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Kyoshi wondered if the encounter had changed her somehow. She couldn’t detect a difference within herself, but maybe one would become clearer with time. She remembered what Nyahitha said to her over a flickering light, how a fire was never the same fire. Kyoshi wasn’t the same Avatar as Kuruk or Yangchen. She wasn’t even the same Avatar she’d been a day ago.
In the future, perhaps, she’d become finalized like carved stone. It would be easier to deal with the world then. She could only hope.
As she stood, her legs filled with the ache of blood rushing back through her veins. It was a good sign she was still human. She saw the fox basking on a warm stone nearby. It opened a single green eye, and then stretched to get up with her.
“You’re a spirit, aren’t you?” she said to the creature. She’d expected it to be long gone, having fulfilled its mission of leading her to Yangchen. But it was still here, waiting. “Well, if you’re going to stick around, do you think you can guide me back to my friends?”
The fox yawned in response. It picked a route out of the clearing and down the dangerous slope, moving slowly enough for her to follow.
She still had to be careful not to lose her balance and fall. Kyoshi kept her eyes focused on her difficult path, sometimes stumbling but making sure to catch herself, taking one step at a time.
EPILOGUE
After a long day in the tower study, surrounded by relics of his ancestors and the journals of Toz the Strong, Fire Lord Zoryu dismissed Chancellor Caoli, the late Chancellor Dairin’s former student and successor. The two of them had been spending a lot of time together, crafting how this period of history would be viewed by future generations. Caoli had imaginatively suggested calling it “The Camellia-Peony War.” Despite war being precisely what Zoryu had managed to avoid, he liked the sound. It was pretty and poetic.
The skies were gray outside his window, rare for this time of year. Zoryu sat in his chair, a high-backed piece carved by a Sei’naka craftsman, and watched evening fall to darkness.
The word he’d received from the Avatar indicated she’d tidied up the mess that had spilled out of the Earth Kingdom. He didn’t take the girl for a strong liar. Yun was out of his hair.
His ruse would hold. The fake Yun still lingered in the prisons, though not in bad conditions. Huazo, Chaejin, and the other Saowon in the capital were under house arrest. Their relatives in Ma’inka couldn’t act militarily without risking their lives, and so remained bottled up on their home island. An observer might mark this as the moment the Fire Nation was truly saved.
Zoryu knew better. Only fools thought they were ever saved. His struggles were just beginning.
Huazo and Chaejin’s ploy for the throne was the symptom of a deeper sickness within his country. As long as the clans held power and were sway to the greed and hatred of their ruling families, the Fire Nation would constantly erupt in these fevers of civil conflict. It had in the past. Without change, the future would be no different.
He dreamed of the day when the citizens of the Fire Nation stopped using the silly insignias of their home islands as reasons to start fights. He longed for the ability to take the surplus of one island to feed the hungry of another. He wanted his country to stop burning itself in the name of honor.
To make his dream come true, he would have to break the clans. All of them, including the Keohso. There could be no true strength in the Fire Nation unless the fealty of its citizens was reserved for the Fire Lord alone.
It would be a generational project. Remolding the country would take decades, centuries. Zoryu would not live to see his great work completed. But he’d planted the seed by ruining the Saowon, one of the most powerful families of the age. He’d proven it could be done. His children, and his children’s children, would have to continue his efforts to weaken the clans, destroy them, render them irrelevant.
And then one day, one day, a Fire Lord of his bloodline would look upon his strong, united country, and sit the throne in peace.
But right now, Zoryu had to figure out tomorrow.
He considered the Avatar’s ultimatum. Sparing the Saowon appeared to be simple. It was anything but. There was nothing he could do with them. The clan was dishonored, aimless, in disarray. Yesterday he’d flirted with th
e idea of incorporating them into the standing Fire Army, but he doubted they would readily accept subservience. And worse, the burden of supporting them would fall on the Fire Lord’s coffers.
The simplest and best solution was the one he’d decided on first. You didn’t have to pay a salary to a corpse. He would cull the Saowon, like the nation’s farmers had done to their plagued pig chickens.
He would merely have to go back on his word to the Avatar. Defying Kyoshi was the option without cost. The islands would be refreshed in the blood of his brother’s clan.
Zoryu heard thunder outside his window. The night skies opened and began to pour.
He had to stare at the falling sheets of water for a good minute to believe they were real. Rain, so late in the season? It almost never happened.
The tension left his body in an uncontrollable giggle. For rain to come after the Festival of Szeto was the ultimate sign of good fortune. It would accumulate in the mountaintops, refill the cenotes, and ensure a productive start to the next growing season. It would stir the seas and attract migrating silverskim fish closer to the islands, into waiting nets. By this time next year, the Fire Nation would enjoy a bounty beyond imagination.
Not even Lord Chaeryu of the green fields could boast of such a blessing during his reign. This was a sign from the spirits. The islands approved of Zoryu’s plans. For once, in his entire life, he felt lucky.
He hadn’t been this happy in a while. That was why it took more than one lightning flash for him to notice the man crouching in his window.
Zoryu shrieked and fell out of his chair. The man stepped inside the room, dripping water on the floor. By the light of the candles in the study, Zoryu could see the intruder was old. Very old. But he moved with a slinking, deadly grace, as if his tattered robes covered the muscles and scales of a dragon.
“Hi!” the man said brightly. He took no heed of the rain he was drenched in. “You must be Zoryu.”
He smiled, and then frowned. “You are Zoryu, right? I’ve heard there’s been a lot of funny business going around recently involving people who look like each other. You wouldn’t lie to me about being the Fire Lord, would you?”
