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“And that helped?” Kyoshi said incredulously.
“It turned out to be a brilliant strategy,” Rangi said. “Rather than chase emergencies all over the nation, he concentrated his efforts on a central location and spread his influence from there. Szeto was an ex
tremely capable bureaucrat, accountant, and diplomat. And since he was working for the royal family, there was no split in legal and spiritual authority in the country. His victories were the Fire Lord’s victories.”
Dairin nodded, satisfied that the youth of today were being educated suitably about their nation’s past. “Once he was promoted to Grand Advisor, Avatar Szeto was able to end the open hostilities between rival noble houses. A lasting peace followed, in which he continued to serve his country with dignity and excellence.”
“He put an end to the debasement of coins,” Rangi said. “It rescued the economy from the brink of disaster.”
“One of the scrolls we passed on the way here said he set up the first official programs to give relief to the peasantry in times of famine,” Jinpa said.
“And most important, he kept proper records of it all,” Dairin said. He wiped the corner of his eye out of habit, as if he’d been moved to tears in the past when thinking about Szeto and was just making sure right now. “Truly, Avatar Szeto was an ideal for us officials to live up to, and a shining example of Fire Nation values in general. Efficiency, precision, loyalty.”
Kyoshi gazed with new admiration at the dour, long-faced man whose festival they were here to celebrate. She liked this Szeto fellow. Or this version of herself, as it were. A strong work ethic and an eye for organization were traits she respected. Perhaps she should have tried communing with him instead of focusing on Yangchen so often.
Dairin graciously allowed their party to drift toward the art pieces that interested them. Kyoshi wandered over to the portrait of Lord Chaeryu again. Knowing more about him could help ingratiate her with his son, the current Fire Lord Zoryu.
Kyoshi tried to interpret some of the imagery. Chaeryu’s theme seemed to be vegetation. She could see bundled rice stalks, a harvest bounty. There was a penciled outline yet to be painted, a detailed flower arrangement with two blossoms sprouting from the same vase. In the vessel, a large stone camellia greatly overshadowed a smaller winged peony.
That was odd. Kyoshi knew the basics of flower arranging in the Fire Nation style, and that kind of off-balance spacing was normally frowned upon. In real life, the bigger plant would have blocked off the sunlight from the lesser one and caused it to wither.
“Chancellor,” she said. “I have a question about these flowers.”
Dairin tensed up unnaturally at the word flowers. He hurried to her side with a sense of dread, not waiting for her to ask anything, and peered frantically at the stencils like he expected some sort of unpleasant revelation.
It took him a little longer than Kyoshi to see the outlines, but when he did, his reaction was unmistakable. The chancellor turned white and trembling, and beads of sweat gathered on his nose.
“Do not speak of this to anyone but the Fire Lord,” Dairin muttered under his breath.
“Wait, what?” Kyoshi had heard him clearly, but she didn’t understand the life-or-death conviction in his voice.
The chancellor clapped his hands, the sharp noise startling Rangi and Jinpa, who were still looking at other paintings. “The tour is over!” he declared. His eyes darted to the entrance of the gallery, fearful of the empty space. “Avatar, my apologies for prattling on when you must be tired from your journey. I will show you to your accommodations. Immediately.”
The floors and walls of the Avatar’s quarters in the Fire Palace were so laden with antiques and artwork it could have passed for a small museum in itself. For the remainder of her stay Kyoshi could look forward to enjoying landscapes painted in cinnabar, vermillion sculptures of preening birds, tapestries woven with carmine threads. The overwhelming redness of the space made it hard to tell distances inside. The room where she was going to sleep might have been as big as the bottom level of Loongkau.
“I feel like I’m staring directly into the sun,” Jinpa said. He pressed his palms against his eyes and blinked.
“It took me a while to get used to so much red again myself,” Rangi said. She sat down on the corner of what Kyoshi had thought was a large raised platform and bounced softly, which meant that the scarlet-quilted square wide enough to hold a lei tai on top of it was the bed. “Agna Qel’a is the same thing, only with ice. You need special goggles to move around the brightest parts or else you’ll go snowblind.”
The mention of the north made Kyoshi’s innards clench. It was a reminder of how far Rangi had journeyed to seek treatment from Water Tribe healers for her mother’s poisoning, and a warning of how demands on the Avatar could steal away time in the blink of an eye. Kyoshi hadn’t been to the North Pole yet. She was lucky that Rangi wasn’t angry at her for not visiting.
She thought about bringing up Dairin’s cryptic actions in the gallery but didn’t, less out of concern for his wishes and more because she and Rangi had more important things to talk about. Kyoshi turned to Jinpa. “Can you give us some time alone?” she asked him, motioning at the door.
“Not so fast,” Rangi said. “Report please, Brother Jinpa.”
The monk stepped forward like a first-day recruit and addressed her directly, completely bypassing Kyoshi. “She hasn’t been eating properly despite my repeated admonitions.”
“Hmm.” Rangi pressed her lips together in disapproval. “She can be stubborn like that.”
“Hey!” Kyoshi said. “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here!”
Jinpa continued to count out various offenses on his thumb and fingers, bending them back one by one. “She barely gets any sleep. I’ll find her passed out late at night, on top of a book or a map or a manual. She doesn’t give herself enough time to recover from her injuries. And she insists on reacting to random reports of violence throughout the Earth Kingdom in person! Do you know how hard it is to manage her schedule when she does that?”
Out of all her fears for this visit, Kyoshi hadn’t been prepared for this scenario, her secretary and her bodyguard ganging up on her. “Have you two been writing each other behind my back!?”
“Only the one time,” Rangi said. “I sent Jinpa a letter at the same time as I sent your invitation. It was the only way I would get a truthful update on whether you’ve been taking care of yourself. Apparently, you haven’t.”
“She hasn’t,” Jinpa confirmed. “Quite the opposite, in fact. If I didn’t know any better, I would say she’s intentionally seeking out the most dangerous situations and hurling herself into them without any regard for her own safety!”
