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“Thank you, Avatar.” He bit his lip. “That’s not the only reason I’m here, though.”
He stepped aside to reveal Hei-Ran standing behind him, with Atuat by her side. The two women were stiff-backed, as if ceremony had suddenly intruded its ugly head again.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Rangi said. She recognized something she didn’t like in her mother’s posture.
“Atuat is my second, and the Fire Lord is my witness,” Hei-Ran said. Without her cane, she slowly, carefully, sank to her knees on the grass. She reached behind her and unsheathed a wickedly sharp knife.
“No!” Rangi started forward. “Mother, no!”
Hei-Ran pinned her daughter in place with a glare. “After what I’ve done, you would protest? Consistency, Lieutenant. No one gets to escape the consequences of their deeds. This was a long time in coming.”
She grasped her topknot with one hand and placed the edge of the knife on it carefully. “For failing to recognize the true Avatar,” she said, holding Kyoshi’s gaze. “For not protecting my friend Kelsang.”
Hei-Ran looked to the Fire Lord. “For letting my former pupil dishonor our nation.”
And finally, Rangi. “For not being worthy of my daughter’s esteem.” With one swift stroke Hei-Ran lopped off the bundle of hair and tossed it on the ground before her. Her dark silken locks, salted with gray strands, billowed down her face and neck.
Rangi shuddered as Atuat carefully picked up the severed topknot and folded a clean silk kerchief around it. She’d lost her own hair, once, but that was due to the underhanded tactics of an enemy, far away in the Earth Kingdom. Regrettable and traumatic, but more akin to a war injury. Hei-Ran had acknowledged her personal dishonor right in the beating heart of their own country, in front of the Fire Lord.
“It’s done,” she said to Rangi with a sad smile. “You hold this family’s honor in your hands now. You’ll take far better care of it than I have.” With a few more flicks of the knife, Hei-Ran cropped the remainder of her hair to match the severed ends, making it shockingly short, yet somehow still neatly fetching around her beautiful face. For this family, doing things cleanly and properly applied to everything, including rituals of ultimate humility.
Atuat took the knife from Hei-Ran and helped her up. In a way, the doctor made the ideal second. She would do as her friend requested, without the hesitance a noble of the Fire Nation might have at seeing one of its most illustrious figures fall from grace.
Rangi, on the other hand, was apoplectic. She’d been robbed of her righteous momentum, had her pockets picked. There was nothing she could say anymore to her mother in anger.
Hei-Ran let her daughter flap and fume another minute before deciding they’d wasted enough time. Letting witnesses have their say, even family members, did not appear to be part of the topknot-severing ritual. “All right then. North Chung-Ling.” She peered inside the stable at Yingyong. “I see you haven’t saddled the bison correctly. Five people will cause the floor to shift.”
“What do you mean five people?” Rangi managed to spit out. “What do you mean North Chung-Ling? We didn’t agree to go there.”
“You were upset we weren’t discussing a plan for my safety earlier,” Hei-Ran said. “Well, standard operating procedure after a target comes under attack is to move their location. You should know this well; it’s how you protected the Avatar from Jianzhu.”
Hei-Ran turned to everyone. “We are going to hide out in North Chung-Ling,” she declared. “While we’re there, Kyoshi can make contact with Kuruk’s friend to follow up on
any spiritual leads to find Yun. It’ll kill two spidersnakes with one stone. Brother Jinpa! Have you finished gathering the supplies?”
Jinpa teetered around the corner, crates and burlap bags stacked high in his arms. “I have, Headmistress. We can be in the air in fifteen minutes.”
Hei-Ran had commandeered Kyoshi’s secretary the same way Rangi had. Rangi stared at Jinpa, furious at his betrayal. He simply shrugged as if to say Scariest Firebender wins before sidling into the pen next to his bison.
“We haven’t discussed our options!” Rangi said. “We have to take into account your condition!”
“She’ll be fine,” Atuat said with an uncomfortably cavalier wave of her hand. “Fresh air and movement will be better for her health than cooping her up in the palace. She survived the trip home, didn’t she?”
“But—but—” Rangi looked to Kyoshi for backup. It seemed like she wanted to avoid a flight with her mother at all costs.
“But nothing!” Hei-Ran said before the Avatar could weigh in. “I may have no rank now, young lady, but you are still my daughter! I am telling you that we are going on this trip, and I don’t want to hear any further complaints spewing out of your mouth! Now hush!”
Young lady? Kyoshi had seen the headmistress give the lieutenant orders before, but this was some kind of new and frightening relationship that had been unshackled. Rangi’s mouth bent into a shape Kyoshi didn’t know it could achieve.
“I’m officially an Avatar’s companion!” Atuat whooped, throwing her fists in the air. The sudden noise startled Yingyong into squashing Jinpa against the side of the pen. “I’m going to get one of those fancy ink paintings of us commissioned for posterity!”
Hei-Ran was already inspecting the sections of Yingyong’s coat Rangi had worked on. “You call this grooming?” she said, aiming her disapproval at her daughter. “It looks like you used a body brush instead of a dandy brush. It’ll have to be redone. All of it.”
“Somebody help me?” Jinpa pleaded from the other side, his voice muffled by his own bison’s fur.
Zoryu watched the proceedings, gripped by horror and dismay. “I was going to give a great big speech about how the fate of my nation rests on the shoulders of this group,” he said to Kyoshi.
A bag tore open, scattering grain everywhere. Yingyong roared in delight and began lapping it up, nearly knocking Atuat down with his tongue.
