Chapter 12: The Last Festival

Two months before the Great Comet. Southern Air Temple.

I sat cross-legged on the cave floor with a melon in my lap and worked a kitchen knife in shallow cuts, two narrow eyes above a straight cleft of a nose, and a mouth cut in a downward line. When the face was done I set the melon upright on the shelf against the back wall and stepped back. The melon glared at me.

“You again,” I said.

I bent a current of air tight around it and let go on the far side. The rind split along its length and the flesh came out across the stone. I cleaned up and did it again with a second melon from the same distance.

A waterskin hung on a cord from a hook in the stone wall. I stepped back four feet, bent the air between my palms into a slow pulsing pressure, and pushed it at the center of the skin. The leather began to hum, and the hum held for three seconds before my hands gave out and the vibration died. The second time the hum pitched higher and I held it clean for a count of five. The leather on the underside split open and the water burst out and splashed against the stone.

My arms burned to the shoulders. I had one more attempt in me, and something I’d been calling the air bullet still hadn’t worked. I walked to the center of the chamber and raised my hands.

The idea was to draw air inward from every direction around me, gather it into a single dense point on my palm, and throw the point like a stone. I had been searching for the shape of it in the feel of my hands for a week and had found nothing.

The air came in from five directions and resisted for a fraction of a second. Then the currents struck each other and the pressure blew out. The force hit me in the chest and threw me into the cave wall.

I sat with my mouth open, unable to pull a breath in. When it came at last it came ragged and burning across my ribs, and I coughed through the hitch until I could breathe past it.

“Fuck, that hurt,” I croaked.

I pushed myself up, relieved that nothing felt broken.

I cleaned up the ruined skin and the water on the stone and climbed the drainage ledge back to the archive level. The second bell had rung and the corridor was empty. I cut east and down the switchback to the stables, the smell of melon still on my fingers when I reached Dolma’s stall.

She was standing in the corner with her eyes half-closed, a ridge of winter fur come loose between her shoulder blades. I pulled a handful of the loose fur free before I picked up the brush.

“Morning.”

Her ear flicked.

I worked the brush absently down her side in long strokes. She leaned her weight into my hand, and the brushing went on in silence for a while. At one point, she pressed her forehead against my chest and held it there. I stood with my hand on her head and breathed with her.

“I scared myself today,” I said.

She huffed against my shoulder.

“I’ve been trying to invent something new and this morning it threw me into a wall. I couldn’t breathe for a few seconds and thought I’d done something to my lungs. They’re okay, but I’m going to have a bruise across my back for the flight. So sorry, but you’re going to have to carry a rider who can’t lean forward.”

I moved the brush back to her shoulder and worked the spot where the winter fur was thickest.

“What I’m making in the cave is worse than anything in the archive, and I think worse than anything ever made by an airbender.”

I pulled a clump of fur off the brush and kept brushing for a while. The only sound in the stable was the brush against her coat and her breath against my robes.

“If they knew the truth, would they call me a monster?”

A low rumble came through her chest.

“Some of them would rather die than be saved by it.”

I moved to her face. The fur above her eye was short and the brush was wrong for it, so I used my fingers gently along the ridge where she liked to be scratched.

“I’m only teaching the kids to fight offensively. I don’t think they could handle learning to kill.”

She let out a soft groan.

“Honestly, when it comes to it, will I even be able to do it?”

She pressed her head against my chest.

“You’re a good bison.”

Her ear flicked.

I pulled the saddle down from the rack and started laying out the straps. My ribs protested when I reached up to set the saddle in place, so I slowed the motion until I could do it without gasping.

“Hey, there you are.”

Dorje was at the stall door with his pack over one shoulder and his bison’s lead in his other hand. The bison was already saddled and tugging toward the open stable entrance where the midday sun was coming in.

“I’ve been looking for you all morning,” Dorje said. “Why are your sleeves wet?”

“I was washing my face.”

“But they’re wet up to your elbow.”

“So?”

He grinned. He led his bison past the stall and called back over his shoulder as he went. “Hurry up. Ngawang found the flatbread with the seeds and it’s going to be gone before we take off.”

I finished the straps. Dolma lowered her head so I could get the harness under her chin. I climbed into the saddle and she walked out of the stable into the light.

The formation gathered in the air above the temple. Twenty-six bison flew in loose column this year, three more than last time. Dorje was on his own mount now instead of a borrowed one, and two of the younger novices had bison old enough for a full crossing. Dolma took her usual position at the rear and I let her have it. Even though I sat with my weight on the back of the saddle and my hands loose on the reins, the bruise across my ribs still pulsed every time Dolma shifted altitude.

Dorje pulled his bison alongside mine as we crossed the coast. He held up seven fingers. I held up zero because I hadn’t eaten anything before departure and that was exactly as impressive as it sounded. He laughed and dropped back into formation.

We landed on the upper edge of the meadow in the early afternoon. The horns started as they always did and I stood in the crowd with my chest full of the sound and waited for the four bows. Dolma had gone to find the Eastern Temple’s herd before I’d finished pulling my pack from the saddle, same as every year.

The meadow was the same meadow. Tienhai’s statue on the headland, the sea beyond it, the camps arranged by temple in the same spots they’d been arranged in for as long as anyone could tell me. The Western Temple’s delegation was smaller again. I counted thirty-one adults.

My back seized when I bent for the first bow and I had to slow through the remaining three. During the ceremonial meal I sat with my spine straight against a tree instead of joining the concentric rings because leaning in any direction sent the bruise crawling up between my shoulder blades. Ngawang had saved me the flatbread with the seeds. I tore it in half and ate watching the crowd from a distance. Dorje noticed and didn’t ask.

After the meal I found Yeshi.

She was sitting at the edge of the Eastern Temple’s camp with a scroll open across her knees and a charcoal stick behind her ear. She was taller than I remembered and her face had thinned out, the round softness she’d had at eleven replaced by angles that made her look like she was about to argue with someone. She probably was.

“Sonam.” She looked me over. “You look terrible.”

“It’s nice to see you too.”

“Seriously, though. When did you last sleep?”

“I don’t remember.” I sat down on the ground cloth next to her. “What are you reading?”

She held up the scroll. It was a genealogy of every Mother Superior at the Eastern Temple going back four hundred years, cross-referenced with dates of policy changes. She had carefully made notations in the margins that were too small to read from where I was sitting.

“Yeshi, I need you to listen to me.”

She put the scroll down.

“Before the Great Comet returns, you need to leave the Eastern Temple. Don’t wait for signs or for the Council to act.” I told her the coordinates once, and then again while she mouthed them back. “It’s a swamp in the southwestern Earth Kingdom. Leave as soon as you can and take anyone you can convince to go with you.”

“How many people have you told?” she said.

“Not enough.”

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Will any of them listen?”

“I don’t know.”

She picked up the charcoal stick from behind her ear and wrote something small on the edge of her scroll, tucked between her genealogy notes where no one would think to look.

“I’ll go,” she said. “And I’ll bring whoever I can.”

“Don’t try to argue with the ones who won’t listen. Just go.”

She nodded once. I left her sitting with the genealogy scroll and walked toward the meadow’s western edge.

Khandro was where I expected him, near the tree line. He was sitting on a fallen log with his satchel at his feet and his hands resting on his knees. A few other Guiding Wind members were nearby, people I recognized from the last festival.

Only a year had passed, yet he looked older. The lines around his mouth were deeper and he held himself straighter, as if refusing to show fatigue.

“Elder Khandro.”

“Sonam,” he said. “It is good to see you.”

He studied me as he had the first time, his eyes going to my hands and then my posture. I sat down across from him on the grass. The log between us put us at different heights, him above and me below.

“Sozin canceled Twin Sun Day,” he said. “The ceremonies the Fire Sages had been planning for years, all of it, stopped. The order came from the capital two months ago.”

“How do you know this?”

“I have an old friend among the Fire Sages. We have known each other for more years than you have been alive.”

A memory surfaced before I could stop it, delivered by a mad king in a voice like cracking stone. All old people know each other. Don’t you know that?