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“We don’t know where Yun is!” Chaejin cried. “We’ve never dealt with him!”
His denial sent Kyoshi into a rage. With her other hand she grabbed him by the throat and angled him over the saddle railing. Now both of the Saowon threatened to fall.
“Let my son go, you monster!” Huazo shrieked on her hands and knees. “Viper! Animal!”
Kyoshi would be those things if necessary. “I’m only going to ask one more time,” she said, and in her heart, she knew it was no exaggeration. She had lost her patience, her honor, her friend. She had reached her limits. She was done, finally done, and unless Huazo or Chaejin answered her, they would be too. “Where is Yun?”
KYOSHI.
She shook her head in confusion. She normally didn’t hear Kuruk’s voice so clearly. His husky growl pierced through the roar of the waves, the whistling of the wind.
KYOSHI. THIS ISN’T WHO YOU ARE.
Chaejin raised his tear-stained face and wailed in helplessness. It was the same cry the little girl in Loongkau had made, watching her parents dragged into the street. Maybe Kyoshi had cried like that once, as she watched a bison fly away from Yokoya, never to return.
Sobbing, Huazo crawled to the edge of the cliff and reached for her son. It was a fruitless gesture, but she’d be that much closer to her child, whom she loved more than her own life.
Kyoshi finally saw the truth, bare and stripped open. They didn’t know where Yun was. They hadn’t been working with him. In her frenzy, she had nearly killed mother and son in front of each other.
She tossed Chaejin onto the platform beside his mother before she accidentally throttled him. She could hear Jianzhu laughing in her ear. Or maybe it was Kelsang weeping over the loss of his daughter, her betrayal of his example.
She pulled out her fans, eliciting whimpers from Huazo and Chaejin. Another sharp crack of rock rang out. Instead of heralding a landslide, the entire crag they were on rose higher, riding the edge of the rock wall toward the sky.
Without needing to be told, Jinpa climbed Yingyong in the air, keeping pace with Kyoshi’s earthbending. The platform stopped at the top of the cliff, leaving the Saowon level with a wind-scrubbed field of coarse grasses.
“Go,” she ordered them. “Go!”
They crawled away at first, not trusting the steadiness of the ground or her sudden change in disposition. Then Huazo and Chaejin began to believe they might yet survive. They picked themselves up and ran, the pounding of their feet clumsy and unpracticed. The flatness of the cliff tops meant Kyoshi could see them go for as long as she wanted. Watching them take part in the most humbling, equalizing ritual—the flight for one’s life—made them look vanquished and small.
Kyoshi turned around, unable to stomach the sight any longer. She teetered to the edge of the saddle, dropped to her knees, and retched emptiness into the ocean.
“Kyoshi!” Jinpa dropped the reins and clambered into the saddle with her. He grabbed her by the shoulders, wondering if she was still maddened. “Get a hold of yourself!”
She tried to apologize for risking so much on this desperate, ugly, vile gambit and coming away empty-handed. For being so completely and utterly wrong about the connection between Yun and the Saowon. For almost making him complicit in her crime.
But she was only capable of producing halting gasps. Seeing she was incoherent, Jinpa got back in the driver’s position and flew them away, making a straight line for the capital. Kyoshi refused to look over the rails below. If she did, she would see Huazo and Chaejin moving in the same direction.
She’d forced them to their lowest state and terrified them down to their bones. If only that were the end, the conclusion of the Avatar’s dealings with the Saowon. How convenient it would be if giving someone enough comeuppance silenced them for good.
But eventually they were going to make it back to their kinsmen, and not long after, the royal court itself. Huazo and Chaejin would spread word of what happened. The story of their treatment by Zoryu and the Avatar would be used as the just cause for their war. Kyoshi had not only fanned the flames. She’d thrown oil onto the blaze.
She thought of Yun playing Pai Sho with Hei-Ran and how he’d predicted the end of their game. How Hei-Ran had all but clasped his hand over the board in agreement. If only she could see so far ahead, read a board and know where the final tiles would fall. But instead she was walled in from every side. To her, the future was an impenetrable blankness where she’d faltered, injured, and made things worse with every step.
Not only was she the loser of the game. It had been a mistake for her to ever play.
SHAPES OF LIFE AND DEATH
By the time they arrived at the palace, Kyoshi was a shivering wreck. Jinpa collected the shards of her as gently and methodically as she had once picked up messes in the Avatar’s mansion.
First, a place to store the mess. He brought her to her room and sat her on her bed. Then he took it upon himself to find Zoryu and let him know the plan hadn’t worked.
The lack of an angry Fire Lord beating down her door to demand answers for her failure likely meant that Zoryu had decided to withdraw and collapse much like Kyoshi was doing now. There was a set length of wick left to burn before his country set blade and fire against itself, and it was exactly however long it took for Huazo and Chaejin to walk back from the cliffside to the capital. A day? Two? As soon as they met up with their clan, a new, bloody chapter of Fire Nation history would begin.
Kyoshi wasted a few precious hours of her remaining time before that moment sleeping. A sympathetic future scribe, slicing the records apart to truly understand why the Fire Nation broke out into civil war under Kyoshi’s tenure, might declare the Avatar had blacked out from strain and exhaustion. In truth, it was the kind of sleep where she was afraid of tomorrow and what the morning would bring. Tears squeezed out of her shut eyes as she fell into the slumber of weakness. She simply couldn’t handle being awake anymore.
Dark grayness was her shroud, until Jinpa roused her, shaking her shoulders. “Avatar. The Fire Lord is calling for an assembly. I’m barred from going, but you should be there.”
Huazo and Chaejin must have arrived. At least Zoryu was using his final peacetime moments to speak to his people, rather than hide away. He’d done better than her in the end.
