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She was still in a low stance. She remembered the ineffectual Fire Fist she’d thrown in Jianzhu’s face. Perhaps if she’d embraced her firebending ability earlier, she could have ended him right then and there.
“Let me try producing flame,” Kyoshi said.
Rangi looked up and frowned.
Kyoshi’s rededication to her cause felt hot and bitter inside her, like steam in a plugged tea kettle. She was sure that if she let it out, she could firebend. “Fire Fists,” she said. “I think I can do them with real flame now. I feel like it’ll work.”
“No,” Rangi said.
“No?” Kyoshi was taken aback by her certainty. Firebending felt so real, so close. “What do you mean, no?”
“I mean no. You?
??re as tense as a rolled-up armadillo lion right now. You’re going to produce the wrong kind of flame and develop bad habits. Watch.”
Rangi stepped to the side. Without warning, she dropped into her stance and punched the air, snapping her sleeves with the force of her motion. Kyoshi could see her knuckles smolder like the tip of an incense stick.
“You need to work on relaxation and mental coordination first,” Rangi said. “Early lessons in firebending are all about suppressing flame and keeping it controlled. For a beginner, making visible fire means failure.”
Kyoshi scoffed to herself. Not producing flame had been the cause of her problems from the start. “Then let me try what you did.” She planted her feet in mimicry of Rangi and chambered her fists.
“Kyoshi, don’t.”
She imagined Jianzhu’s face, inhaled, and struck.
Her one experience at flamespitting had jiggled something loose, made it easy for her breath to spiral outward from her lungs and combust. Too easy. Energy raced down her arm and crashed into her fingers. It caused her nerves to light up with signals, as if she’d gripped a red-hot coal straight from the stove.
Instead of the crisp glow that Rangi produced, the heat that came out of Kyoshi’s fist was erratic, toggling, the popping of water added to hot oil. It went on for far too long and caused far too much pain. Kyoshi fell on her back and tried to get herself pointed away from any target. She managed to aim her hand at the sky in time. A tiny, contorted spout of black smoke belched upward from her fingers.
Kyoshi sat up. Rangi watched the pathetic yarnball of vapor climb into the air. Then she gave Kyoshi a stare that was hard enough to flatten iron.
They were saved from a difficult conversation by Lek. He crested the hill next to them and traced the path of the smoke with his finger.
“What kind of broke-down firebending was that?” he said with a snicker. He directed the question at Rangi, not having seen the source.
Rangi crossed her arms. “I had a momentary collapse of discipline,” she said, still glaring at Kyoshi. “It won’t happen again. Not if I ever want to firebend properly.”
Lek shrugged. “Lighten up; I was just asking. If the two of you are done collapsing, breakfast is ready.”
Breakfast was some manner of rodent, hunted, gutted, skinned, and burnt to the point of unrecognizability. Kyoshi and Rangi ate with big, angry bites as they sat with the daofei around the rebuilt fire, each trying to show the other how upset they were through aggressive gnawing.
Lek forgot his portion as he watched them, amazed. “I didn’t think an army princess and a servant girl from a fancy mansion would take to elephant rat.”
“Survival training at the academy,” Rangi said, breaking a bone with her fingers to get at the marrow. “We learned to accept whatever food we could find in the wild.”
“I used to eat garbage,” Kyoshi said.
That drew stares from the group.
“I thought Jesa and Hark left you in a farming village,” Kirima said.
“That doesn’t mean the farmers shared food with me.” Kyoshi worked her tongue around a stringy fiber of meat caught in her teeth. “They might not have known I was the child of outlaws, but I was still an outcast there. They treated me like I was unclean. And then I had to do things like this to survive, so you know. Self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“Reasons like that are why I can’t stand law-abiding, salt-of-the-earth folk,” Wong said. “It’s the holier-than-thou attitude. The hypocrisy.” He wiped his hands on a leaf. “If anything, they deserve to be knocked out and robbed on a regular basis.”
He noticed Kyoshi staring at him. “What?” he said. “I practice what I preach.”
“You must have hated their guts,” Kirima said.
