I left before it ended and walked toward the Eastern Temple's section of the meadow looking for contacts. The nuns kept their space more organized than the monks, ground cloths in rows, cooking fires banked and covered against the sea wind. I walked through their camp the same way I'd been walking through the whole festival, watching for anyone who might be useful, listening to conversations.
Most of what I heard was what you'd expect. Nuns were catching up with each other, girls were talking about the airball game, and a pair of older novices were comparing notes on a meditation technique.
Then I passed a ground cloth where a girl about eleven was arguing with a younger nun about the ceremony.
"It's not the same as last year, though," the girl was saying. She had a chunk of bread on her knee that she was tearing into pieces without eating any of it. "Last year Monk Pasang opened with the four bows and then the horns came right in after. This year everybody just stood around for a while before the horns started. Somebody moved things around and when I asked Sister Dolkar about it she said it's always been that way, which is just not true."
"Does it matter?" the younger nun said. "It's a ceremony, Yeshi. It's not a puzzle."
"Well how am I supposed to know if it matters if nobody will even tell me why they changed it?"
The younger nun rolled her eyes and walked off toward a cooking fire. Yeshi tore another piece of bread and didn't seem bothered by being left alone.
I sat down on the edge of her ground cloth. She glanced at my robes and looked away.
"You're right, by the way," I said. "About the horns being different this year. I've been coming to this festival for a while and they always came in right after the last bow."
She looked at me again, longer this time. "Yeah, well, at least somebody else noticed. How old are you?"
"Nine."
"And you remember what order things went in from previous years?"
"I just notice stuff like that."
"Apparently." She studied me for a second. "I'm Yeshi. I'm from the Eastern Temple."
"Sonam. I'm from the Southern Temple."
"I figured, from the robes." She pulled her knees up. "So is your whole temple like you? Because the nuns at ours don't notice anything unless you put it right in front of them."
"No, most of them are the same as yours."
"But I've heard your monks let you visit other nations. Is that true? Ours won't let us go anywhere. I wanted to visit the university at Ba Sing Se or Ember Island in the Fire Nation and Sister Dolkar wouldn't consider either."
"Well, we're allowed to travel, but I haven't yet. I wouldn't go to Ba Sing Se, though. They separate people into walled rings based on how much money they have. Their poorest citizens are packed into slums in the Lower Ring."
"Oh. I didn't know."
"And the Fire Nation has other problems. I actually went to our Council about it a few weeks ago."
She put the bread down. "Really? They listened to you?"
"Not only that, they agreed to run evacuation drills once a season in case something goes wrong."
"How'd you get them to agree to such a thing?"
"I reminded them that Sozin colonized parts of the Earth Kingdom. Avatar Roku made him pull back, but Roku's been dead for nine years. He may yet continue colonizing."
She went quiet for a few seconds. She was looking at her hands in her lap.
"I wish I could say that to Sister Dolkar's face," she said. "No one at the Eastern Temple will tell us anything. We all know something is wrong but they only ever talk about Roku, never Sozin."
I sat with that for a second.
"So I started trying to figure things out on my own," she said. "I've been going through our archive trying to find what stuff they used to teach that they stopped." She shrugged. "It took most of last year. Our archive sorts everything by who wrote it, so unless you already know which master you're looking for, you're stuck. I was just pulling scrolls at random and checking them against the catalog." She was sitting up straighter now. "I found about forty entries from the warrior monk period that should have scrolls on the shelves. The entries are there, and the cross-references are there, but the actual scrolls are gone. Nobody I've asked knows when they were removed."
"At the Southern Temple they locked those in our restricted section. I don't think anyone's opened the door in years."
She leaned forward. "That's almost worse, if you think about it. If somebody removes a scroll, at least the hole shows up when you go looking. But if you lock it away, everyone just assumes it's being taken care of. They stop thinking about it."
She had a point. I'd been treating the restricted archive as my personal advantage since I was eight. I hadn't thought about what the locked door was doing to everyone who walked past it and assumed the scrolls were being looked after.
The cooking fires around us had drawn most of the camp away. We were alone on the ground cloth.
"Can I come find you in the morning?" I said. "Before your group heads back?"
"We're camped on the north end. Look for the one that looks like someone actually planned it."
I left her sitting on the ground cloth with her arms crossed over her knees.
I spent the next hour walking through the festival looking for the Guiding Wind.