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Lek, Kirima, and Wong hustled them back to camp. “What’s the rush?” Rangi said, covering the dwindling stick of incense. “There’s no reason to be hasty at this point.” She and Kyoshi were already wearing their armor.
“We have to put on our faces,” Kirima said. She rummaged around her limited belongings. “It’s tradition before a job.”
Lek failed to find what he was looking for and grunted. “I forgot we left Chameleon Bay in a hurry,” he said. “I’m out. Does anyone else have some makeup they can spare?”
Kyoshi blinked, having difficulty comprehending. “I . . . do? I think there was some in my mother’s trunk, along with the fans?”
Wong helped himself to Kyoshi’s rucksack until he found the large kit of makeup that had been completely neglected until now. “It would be a disgrace for an opera troupe to perform barefaced. And stupid for thieves not to hide their identities.”
Kyoshi remembered. Classical opera was performed by actors wearing certain patterns of makeup that corresponded with stock characters. The tiger-monkey spirit, a popular trickster hero, always had a black cleft of paint running down his orange face. Purple meant sophistication and culture, and often appeared on wise-mentor types. Her mother’s journal had mentioned the makeup, but she’d overlooked it in favor of the more practical fans. And the headdress. Didn’t she have a headdress too?
Wong brought the kit to her and opened it. “It looks like the good stuff, from Ba Sing Se, so it hasn’t dried out,” he said. “I’ll do yours first. It takes practice to put on your own face correctly.”
Kyoshi shuddered at the thought of the oily paste on her skin but decided not to complain. “Wait a second,” she said. “There’s nothing in here but red and white.” The indentations that should have held an assortment of colors had been filled multiple times over with deep crimson and an eggshell-colored pigment. There was a small amount of black kohl as well, but not enough to cover the whole face.
“Those are our colors,” Wong said as he dipped his thumb and began to gently apply the paint to her cheeks. “White symbolizes treachery, a sinister nature, suspicion of others, and the willingness to visit evil deeds upon them.”
Kyoshi could hear Rangi snort so loudly Te might have heard it in his palace.
“But,” Wong said, scooping into the other side of the case with his forefinger. “Red symbolizes honor. Loyalty. Heroism. This is the face that we show our sworn brothers and sisters. The red is the trust we have for each other, buried in the field of white but always showing through in our gaze.”
Kyoshi closed her eyes and let him put more paint on.
“Done,” Wong said. He smoothed the last of the black eyeliner on her brow and stepped back to examine his handiwork. “I can’t promise it’ll stop a sharp rock or an arrow, but I can guarantee you’ll feel braver. It always does that for me.”
“Lean down,” Kirima said. She’d pilfered the headdress out of Kyoshi’s bag while her eyes were closed. “You’re wearing your mother’s face, so you should wear her crown as well.”
Kyoshi lowered her head so that Kirima could place the band around it. She’d never tried on the headdress before. It fit like it had been made for her.
She rose to her full height. “How do I look?” she asked.
Wong held up a tiny mirror that had been nestled in the lid of the makeup kit while Rangi angled the glow of the incense so she could see. The glass wasn’t wide enough to display her entire face, just a slash of reflection running down the arc of gold atop her brow, across her flaring eye, and over the corner of her reddened mouth.
The narrow mirror resembled a tear in the veil of the universe, and from the land that lay beyond the other side, a powerful, imperturbable, eternal being stared back at Kyoshi. A being that could pass
as an Avatar someday. “I’m not thrilled you’re wearing daofei colors,” Rangi said, biting her lip as she smiled. “But you look beautiful.”
“You look terrifying,” Lek added.
A lifetime ago, Kyoshi had never thought she would be either of those things. “Then it’s perfect.”
THE RAID
They crept to the staging point, a small promontory a few hundred feet from the walls of the palace. They huddled around Rangi and watched the timing incense die out in her fingers, the last embers lighting their painted faces. Kyoshi glanced at the group, their features muted or exaggerated by strokes of red on white. Even Rangi and Lao Ge had donned the colors. The markings tied them together.
The incense crumbled to where Rangi could no longer hold it. “Go,” she whispered.
Lek dust-stepped to the top of the boulder they were hiding behind. He grabbed his sleeve and pulled it up over his shoulder, exposing a long, wiry arm wrapped in more thin leather straps than Kyoshi had previously thought.
He shook his elbow forward, and the bindings released, revealing the pocket of a sling.
Rangi, Kirima, and Wong took off running for the palace.
Without slowing his motion, Lek kicked a stone bullet the size of a fist into the air and snatched it up in the sling pocket. The projectile whined with speed as it whirled around his head, accelerated with bending. As he stood astride the rock, legs bracing against the powerful momentum of the bullet, his face tranquil with concentration, he looked much older to Kyoshi. Less a boy, and more a young man in his element.
He let the stone fly. Kyoshi could barely see the guard on the roof he was aiming at and would have guessed that such a target was too impractical to hit, but Lek’s talents—physical, or bending, or both—created a tiny plink sound off in the distance. The blurry shape that was the guard dropped out of view.
Lek was already winding up his next shot before the first one landed. Rangi and the others closed the gap. They were within spotting distance of the guards. He loosed the second stone.
