, they scavenged and spliced enough rope for him to tie one end around his waist. That afternoon, he took off soaring on his glider while Kyoshi held the other end from below. They laughed so loud they could hear each other across the great heights. For her, he was the biggest, fastest, best kite in the whole world.
She’d misjudged the weather. The first drops of rain pattered on her cheek, waking her from her slumber of exhaustion. She and Pengpeng still had some ways to go when it quickly became a torrent that blotted out the sun. They narrowly managed to get down to Yokoya in time to avoid the lightning spreading its fingers across the sky.
They arrived at the mansion. Kyoshi jumped off Pengpeng near the stables and landed ankle-deep in mud. She waded through the blinding rain to the house. The staff and the guests had been driven inside to their quarters.
The ride had given her time to think. And she’d concluded that every decision from here on out was easy. An inevitability she would follow into the darkness.
The only person who could have made her falter was waiting inside the servants’ entrance for her, under the archway of the wall. Rangi looked like she had confined herself to this area the entire day. She’d worn out a groove in the floor with her pacing back and forth.
“Kyoshi, where were you?” Rangi said, a scowl on her face from having been left in the dark for so long. “What happened? Where are the others?”
Kyoshi told her everything. About the powerful and terrible spirit that had identified Kyoshi as the Avatar. About the way Jianzhu had offered Yun up as a sacrifice and murdered Kelsang when he came to rescue them. She even included how she’d entered the Avatar State.
Rangi stumbled backward until she knocked her head against a support beam. “What?” she whispered. “That’s not—What!?”
“That’s what happened,” Kyoshi said. She dripped rainwater on the floor, each plip another precious second lost. “I have to go. I can’t stay here.”
Rangi started pacing again, running her fingers through the ends of her hair, which had fallen loose. “There’s got to be a misunderstanding. An explanation. You said there was a spirit? It must have played tricks on your mind—that’s been known to happen. Or maybe you simply got confused. Master Jianzhu can’t have . . . He wouldn’t . . .”
She watched Rangi attempt to will a different reality into existence. It was the same trap Kyoshi had fallen into the day Kelsang told her she might be the Avatar.
“We’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” Rangi said. “When Jianzhu gets home, we’ll make him explain himself. We’ll find out what really happened to Yun and Master Kelsang.”
“RANGI! THEY’RE DEAD! I HAVE TO GO!”
Throughout the journey back, Kyoshi had been thinking only about the shards of her life buried on that mountain. She’d forgotten there was still one more piece, and Rangi’s stunned silence let her know she’d lost that too. Kyoshi pushed past her without saying goodbye and headed to her room.
It was easy to fill a sack with her clothes. She barely had any. She was going to leave everything on her shelf behind, but the thought of Kelsang made her grab the clay turtle and throw that in. The item that gave her pause was the beautiful green battle outfit that she’d worn on the iceberg and was now hanging on her wall.
For some reason Jianzhu had let her keep it in her room. The thought of taking, of using, a gift from him made her insides clench. But she would need armor like that where she was going. A protective shell.
She took it down, hastily rolled it up, and stuffed it in the sack. The leather journal went on top. She was
truly grateful she’d never given in to her urge to destroy the book. In the past it may have been incriminating evidence, but now it was a war plan.
Tucking the bundle under one arm, she stooped down, grabbed the handle of her trunk with the other, and dragged it out into the hallway.
The corners of the trunk screeched as they gouged out a trail in the polished wooden floors. She supposed the reason that no one stopped her was that they were scared. She saw the hems of robes disappearing around corners, frightened whispers behind closed doors as she passed.
The guardsmen, she remembered, had been decimated on the iceberg. And there had always been an undercurrent of suspicion in the way the other servants looked at her. Now her aberrant behavior must have pushed it over the edge into fear. She looked like a swamp ghost dripping with the water she’d drowned in. She could only imagine what terrors her face held.
Each fork in the hallway brought another flash of raw, saw-bladed pain to her heart as if she were one of the target dummies in the courtyard, collecting jagged arrows with her body. The routes she’d taken in her daily life unfolded down the corridors of the mansion, leading inevitably, over and over again, to the dead.
The way to Yun’s room, the one area he never let her clean, flustering over his privacy. The path to the little nook where Kelsang would meditate when the weather was too harsh. The grass where the three of them had spat watermelon seeds, only to run away when Auntie Mui yelled at them for making a mess.
She would never tread these lines again. She would never arrive to see Yun and Kelsang’s smiling faces at the end of her steps.
By design, Kyoshi took the long way past the wood-chopping station. The splitting maul was there, the wedge buried in the block. Kyoshi placed her bag between her teeth and picked up the maul with her free hand. The entire block came with it, stuck to the blade, so she smashed the whole agglomeration against the wall until the heavy tool was freed from the wood.
She kept walking.
Outside, the rain had doubled. The interval between lightning and thunder was nonexistent. She dropped her bag and flung the heavy wooden trunk in front of her. It slid in the mud before coming to a stop.
The chest had been a focal point for her anger in the past, collecting the flows of her hatred like the water barrels positioned under the gutters of the house. It had been left behind in Yokoya, like her, by the people who’d relegated her to the life of a starving, desperate, unloved creature for so many years before Kelsang came into her life.
Her parents would have to take a lower place on the shelf for now. She had someone new to focus on.
Another lightning flash illuminated which side the iron lock was on. Raising the maul high above her head with both hands, she swung it down, aiming for the weakest point.
