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That far, huh? “I don’t remember much from when I was little,” Kyoshi said. Though her legs had settled down, the front of her neck now ached with tension. “Only that my parents and I never stayed in one place very long, and they never told me where. You could say I grew up in ‘the Earth Kingdom.’”
“That would have been before any of you joined,” Lao Ge said to the others. “Jesa and Hark slowed down considerably for several years and barely ran any jobs. They never told me why they stopped gathering the old crew for so long. I thought maybe they’d quit the game.”
The old man’s memory helped Kyoshi fit pieces together into a completed puzzle. The result was uglier than she’d imagined.
“Well, they must have wanted back in very badly, because they abandoned me in a farming village when I was five or six,” she said. “I can’t be sure exactly when. I never saw them after that.” Or forgave them.
“That can’t be,” Lek said. “Jesa and Hark would never do that to family. They were the most loyal bosses anyone could ask for. You must be mistaken.”
Kyoshi wondered what it would be like to pick him up, like she did to that pirate, and shake him until he saw spots. Kirima intervened before she could explore the idea.
“Are you telling their own daughter what happened to her?” the Waterbender snapped at Lek. “Shut up and let her finish.”
“There’s not much more to tell,” Kyoshi said. “I nearly died of neglect in that village before I was taken in by the household of a rich and powerful man. A sage. The only possessions I had to my name were my mother’s gear and her journal, which had information about my parents’ daofei customs, obligations I could call on. It was an instruction manual. Like you said.”
She glanced at Rangi. “I kept my parents’ past a secret from the village the whole time. Given how I was treated as an outsider, I don’t think I would have fared well if the townsfolk knew I was also the spawn of criminals.”
Rangi clenched her jaw. Kyoshi could tell she was thinking about the what-ifs, how their relationship might have been different had she known Kyoshi was a tainted child from the start. Would she have looked past that and befriended Kyoshi all the same? Or would she have condemned her to the rubbish heap like she’d done to Aoma and Jae and the others?
“And one day you just decided to leave and come here?” Lek said. He was still incredulous, like a sequence of events that started with Kyoshi’s parents being anything but perfect was not possible.
“I did not just decide,” Kyoshi snarled, turning her attention back on him. “The man whose house I lived in decided, when he murdered two people dear to me. I swore by the spirits that turn this world on its axis that I would make him pay for it.
“That’s why I’m here,” she said, pounding her fist on the table for emphasis. “He’s too powerful and influential to be brought down by the law. So I need the opposite side of the coin. I need my parents’ resources. If they can give me one gift at all in this life, then let it be revenge for those I’ve lost.”
Her face was red. Kyoshi felt ready to explode. She didn’t know what she’d do if another door in the wall opened and her mother and father stepped out. It would have been as volatile and uncharted as her encounter with the cave spirit.
Lek solemnly took his headwraps off and wrung them between his hands. His hair was sandy and cropped underneath. “You came all this way to find Jesa and Hark,” he said in a mournful mutter. “Kyoshi, I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to break this to you, but . . . but . . .”
Relief came like a monsoon. She did not have to meet them. She didn’t have to discover what kind of person she was when the past unearthed itself and took solid form.
“What, are they dead or something?” Kyoshi said, waving her hand at him flippantly. “I don’t care.”
A lie. Had they appeared in front of her, she might have had to run screaming from this room.
Lek’s grief was replaced by outrage, a funeral guest who caught her stealing the altar offerings. “We’re talking about your mother and father! They were taken by a fever three years ago!”
She found it so easy to be cruel now that she knew for certain they couldn’t defend themselves. “Wow,” Kyoshi said. “I guess there’re some things you can’t outrun, huh?”
His eyes goggled out of his head. “How can you be so vile? No one in the Four Nations disrespects their own kin like that!”
“They left me behind because I took up too much cargo space,” Kyoshi said. “So I would say it’s a family tradition.”
She snapped the war fan closed, intending to punctuate her sentence in an intimidating way. Instead the arms fell out of alignment and the leaf folded the wrong way, ruining the effect. She would need to learn how to use it properly at some point.
“I’m not here to confront my parents, or their ghosts,” Kyoshi said. The raw nervous energy coursing through her bones had slowed. “I’m here to seek what’s owed me by blood ties.”
She counted off on her fingers. “I want access to safehouses in the bigger cities where I can stay hidden at length. I want introductions with the rest of the network, starting with the strongest benders. And, most of all, I want training. Training until I’m strong enough to take down my enemy personally.”
A silence fell over the group.
Kirima made an awkward little choke. Kyoshi thought maybe she’d gotten some saliva down the wrong pipe, but then the Waterbender burst out laughing.
“Other cities!” she guffawed. “Let me guess. Your journal mentioned secret bases in Ba Sing Se, Omashu? Gaoling maybe? Filled with a brotherhood of bandits who honor the old ways?”
“I’ll blow my trumpet,” Wong said. “I’m sure they’ll come running.”
Kyoshi frowned. “What’s so funny?”
