“Did you really talk to her grandfather,” Torun whispered.
“You think I lied to her to get her to come with us?” Yaosen hissed.
“I wouldn’t fault you if-”
“I wouldn’t abduct a child. What’s wrong with you?”
Torun shrugged, “Just… don’t really believe much in all this bender spirituality stuff. Never can tell what you’re making up.”
Duu came running back up the path from her grandfather’s tree.
“Did you get to talk to him?” Yaosen asked.
The girl wore a big smile on her face and nodded, “He said he’d be just fine. He’s got plenty of trees to talk to. I didn’t think of that. He is a tree after all. It makes sense that he’d be plenty happy with his own kind, even if he is the only tree that I can talk to. It’s because I’m not a tree of course. But he can probably talk to them.”
“I… didn’t think of that either,” said Torun.
As the girl grabbed a mossy pack that appeared to grow into her clothes, rather than have any straps, she paused just long enough to jump in the air and cast a palm to the ground.
The bark of the hollow tree slammed shut behind them, not a single seam to suggest that two grown men, a child, and a wolfboar had once lived comfortably within.
Both Yaosen and Torun stared at the girl, wide-eyed at such a flippant display of bending power.
“What?” asked Duu, noticing their strange looks, “This way the tree will grow in. Come on, the ‘rivvur’ is this way.”
Torun said nothing, but Yaosen elbowed him and said, “Still think she’s not a bender?”
“Hmph.”
***
It was slow going with the two injured men, and the girl having to tug Grunt onward the entire way. But when they reached the main branch of the river – or the big waterwiggle, as Duu called it – Yaosen put Duu through a series of traditional waterbending forms.
They were basic, but each time the girl performed them and nothing happened, Torun would make this sort of snort that was halfway between a derisive laugh and “see, I told you so.”
The third time he did it – when Duu put everything she had into octopus arms and it produced… well, nothing but a whole lot of arm-waving — Yaosen launched himself into the air to land in front of the Meteor Knight in a vortex of fire.
“What is your problem?” the monk asked.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Torun leaned back, unbothered by the display, “I just don’t see why it's so important for the girl to be a waterbender. Maybe she’s not even a bender. Maybe this is something new that only the Farwilds have.”
“It doesn’t matter for her if she’s a waterbender. But it's important for us to know if her grandfather really did invent treebending. Because if Duu is a treebender and not an advanced waterbender, then the avatar may be rotating through five bending nations instead of four. Maybe the avatar was born to any one of a hundred new nations we don’t know about, and we have no idea who or what we’re looking for out here. But if the four elements are a universal constant, and fire burns the same here as it does in Caldera City or Omashu, then we’re still looking for a firebending avatar, whatever that may look like in a wild bender.”
“But do you need to set the kid up for failure just to figure that out?”
“You need to stop making her feel like she’s failing. Aside from your judgments, she’s just having fun. You want so badly for her to be a nonbender because you actually like the kid, and if she’s a bender then you think you can’t be friends with her. But she’s not a bender, or a nonbender. She’s just Duu, and the more you think of her as what she is rather than who she is, the more of your baggage you lump onto her shoulders.”
Torun leapt up at that, but when Yaosen didn’t back down, the Meteor Knight ended up turning on his heel and pacing back and forth before responding, “So what? We just teach her to bend away all her problems?”
“Being a bender isn’t magic, Torun. It takes hard work and discipline, same as your sword. And just because she’s a bender doesn’t make it any less impressive that she survived alone out here all those years. She still knows every plant by name. They’re her own names for them, sure, but she knows every one of them; which ones are useful for what and which ones are deadly and how. She healed us a little with bending, but she healed us the rest of the way your way: the nonbender way.”
Torun had no response.
Yaosen just stood there fuming, seriously pondering how dignified he could be while blasting some sense through the Meteor Knight’s thick skull.
“Hmpheremerel,” Torun finally mumbled.
“What?”
“Front toe a little to the left!” said Torun, gesturing toward the form Duu was practicing while the two adults argued.
“How would you know?”
“Do a fire fist.”
“What?”
“Do a fire fist.”
Yaosen executed a flawless-
Torun kicked out Yaosen’s front foot and the fist went wide, causing a wave of nothing but hot air.
“You’ve studied firebending because you had to. You studied the rest of the bending forms because they were interesting to you. But I’ve studied all the forms because my life and my Fire Lord’s life depended on it. To stop a bending assassin, you need to know every form there is before it's even finished. You handle the spiritual crap and I’ll handle the physical stuff.”
An hour later, they were back on the trail, heading north along the riverbank, and Duu was making droplets of water dance in front of Grunt’s head. The boar kept lunging forward to lick them out of the air, and Duu was even nice enough to let the wolfboar catch one every now and then. Duu had pulled the water from a blade of sweetgrass, and she was most definitely a waterbender.
“So what does this mean again,” grumbled Torun, still mad at himself for being complicit in something so insidious as teaching a child to bend dewdrops.
“You play pai sho?”
“Not my favorite.”
“But you’re familiar?”
“Hmph.”
“It means… that if bending is a game of pai sho, the rules are still the same, but the players here have come up with strategies we’ve never even thought possible.”