The Dawn of Yangchen, page 9
READING LEAVES
“Order something or get out.”
Kavik opened his eyes to see a gruff old man shaped like a barrel standing over him. He thumped the bamboo platter he’d been drying for emphasis, displeased that a potential customer had dipped in and out without spending anything.
They engaged in a stare down. Kavik was going to comply, but in the slowest, most annoying way possible. He was in a mood.
“Sorry, sorry,” said a voice on the cusp of familiarity. “He was waiting for me.”
A figure slid into the seat across from him. She wore plain Earth Kingdom winter clothing of quilted cotton, probably to avoid the furs of the Water Tribe or Fire Nation. Her hair, though, was carefully styled in a pair of upper-class buns. Thick, impenetrable bangs reached down over her forehead to her eyebrows.
This was the second time he’d shared a table with the Avatar and still he was nearly fooled.
“The square is completely blocked,” she explained to Kavik, her breath short. “I had to go all the way around. I hope you’re not upset with me.”
“Of course he isn’t, dear,” said the owner, suddenly all smiles. “Please, take your time. The menu’s on the slate board.”
Kavik frowned at the old man. Really? He got nothing but a warning sneer back, as if his new company were too good for him.
Spiritually speaking, she was. “That’s some wig,” Kavik said to Yangchen once they were alone.
“Do you like it?” She mockingly primped the sides with her gloved hands. “I hear the style’s all the rage in the Fire Nation. Unfortunately my clothes don’t match, but it was the best disguise I could put together on short notice.”
She looked more fetching than he cared to admit. “It’s only slightly less subtle than giant blue tattoos.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t have much of a choice. This city has given me its official welcome. I’ve got so many watchers posted on me now that Avatar Yangchen can’t say hello to anyone in the street without the shangs knowing.”
Hmph. If anything, Kavik’s attempted burglary was her introduction to how things worked in Bin-Er. “Did you get a good enough look at my broker?”
“I did. You weren’t lying about being independent. That guy’s the opposite of a power player. Sloppiest handoff I’ve ever seen.”
Before leaving his house the other night, Yangchen, in one last jab to his professional pride, told Kavik he hadn’t been as quick-fingered as he’d thought. She’d seen him pilfer the envelope from her room and stuff it into his boot. But instead of demanding it back, she instructed him to deliver it to Qiu as promised. “What was in it?” he asked.
“Garbage. I make fake versions of my correspondence from time to time, each copy different in one tiny but critical way, and let them get intercepted. Based on how my opponents react, I can trace the chains of leaks. I also wanted to protect you in case someone along the way got upset you came back empty-handed. This way, everything’s fine.”
Wow. If Kavik worked for the Avatar, he’d have a much smarter, more diligent boss than Qiu. But they weren’t quite there yet, were they? “I thought about your offer,” he said. “I need more specifics. It’s only fair to tell me what I might be getting into.”
She took her time answering. Kavik had intentionally put her in a difficult spot, and fairness had nothing to do with it. She could reveal more and risk him fleeing with knowledge of her intentions or lose her potential new recruit. The choice was hers.
After some thought she made her decision, and Kavik could see the determination flow through her posture like water through a pump. The girl did not hesitate once she settled on a course of action.
“I have reason to believe the shangs of Bin-Er and Jonduri are planning to get their hands on an asset that would give them unlimited leverage over the people inside their cities and the Four Nations as a whole,” Yangchen said. “I need someone to help me intercept it and make sure it never sees the light of day.”
Interesting. “What is this asset?”
“I don’t know yet. Logic would dictate it’s some kind of weapon, but I’m having trouble imagining what could give a bunch of merchants enough power and confidence to think they can turn their noses up at the leaders of the world combined. It fits in shipping crates and can be packed on a boat.”
“Maybe it’s lots of weapons?” Kavik suggested. “Enough swords to arm a force of their own?”
“It could be, but the shangs would be foolish to think they could put together more steel than a single division of the Earth King’s army. I’ve run through so many possibilities. Poison, or an apothecarial drug. A secret, maybe, blackmail on a head of state. A small, compact treasure of immense value? I know High Chieftain Oyaluk is obsessed with recovering his family’s lost dynastic amulet and would give nearly anything to get it back.”
Yangchen rubbed her eyes. It looked like the questions had cost her sleep. “They call it Unanimity,” she said. “That’s all I have.”
Very, very interesting. “I assume there’s not enough evidence to get the rulers of the Four Nations involved.”
“I don’t want any of them involved,” she said. “If Unanimity is as powerful as the shangs believe, then it could tilt the world in favor of whoever possesses it. I would like to find out what the asset is, and then make it go away. Quietly.”
A surge of yelling outside turned their heads. A group of people on their way to the square, raising their voices early. The spell of curiosity she’d cast over Kavik broke. “This is bizarre,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re the Avatar, and you’re plotting schemes in a dark teahouse. Why aren’t you out there, keeping the peace?”
“Keeping the peace?” There was a vibration in the air. “What do you believe that entails, keeping the peace? Are you of the opinion that I should fly above the square and tell the hungry and poor of Bin-Er they should shut up and go home?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You did until I pushed you.” She slumped in her bench, sullen, looking like her age for once, the same as Kavik’s. “I tried talking to the people who could have made a real difference, and they spat in my face. The shangs are going to continue to run roughshod over the people of this city unless I can deny them the power of Unanimity. I presume you’ve heard of the waterbending saying, ‘A feather’s weight moves a wagon’s load’?”
He had. A classical teaching to focus on redirecting force instead of relying on brute opposition. Subtle moves for maximum effect. “This scheme, as you put it, is where I apply the feather,” Yangchen said. “If I can even manage that.”
She scoured her eyes again, and when her fingertips came away, they were damp. “I’m tired.” A normal thing to say, but she made it come across like a grave confession of an unforgivable crime. “I’m very tired of fighting this battle over and over.”
The proprietor came out from the back, carrying a steaming kettle. He plunked it down on the table, followed by two large cups filled with pearls of dried tea, even though they hadn’t ordered anything yet. “Here, darling,” he said to the disguised Yangchen. “Our best, on the house. You look like you need it.”
Kavik sputtered over the principle of the thing. No shopkeeper in Bin-Er gave stuff away to normal customers. The old man didn’t know she was the Avatar. She wasn’t even in her Air Nomad clothes.
“Thank you, uncle,” Yangchen said. She reached for the pot and poured.
As the tea steeped, she found a hidden reserve of energy to chat with the owner about Bin-Er and how it must have changed over the years in his eyes. Talking face-to-face seemed to be her style with people regardless of whether they knew she was the Avatar. The man eagerly shared his opinions with an attentive listener. By the time he was done, Yangchen was all but his legal heir.
“You,” the owner said to Kavik. “You treat a nice girl like her right, you hear?” He let loose a final warning glare and went to tend the stove.
Kavik watched the leaves unfurl in his cup. “Is this job going to be dangerous?” he asked. He knew the answer, but there were rituals. Meaningless statements passed off as due diligence.
“What do you think?” She didn’t hold back her snort. “It’s going to make powerful people very angry. Funny how we’re talking about it, no? We have ourselves to blame if anything bad happens, not them.”
At least she was being honest. “I have a price,” Kavik said.
“I suppose you do. Name it.”
The request came so easy, as if it were a retaliation against his vanished brother. After Qiu’s revelation, there was nothing left holding him and his parents to Bin-Er. “I want passes out of the city for me and my family. Real ones. I want them so clean you could eat off them.” She didn’t respond. “As the Avatar you can get those, can you not?”
“I can. It’s just . . .” She bit her lip. “Your parents said it themselves. The Bin-Er control office is one of the most corrupt, leaky institutions on the continent. If I put your names through the process, it’ll be a signal pyre to the shangs that you’re working for me, and you’d become useless as a spy. I wouldn’t be able to procure the passes until you complete the mission.”
He could guess why she was uncomfortable. “You don’t like how that makes you feel,” Kavik said. “You would like to show an act of generosity first and then have me serve you out of a sense of obligation. The goodness of my heart.”
The emotions behind gifts were tricky, Kavik knew well. “But if we go in this order, you’re withholding payment until I finish rendering services. It makes it more obvious that you’re simply using me to get what you want.”
The Middler expression he’d heard used was “sky-pointing needle,” referring to a scale that had been balanced down to the motes of dust. A perfectly reciprocal transaction. Once a foreign, abhorrent idea to a Water Tribe child who’d been raised to share without counting, to give everyone he met what they needed without keeping score.
“Welcome to Bin-Er,” Kavik muttered. “Do you have any other options?”
Yangchen sighed. “I do not. I need an agent in Jonduri immediately.”
The delicate jasmine had finished steeping. Kavik picked up his cup and took a moment to consider the amber liquid. Tea poured by the Avatar herself. Nobles could go their whole lives without ever being granted such an honor. “Then I guess you’ll just have to trust me.”
Before he could drink, an iron grip clamped around his wrist. Droplets of tea spattered the table. Yangchen leaned forward, a sprung wire. “Before we make this official, tell me. The money I gave you. Who did you hand it off to? I saw you transfer the coins to someone while I was tailing you from above, but I couldn’t make them out.”
He had an idea what she was doing. “I gave it to—”
Yangchen loomed her face dangerously close to his until they were breathing the same air. “Look me in the eye while you answer,” she said. “Don’t blink.”
Kavik stared into irises as gray as storm clouds before a vicious downpour. “I gave the money to a woman named Ayunerak who’s lived here since before the Platinum Affair. She runs a kitchen to feed the hungry. She’ll put the coin to good use.”
The Avatar tilted her head back and forth, trying to see him in subtly different angles. “All right. All right. Points in your favor. Now tell me. Are you working for a shang? Are you a plant?”
“How would I possibly be a plant—ow!”
Her fingers tightened. She was stronger than she appeared. “You’re my age,” Yangchen said. “Quite nice to look at, if you don’t mind me saying. You’re certainly not another minister or dignitary trying to order me around. When I ask around the Water Tribe Quarter, no one has a bad thing to say about you.”
More like they refused to say anything at all about him. His countrymen tended to keep business, good or bad, to themselves. “We met under very unlikely circumstances where you managed to demonstrate a number of useful skills to me,” Yangchen said. “One of which is being an adept liar. I made the choice to bring you on. Do you know how the best cons work?”
Kavik did know. “By making the target feel like they’re in control. You think there’s a chance this was one big ploy to gain your trust.”
“There’s a Pai Sho saying: ‘A good move for you is a good move for your opponent.’ Now answer the question. Are you working for a shang? Are you working for Zongdu Henshe?”
“No,” Kavik said, and he couldn’t stop himself from smirking. Bluntness was the goal here, in both her question and his response. She was measuring his physical reactions. “I’m not working for a shang or the zongdu or any of the powers that be in Bin-Er. I hate this city with every fiber of my being, and I want nothing more than to leave both it and you behind.”
He let his declaration soak in. “Now if you’re done measuring my pulse and checking if my pupils are changing width, my tea is getting cold,” he said.
She let go of his wrist. He and his parents had done the right thing by not bringing up Kalyaan. There was no way the Avatar would have given him this opportunity if she knew his brother had been a runner for the very people she was trying to bring down.
Yangchen studied him for a bit longer, sitting so perfectly still she resembled a statue. Then she grudgingly picked up her teacup and held it to Kavik’s. “I suppose that’ll have to do for now,” she said. “To a successful partnership.”
They both drank slowly. Watching each other the whole time.
THE NORTHERN AIR TEMPLE
If you asked around the Water Tribe Quarter, Ujurak and Tapeesa’s wayward boy was sick with the wet cough. A moderately serious illness that required a couple of weeks of bed rest. Sometimes longer if you were unlucky. He’d probably caught it in the international district during one shady outing or another, but no one was going to give that opinion to a Middler or anyone remotely connected to the Earth King’s law. If he had any shame left, he’d lay low for a while after he recovered.
Kavik the newly inducted Avatar’s companion was undergoing intense study and meditation under Yangchen’s wing and wouldn’t be showing his face for a very long time. Kavik’s parents understood how important the training process was and had sworn themselves to secrecy. Becoming a celebrity was a frequent and undesirable side effect of working with the Avatar. The mind had to be strengthened first without outside interference so one could better serve the spiritual needs of the world.
“Jingli,” the nobody who possessed a shockingly high level of clearance, was sitting in the back of a wagon safeguarding a load of pottery. No one in the supply caravan bothered him about why he had such an unusual name for a Waterbender. Sections of Bin-Er were cosmopolitan enough that it wasn’t too out of the ordinary.
The idea of using someone else’s real identity made Kavik deeply uncomfortable. It was one thing to make up a fleeting background when necessary, but stepping into an existing life and taking it for your own was the sort of theft Kavik wanted to avoid. When Yangchen gave him the wooden tag, similar to his own internal city pass but with a different grain pattern, she assured him Jingli was the most expensive and hard to obtain kind of cover—completely fabricated. An empty set of clothes looking for a body to fill them, only good for trips between Bin-Er and the Northern Air Temple, nowhere else.
The wagon train he rode in was part of an alms mission. A small number of shop owners in Bin-Er looked to soothe their own spirits and keep the winds of fortune blowing in their favor by donating unsold goods in bulk to their local Air Nomads. The crew of volunteers Kavik rode with had been making the journey into the mountains for decades and had been given exceptions to the rules set in place by the Platinum Affair. They were a dour, uninterested bunch, and Kavik wondered if they cared that many people in the city would have paid small fortunes to have the same level of travel clearance.
The outskirts of Bin-Er were a bleak scrubland of month-old snowdrifts and reeds crispy with ice. The little guardhouses marking the line between the shang territory and the Earth Kingdom looked pitifully inadequate to cover such a large tract, but that only meant the men inside were committed to pursuing you across the open ground, nothing blocking their sight lines, until you were caught.
When the wagons pulled up to the guard station and halted, Kavik’s stomach became the same cauldron from when he first set foot onto the continent, the overheated roil warning him to turn back and go no farther. The Earth Kingdom soldiers frightened him worse now that he was older. Instead of being faceless, stoic green giants, they were human beings, unpredictable and dangerous. He could smell the scallions on their breath and tell which ones hated their captain. The plan might fall apart if one of them simply happened to be in a foul mood.
He held his breath while the soldiers pulled back tarps and inspected jars of vinegar dregs, bundled scraps of rags, tubs of broken grain. They asked for his pass, and he handed it over, trying not to scream as the protective token left his possession. There was a high chance of getting caught right here.
They let him through without a hitch. Him and the entire caravan.
He couldn’t believe it. The thing he’d wanted to do, this whole time, had been done. He’d left Bin-Er. The Avatar had made the impossible happen. Such was her blessing.
His awe faded as he remembered his grand escape was merely a component of a larger plan. His parents were still stuck in the city behind him. The Avatar’s blessing, he groused once his heart stopped pounding in his chest.
They reached the mountains. From there it was a miserable four days in the back of the leading wagon, using slips of water to keep the fragile goods from cracking against each other over the rocky trails. The driver, whose name was Choi, spoke little to him as they went down and up the slopes, winding through treacherous passes. Nights passed in silence around the campfire.
On the fifth day, as the caravan rounded a bend, a cry went out. Kavik looked up, his neck popping, and saw the spires rising out of the mist.
